Books That Saved My Life

JY: I recorded myself reading four poems, Classic Water by David Berman, Some of my Happiest Moments In Life Occur on AOL Instant Messenger by Tao Lin,  an untitled poem by Roberto Bolano from the Romantic Dogs and For Grace, After a Party by Frank O’Hara.

Listen here to James’ reading and introduction about why these books were life-saving:

James Yeh (b. 1982) is a writer and founding editor of Gigantic, a magazine of short prose and art. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in PEN America, elimae and the anthology 30 Under 30. His humor, nonfiction and interviews have appeared in Gigantic, The Morning News, Yankee Pot Roast and The Faster Times. He is at work on a novel-in-stories called I Love and Understand You and Would Be Perfect to You Now and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Photo: Frank O’Hara’s loft

AP: I can’t honestly claim a book has saved my life, as I’m not the sort to carry a thick Turgenev in my vest pocket to absorb dueling balls, but… Several years ago I was expected at a wedding of two people for whom I didn’t have any huge feeling, and I was in my hotel room reading the last ten pages of Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual.” As the denouement approached, the beauty of the whole book sort of overwhelmed me, and I found myself in tears at Perec’s accomplishment. Well, not tears, but certainly misty-eyed. I went to the wedding (which I’d sort of been dreading) in a burst of good feeling, including deep affection for the participants. I honestly credit Perec.

Arthur Phillips is the author of several national and international bestsellers, including Prague and The Egyptologist.  He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. His fourth novel, The Song Is You was just published by Random House.  More info, and an excerpt of the book here.

In honor of Banned Books Week this week, and our little blog’s 1 year anniversary, we’ll be posting authors, editors and our own celebrations of books that lay claim to a little piece of ourselves.  Coming up:  Arthur Philips’ metaphorical bullet-proof vest.

We’ll also be posting links to a series of articles that articulate an ongoing conversation about the meaning and method of Banned Books Week itself.

Censor, by Eric Drooker

Great article today in the NYT about reading in the subway. It piggybacks on a conversation I was having  last night about how many journalists live in NY, who then write about their city, which then feeds into the city’s self-mythologizing.

But for those of us who have mastered the one-handed read (that sounds dirty), the article vocalizes the usually silent conversation that goes on between reading riders on the subway.  I envy the author her assignment, who wouldn’t want license to  ask why the woman in the business suit chose to read The Hobbit?

“Reading on the Subway” art by A Lonely Path

Editor’s Note:  I first met Dave in New York several years ago after reading some of his great author interviews on the  Powells Books website.  As an ex-Portlandian I occasionally need a City of Books fix.  I also discovered  that Dave was hard at work creating Powells’ breakout series of films about books.  That’s right, not book-to-film but “al reverse”, letting the medium serve the message. Out of the Book is “a series of literary films screened in more than seventy cities around the United States. The most recent featured John Hodgman, Susan Orlean, Anthony Bourdain, David Rakoff, and a dozen other contributors to Ecco’s State by State collection.”  Dave Weich is Powells Books’ director of marketing and development.

Rather than write about books that saved his life, Dave wanted to write about….

Books That Ruined My Life

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Two grades straight, fifth and sixth, my teachers assigned The Red Badge of Courage. You’d have thought our elementary and middle school teachers would have shared reading lists, but no. Horror of horrors, in sixth grade, my mother actually tried to make me read it. I could not. Not even in our dull cabin, in the woods, with no TV, over several days of pouring rain. I turned pages as fast as seemed reasonable. More than once my mother caught me skipping ahead. The Red Badge of Courage set me back years, novel-reading-wise. Mom caved. Good grades pending, she left me and my friends to the basketball hoop in our driveway. I didn’t read a book start-to-finish until freshman year of college, but you should have seen my baseline jumper. Keep reading →

If I were to write “reality” in quotes, as David Shields does in the first page of his new book Reality Hunger, you might think I’d been hitting the Sartre a little heavily. Despite our post-post-modernism ideals, when we talk about reality we still generally mean “something uniformly true.” As an agreed-upon consensus, however, reality requires plenty of daily effort in its construction. In Rawi Hage’s book, Cockroach, the main character has lost the will to keep putting out the effort.

The main character of Cockroach calls himself a thief, though he rarely steals anything—preferring to try on people’s shoes, read their letters, even imagine he’s entering their dreams. “I see people for what they are,” says the thief, “I strip them of everything and see their hollowness.  I strip them, and they are relieved of the burden of color and disguise.”

The thief is part of an immigrant community in Montreal and his name, like his ethnicity, is never quite clear (he calls himself a “hairy Arab” but his history seems Lebanese, although since Lebanon itself is a mishmash of cultures that hardly clarifies things). The author, himself an immigrant living in Canada, settles us firmly inside his main character’s head by describing not just the thief’s perceptions but his vivid stream-of-consciousness. When the thief presses his nose to a restaurant window he doesn’t just see well-heeled customers having business meetings, he sees a maitre-d who guards the boundaries between worlds—“the hunger police.” Keep reading →

This month we have a piece by Catherine Lacey on her love-affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first book, This Side of Paradise (and with a certain hollow-eyed lad who played literary house with her in an old abandoned mansion).

Paradise was not the first book Fitzgerald sent out for publication, he’d already had one novel rejected, but it marked his first interaction with a young editor at Scribner named Maxwell Perkins.  Perkins, who would later go on to edit such literary lights as Ernest Hemmingway and Tom Wolfe, saw something in this brave new writer and interceded on his behalf to get the novel published.   Keep reading →

By Catherine Lacey

“Catherine Lacey, You need to fucking read this book, I tell you. Now, I know I just met you and all, but, man oh man, you should go to your local library and get this book and read it as soon as possible, ok? I mean, it’s only going to change you life completely. You’ll recognize every fucking person in there.”

Though I just met Robert on the wooden back porch of a diner in Tennessee, and though he was high on stolen amphetamines, I fell in love with him instantly. This was complicated by another boy at our crowded table, a slouchy-shouldered blonde named Sam, who had been my boyfriend for almost two years. But no matter, I fell in love with that over-zealous dark-eyed boy in the way that only sensitive, irrational 18-year-old girls can fall in love. It doesn’t matter if he’s speaking in a shout, barely knows you, or is sweating conspicuously through his threadbare T-shirt. Sam glanced suspiciously at Robert and I as we talked with stunning intensity about writing and books; he was on his fifth draft of a bad novel and I wrote stacks of bad poetry and bad fiction. After I revealed that I had recently been forced to participate in an old-south coming of age ball, Robert demanded that I read This Side Of Paradise.

“I mean, do you have a library card? Do you visit your local library on a regular basis? Of course you do, Catherine Lacey. That’s the fucking kind of people we are! Jesus! Keep reading →

In April, Penguin is releasing Gods And Monsters: A Penguin Anthology of African American Fiction, edited by Tin House Magazine’s Rob Spillman.  

“It includes fiction and non-fiction by writers from all over the continent, including Chris Abani, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Nawal al-Saadawi, Alain Mabanckou, Binyavanga Wainaina, Doreen Baingana, Leila Aboulela, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.”

It also includes an essay by Laila Lalami on the politics of reading.  More in-depth review to come in April.