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

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.

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

Ask and you shall receive:  while avoiding writing I was dreaming up fun things to do with my iphone and found this, an app from IndieBound released this summer that includes a search function to find independent booksellers near you.  I just moved to a new neighborhood so it already helped me find FIVE (count ‘em) comic book stsores near my house.  Apparently I live in heaven.

“City Lights Bookstore” art pathadley.com

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

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.

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.”

At the beginning of Cockroach the thief tells us he has recently tried to commit suicide, and throughout the book he has elaborate fantasies of escape.  Sweeping the floor in a restaurant, he imagines he is a cockroach picking up the crumbs people drop, tasting their saliva, their innermost thoughts, then slipping down the drain into the river of, well, human sewage, that flows under the city.

Hage’s first book, DeNiro’s Game (which pretty much swept the literary awards in Canada, where it was first published), deals with similar themes.  It’s main character, Bassam, is a teenager who dreams of escaping the bloody civil wars in Lebanon—its daily funerals, houses with their roofs left open to the sky—and his fantasies seep into every fiber of his life. Although technically not a sequel, Cockroach follows immigrants who have successfully escaped war-torn homelands only to find the past has followed them.

Beyond paying homage to Kafka in the title, Cockroach is reminiscent of the Metamorphosis in that it takes place almost entirely inside the head of a character whose reality has been badly confounded. Although Hage’s book builds to a climactic finale, the real focus is on the thief’s rich fantasy life.  The book falls somewhere between realism and surrealism and reading it one gets the feeling that the violent clashes of history are being replayed in the battle between survival and the desire to escape into dreams.

-MW

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.  

To the 22-year old Fitzgerald, who had recently broken up with Zelda and spent a summer drinking himself to a stupor, the novel was also a way to prove himself–to get back into Zelda’s good graces.

Click here for Catherine Lacey’s essay An Adamant Recommendation.

A bit of ephemera: The title for This Side of Paradise came from a Rupert Brooke poem called Taire Tahiti

*Painting by Gauguin titled Two Tahitian Women

Tiare Tahiti by Rupert Brooke

Mamua, when our laughter ends,
And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
Are dust about the doors of friends,
Or scent ablowing down the night,
Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
Comes our immortality.
Mamua, there waits a land
Hard for us to understand.
Out of time, beyond the sun,
All are one in Paradise,
You and Pupure are one,
And Tau, and the ungainly wise.
There the Eternals are, and there
The Good, the Lovely, and the True,
And Types, whose earthly copies were
The foolish broken things we knew;
There is the Face, whose ghosts we are;
The real, the never-setting Star;
And the Flower, of which we love
Faint and fading shadows here;
Never a tear, but only Grief;
Dance, but not the limbs that move;
Songs in Song shall disappear;
Instead of lovers, Love shall be;
For hearts, Immutability;
And there, on the Ideal Reef,
Thunders the Everlasting Sea!

And my laughter, and my pain,
Shall home to the Eternal Brain.
And all lovely things, they say,
Meet in Loveliness again;
Miri’s laugh, Teipo’s feet,
And the hands of Matua,
Stars and sunlight there shall meet,
Coral’s hues and rainbows there,
And Teura’s braided hair;
And with the starred ‘tiare’s’ white,
And white birds in the dark ravine,
And ‘flamboyants’ ablaze at night,
And jewels, and evening’s after-green,
And dawns of pearl and gold and red,
Mamua, your lovelier head!
And there’ll no more be one who dreams
Under the ferns, of crumbling stuff,
Eyes of illusion, mouth that seems,
All time-entangled human love.
And you’ll no longer swing and sway
Divinely down the scented shade,
Where feet to Ambulation fade,
And moons are lost in endless Day.
How shall we wind these wreaths of ours,
Where there are neither heads nor flowers?
Oh, Heaven’s Heaven! — but we’ll be missing
The palms, and sunlight, and the south;
And there’s an end, I think, of kissing,
When our mouths are one with Mouth…
Tau here, Mamua,
Crown the hair, and come away!
Hear the calling of the moon,
And the whispering scents that stray
About the idle warm lagoon.
Hasten, hand in human hand,
Down the dark, the flowered way,
Along the whiteness of the sand,
And in the water’s soft caress,
Wash the mind of foolishness,
Mamua, until the day.
Spend the glittering moonlight there
Pursuing down the soundless deep
Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair,
Or floating lazy, half-asleep.
Dive and double and follow after,
Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,
With lips that fade, and human laughter
And faces individual,
Well this side of Paradise!…
There’s little comfort in the wise.

Rupert Brooke, Papeete, February 1914

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!

Robert was slapping the table and rocking back and forth in his chair, his dark hair flinging around wildly; he was nothing like southern boys, who usually kept their cards close to their chests and spoke in lone syllables. Diner patrons peered over their shoulders at Robert while he ranted about Armory Blaine and heartbreak and how I had to read it, but no one stared as hard as I did. Never before had I taken a book suggestion so seriously. I told him that I would read it and then we could talk about it; in truth, I would have done anything to have stayed in that diner the rest of the day talking to him about anything, but soon Sam was tugging at my hand—time to go.

Long before I met Robert, I loved to read—I loved the solitary, intellectual act of it— but I did not love books. Most of the books I chose to read were entertaining but unchallenging, and the ones I had been assigned in High School had bored me to exhaustion. (The main exceptions were the Brave New World, which I would not admit to liking because everyone else in my class thought it was disgusting, and The Awakening, which I would not admit to liking because everyone in my class thought it was depressing.)

I checked out This Side Of Paradise that evening and read it until two the next morning, relieved that I loved it as much as Robert thought that I would, but more relieved that a book so true even existed. Each character crackled with satire and familiarity. I could both detest and root for Armory Blaine, whose self-centeredness reminded me of so many of students at my boarding school, but who also satirized the flippancy that comes naturally to teenagers.

The play titled The Debutante in the middle of the book was what had spurred Robert’s recommendation initially, and I could see why. Armory and Rosalind are both invested in the societal formalities happening around them, but also bored by them. They long to do something differently— to rail against convention.

I was enamored with Armory’s dark intelligence and identified with his contempt for country life. “He used to go for far walks by himself and wander along reciting “Ulalume” to the corn-fields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency.” I felt that I could relate since the “atmosphere of smiling complacency,” in my hometown had recently forced me to don a ball gown, high heels and face-full of what I thought of as clown-whore makeup. Now that I had crossed that rite of passage, been deemed “of age,” and was safely back in my converse sneakers, I was overwhelmed with the plethora of options I suddenly felt that I had. What did I want to do with my life? This was yet another reason that This Side of Paradise and Robert were so well-timed in their entrance into my life. They made me realize that writing and books energized me in a way that few other things could.

After Armory had struggled through one heartbreak and to another, the book ends with a dramatic proclamation that I found somehow comforting. “He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. ‘I know myself,’ he cried, ‘but that is all.’” I had only just started to know myself, but that little knowledge was good enough.

My relationship with Robert, a bond that revolved almost entirely around writing and reading evolved and devolved over the years. For weeks that summer we squatted in a foreclosed, crumbling mansion, writing, editing each others’ work and pretending to be Fitzgerald and Zelda as we hosted friends for all-night parties. We ended up going our separate ways, he to rehab and I to New Orleans, but our friendship endured in letters, a more natural way for us to communicate since our initial bond existed in print.

Catherine Lacey lives in Brooklyn and is writing her first book. She blogs at catherinelacey.com.

“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.