Read These Books

by Bruce Anderson

Two weeks ago, Jeff St. Clair listed his must read book list. Last week Alexander Cockburn passed along his summer recommendations. So this week you get mine, several of which I suggest because they aren't well known, even among readers. Book readers can't resist passing along their enthusiasms. As soon as I read my colleagues' lists, mine immediately began popping up among my fragged mind's flotsam. Phillip Roth says the ranks of serious readers are thinning and not being replaced because of the competition from visuals, music, the internet, radio, and the general absence of the time and the solitude books require even if a book reader, or potential book reader, somehow eludes all these other distractions. I think he's right, and the evidence of the loss is everywhere from the kid who has no ironic sense to the middle age "activist" whose decoding skills are so poor he or she believes whatever their preferred famous person tells them. Hell, half of "progressive" Mendocino County seems to think that Bush was a participant to fly airliners into the World Trade Center! But I know there are lots of book dinosaurs among AVA readers because only a book reader would tolerate the paper's 9-point type.

(1) The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, by Jesse Hill Ford. A strong novel about race relations in the South in the 1940's and 50's by a white writer who became a tragic figure himself after his one big book. Should be read along with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son and Black Boy.

(2) Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades by Oakley Hall. A fictional but historically accurate look at the SF Bay Area circa the end of the 19th century with a lot of interesting bio about the great Bierce thrown in.

(3) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

(4) As I Lay Dying and The Reivers by William Faulkner. The former is pretty tough going -- I had to read it three or four times as a 20-something to really get it, I thought, but when I read it again at age 40 or so, I realized what I'd gotten was maybe the narrative and some of the prose razzle, but it's one of those rare, difficult books that causes you to thank yourself for working hard to understand it. (Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is a difficult book that's not particularly rewarding, even if you can get past the ye olde language reconstructions.) The Reivers is a very funny book, Faulkner's only funny book.

(5) Sentimental Education and Madam Bovary by Gus Flaubert.

(6) Anton Chekhov's short stories

(7) The Short Stories of Isaac Babel, just out in a new translation that critics say is awful but seem fine to me, however that opinion translates as an assessement of my abilities as a reader. So the translations aren't perfect; but if they don't change meaning in a story changing way....

(8) The Western Shore, by Clarkson Crane. Of interest as a portrait of student life in Berkeley and Berkeley itself in the 1920's

(9) Poor White and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Rural life among struggling people in the middle west in the first quarter of the 20th century.

(10) Miss Lonely Hearts and Day of the Locust by Nathanial West. A nihilistic satire about the futility of individual attempts to alleviate suffering, and a nihilistic novel about Hollywood, both as applicable today as they were yesterday (1933 or so).

(11) The Magic Christian by Terry Southern. Another satire, kinder than Lonely Hearts, and on the theme of Every Man Has His Price. Very funny.

(12) Joe the Engineer by Chuck Wachtel. A realistic novel about a contemporary American blue collar worker.

(13) American Pastoral by Phillip Roth. (Particularly relevant to the Northcoast.) The over-indulged daughter of a prosperous American family is dragged down by the lunacies of the 1960's. This wonderful novel includes a fascinating mini-history of glove making among its many profitable diversions.

(14) Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. A very funny novel about a 999-line poem written by a deceased nutty American academic whose even nuttier neighbor devotes the rest of his life to explicating and promoting.

(15) Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, "A true life novel" based on the real life of a petty crook and killer named Gary Gilmore.

(16) Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

(17) Going Away by Clancy Sigal. A disillusioned leftist hits the road and half pints of White Horse, thinking about what went wrong. (Hint. It's still going wrong.)

(18) Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. If I'd read this book before I went into the Marines I'd never have gone. The single most subversive book in American literature. Told in the first person by a kid who went off to World War One and came back as a permanently mummified cripple, the boy eloquently argues that wars have nothing to do with the people who do the fighting and dying, which was certainly true of World War One but not true, unfortunately, of World War Two.

(19) The USA Trilogy by John dos Passos. The true history of industrializing America in novel form. Like most of us, I tuned history out about the 10th grade when the edu-drone, usually only a page ahead of the class, got to the Louisiana Purchase. I'd barely stayed awake for the Boston Tea Party. "No taxation without representation!" Ho hum. How about no taxation with or without representation? History was taught as a series of abstract events carried off by very grand Americans in a world peopled by much less grand populations who needed the grand figures to handle things for them. History these days is made more interesting to captive high school students, I've heard, but, from what I can gather is just as misleading, in that American history is presented as 400 years of serial atrocities, and the Klan remains poised to ride out as soon Maya Angelou and Howard Zinn aren't looking. But when I read USA as a kid I read with my eyes hanging out, feeling something like Born Agains must feel when God Himself first reaches out and touches them. USA is the best People's History of America there is.

(20) Daisy Miller by Henry James. This is the only James I could ever read without falling asleep, although I got all the way through The Bostonians once and more or less profited from the journey, narcoleptic though it was. Daisy Miller is the simpleton's James but highly recommended as both literature and as representative of one of his primary themes -- new money vs. old money, old aristos vs. the new American ones.

(21) The Pistol by James Jones. America's best novelist of World War Two, and The Pistol, along with The Thin Red Line, is the best combat fiction about the war.

(22) The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.

(23) John Updike's Rabbit trilogy. The life's trajectory of Rabbit Angstrom, from his early 1950's incarnation as high school basketball star from the wrong side of the tracks to his moving up marriage to the daughter of a prosperous but primitive car dealer, and on through Rabbit's estranged, trapped, mostly bewildered journey through the 1960's and on into premature cardiac care -- a kind of white guy everyman, circa 1935-1980.

(24) An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.

(25) Moby Dick by Herman Melville. One of the few books you can read again and again and learn something every time.

(26) Dubliners by James Joyce. The most perfect short stories in the language.

(27) You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. Lots of good stuff but always sneered at by the lions of the faculty lounge.

(28) All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque. In the trenches with German soldiers of World War One.

(29) I Was Looking for a Street and Something about a Soldier by Charles Willeford (if you can find them). The fascinating autobiographies of a master of tough guy detective fiction. Willeford was an Army lifer who was trained as a cavalryman in America's last cavalry, went on to become a decorated tank commander in WW Two, and wound up his military tour with the post-War army in the Phillipines.

(30) The Bad Communist by Max Crawford. Will the circle be unbroken! An insider's novel about the Stanford-based 1960's cult left and the murderously wacky politics that inspired its English Department-led Maoists to several murders. Ukiah-area book clubs will certainly want to invite Mike Sweeney of Mendocino Solid Waste Management Authority to explicate this odd but lively rendition of a uniquely berserk chapter in American (pseudo) radical history becuase Sweeney belonged to the Stanford terrorist club and, years later, as an archetypal lone nut, blew up an airport hangar in Santa Rosa then his ex-wife Judi Bari, crimes he has not yet been indicted for because he's been sheltered from accountability by Mendolib and the idiot sectors of the Bay Area and Northcoast left. On second thought, as book chat guide in the liberal livingrooms of inland Mendoland, Sweeney is unlikely to be inclined to lead the discussions of this book, but no harm in asking if you can penetrate his 24-hour security apparatuses.