Books That Saved My Life

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.

Season Ticket by Roger Angell
When Season Ticket was published in 1988, USA Today profiled Roger Angell. Among the excerpted snippets, they reprinted these lines, from a chapter entitled “Not So, Boston,” about the 1986 season:

Glooming in print about the dire fate of the Sox and their oppressed devotees has become such a popular art form that it verges on a new Hellenistic age of mannered excess. Everyone east of the Hudson with a Selectric or a word processor has had his or her say, it seems (the Globe actually published a special twenty-four-page section entitled “Literati on the Red Sox” before the Series, with essays by George Will, John Updike, Bart Giamatti — the new National League President, but for all that a Boston fan through and through — Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and other worthies), and one begins to see at last that the true function of the Red Sox may be not to win but to provide New England authors with a theme, now that guilt and whaling have gone out of style.

This explained so much about my young life in the suburbs of Boston.

Was Season Ticket the first new book I bought in hardcover? It turned this casual baseball fan into an obsessive overnight. Three summers later, I visited all thirty major league stadiums; and six years after that, more than sixty minor league parks.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
What if Alison hadn’t introduced me to Cat’s Cradle? I doubt I’d work in the book industry. She left it on her end table one morning — the orange, Dell paperback — and then left me alone for a while in the house she shared with her Deadhead friends. We dated for just a few months. Plenty of fun times, nothing but good memories, but it would have been worth several more months just for that book.
Soumchi by Amos Oz

Quite possibly the book that’s given me the most pleasure, but not to be confused for an outright recommendation.  It’s a particular edition you’d need to get the spirit of the thing: Harcourt Brace, trade paper, 1995. Quint Buchholz’s shadowy illustrations open the story to another dimension entirely. For a couple years, the book lived in my backpack; we were never apart. I bought a second copy to keep at home, in case my backpack got stolen, I guess.

For full effect, imagine me reading along, sighing:

Near us in Zachariah Street lived a girl called Esthie. I loved her. In the morning, sitting at the breakfast table and eating a slice of bread, I’d whisper to myself, “Esthie.”

To which my father would return: “One doesn’t eat with one’s mouth open.”

While, in the evenings, they’d say of me: “That crazy boy has shut himself in the bathroom again and is playing with water.”

Only I was not playing with water at all, merely filling up the hand basin and tracing her name with my finger across the waves on its surface.

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.

Yesterday Neil Giaman won a Newberry Award for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book.  Gaiman says he was inspired by Rudyard Kipling (of Jungle Book fame) to write a story about a young boy whose parents are killed and who, instead of being raised by animals, is raised by ghosts.  Gaiman heralded the launch of the book with an extensive speaking tour, reading one chapter of the book on each leg of the trip until the whole book was available (a live audio-book type thing) read by the author online.  Last October, the book hit #1 on the NYT Bestseller list and I have to think that many of the readers were adults.  True to Gaiman’s dark sensibility the book is anything but feelgood, but at the same time he displays his enormous talent for making you care desperately about his characters.  On NPR this morning Gaiman puts the award in perspective, saying that the Newberry is like winning the Nobel Prize, it’s the one thing that all but guarantees your book will be on library shelves after you die.

Here’s Gaiman’s own thoughts on the honor.

Just finished reading Annie Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse” about watching a full eclipse of the sun in Washington (the next of which I assumed would happen after I was dead). It surprised the hell out of me. I’ve never read Dillard, always thought of her as somewhat of a sentimental naturalist writer of the sort my parents were always suggesting I read (as a kid in Boulder, CO I spent most of my time inside rather than out doing the various outside things for which Boulder is famous). Maybe it was the title “Teaching a Stone to Talk” that put me off my lunch, I mean, what teenager would be caught dead reading something with that title, might as well carry around your copy of “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret” and get the whole messy business over with. Anyway, so I read the Dillard and was magicked. I carried my “Next American Essays” tome up the subway stairs still grasping for those last words, not wanting to wait ’till I was home to finish it. It had me wandering around in a daze, noticing the sunset light on the side of the ever-under-construction condominiums at the corner of Montague and Atlantic, made me stand like an idiot in below-freezing weather and stare up at how the light climbed the fire escape:

“This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?” -Dillard, etc…

Then I come home and read this:

“I can’t help but feel the greatness of God,” she said, as fellow onlookers applauded and then fell silent. “Anyone who passed up this opportunity, really missed out.”

The next total eclipse will be July 22, 2009, and will be visible in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, China and some Japanese islands.
See you in Myanmar.

Just found this fantastic excerpt from Julio Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Causeway on Fiction Magazine’s website.  Swofford mentioned Cortazar’s book Hopscotch as one of the books that were formative in his development as a writer…that and the smokin’ hot cover of the Vintage edition.

The writing here is hilarious, smart and just “off” enough to make it tickle my funny bone.  Now I really do have to read more of his work, sometimes authors keep popping into your life for a reason & you don’t know why until you read their work and feel like you’ve found some long-lost Uncle (or aunt) who is just like you and suddenly you think you might not be an alien baby after all.

This section of Autonauts is about a motoring trip that takes on the dimensions of an expedition.

An excerpt of the excerpt:

The plan becomes concrete

In the autumn of 1978, the basic idea of the expedition had been established, with the following rules of the game:

1. Complete the journey from Paris to Marseilles without once leaving the autoroute.

2. Explore each one of the rest areas, at the rate of two per day, spending the night in the second one without exception.

3. Carry out scientific topographical studies of each rest area, taking note of all pertinent observations.

4. Taking our inspiration from the travel tales of the great explorers of the past, write the book of the expedition (methods to be determined).

By common agreement, and given that neither of us is a masochist, we decided that we will also be allowed to take full advantage of anything we can find along the freeway: restaurants, shops, hotels, etc.

Focus Features has a great article here titled Neil Gaiman: How Comics Saved This Writer’s Life.  It’s a nicely-written and fairly comprehensive biography about the cult favorite turned bestselling author. Here’s a little excerpt in reference to Gaiman’s remarkable graphic novel series Sandman:

Sandman ran for seven years and was an incredible success. It was (and still is) the only ever comic to win the World Fantasy Award and was called “a comic book for intellectuals” by the late Norman Mailer. The series was repackaged in ten volumes, and subsequently appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Despite its cerebral nature, it had massive appeal and by the end of its 75-issue run in 1996 was outselling DC’s flagship franchise, Superman. Even more startling was its audience: Moving beyond the traditional teen fanboy base, Sandman was picked up by women and college educated twentysomethings. (Plans to bring Sandman to the screen with Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary attached, have so far stalled in development.)…

For even more Gaiman madness check out his regularly updated author blog, or the newly released book Prince of Stories, which delves deep into Neil Gaiman’s intricate mythologies, easter-eggs, inside jokes–the “history and impact of the complete works of Neil Gaiman in film, fiction, music, comic books, and beyond”(Powells.com).

Stranger Things Have Happened

Cover art from Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

On October 30, 2008 I sat down with author Anthony Swofford (Jarhead, Exit A) to talk about the books that have been influential to him as a writer and some that could even be life saving.  Art Bar, where the following interview took place, was festooned that day with orange lights, pumpkin-shaped garlands  and other Halloween decorations.  At the bar, the waitress offered us happy hour drinks and Tootsie Rolls.  We sat in an empty back room where the bespoke art glowed under red light and The Doors played on the stereo.  Every time I looked up another group of people–some in masks or full costumes–seemed to have materialized in the gloom.  By the time we finished up the Doors album had run its course and the room was full.

Montana Wojczuk:  So the first time I heard you read- it was in Portland, OR and Jarhead had just come out-I remember you saying that when you were in the Marines you carried Shakespeare in your pack, is that right?

Anthony Swofford:  When I went to the Gulf I asked my mom to send me Shakespeare and The Stranger by Camus.  The Shakespeare plays she chose, I’m not sure why, were Othello and the Merchant of Venice.

MW:  No comedies?

AS:  No comedies, though I should have had some.  The Stranger was the book that I read and re-read the most in high-school because it’s so sexy and dark, and any 16-year-old likes a book that’s sexy and dark.  I often think about the scene when they’re bathing and she’s kind of floating in his arms…

MW: I’ve never read it, I should.

AS:  You should read it if just for that scene.  There’s that great William Gass quote: “Sex is the first reason we read and the only reason we write.”   Though maybe that’s a little hyperbolic. Keep reading →