Favorite books

I limited myself to books I've read more than once. I think that proves their mettle. Each description is followed by the number of times I've read it.

"Oranges" by john McPhee You might think it's dull. It's about early Florida Orange growers, but that slice of culture was totally unknown to me and very endearing. 2

"Where Strange Roads go Down" by Mary Del Villar about 2 beatniks walking across rural Mexico. 2

"Where Rivers Ran Backward" by William E. Merrit was also great. Another Vietnam biopic, I liked his continual interspersing of rock lyrics to lock the story to the era. 3

"The Devil and Sonny Liston" by Nick Tosches which many would find crude and borderline offensive. It's the biography of the baddest man who ever lived, who happened to be a famous boxer. 5

Stephen King: "The Dark Tower" say what you will. He wrote it at the height of his drug-induced mania. It's brilliant. I think it stands alone as the rest of the series is strictly downhill. 3

Jim goad wrote a book called "the Redneck Manifesto" that was patently profane and indecent and borderline obscene. Alternately it was some of the most original and thought provoking literature I've ever read. 2

Russell Hoban writes books that are hard to follow, difficult to read and often totally unsatisfying to finish. But his use of language is a weapon. He invents new words, sometimes whole new languages. Each book of his I've read is it's own struggle to finish and comprehend. "Riddley walker" is about post apocalyptic future written in a devolved English language replete with new words, new grammar and new spellings. His book "Klienzeit" is even harder to follow and a long narrative that I think supposes existentialism is wrong and metaphysics are right and nothing
is real. Or it's just absurd. I don't think I understand it. 2

"The Crossing" Cormac McCarthy, He is unstoppable in all his gothic western glory. 2

Hunter S. Thompson..It's hard to limit myself to one book... I own most of them, but "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign trail of 72'" is a tad better than the classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." 2 (each)

Simon Winchester

I like to read non-fiction. It's an easy read, you educate yourself and there's no tension in stopping mid-sentence at bedtime. John McPhee, Mark Kurlansy, and Simon Winchester all figure prominently in the personal library.

Simon Winchester's most recent work "A Crack in the Edge of the World" ruined it. He has a new and unnatural urge to dip deeply into the thesaurus. (The origami book jackets remain a fixture.) Below is a complete list of the world I had to stop and look up. many were technical terms a geologist would know, some were typos but most wee just him being difficult. (I've excluded those technical terms he included in the appendix.)


umbos
terminator line
ailanthus
orogeny
febrile
annus mirabilis
skein
kittieakes
fulmars
post hoc ergo propter hoc
auguries
gasconading
lickspittle
panjandrum
hobbledehoy
sauve qui peut
lumpenproletariat
quotidian
archdruidical
ultramafics
minié
cordilleran
allotropes
coesite
sishtovite
niggle
E pur si muove
mountain cwn (might be a typo)
sunder
long chalk (British idiom)
plashes (typo)
friable
serried
soda lakes
bathyscapes
nosegay
inapposite
tisanes
saturnalia
skerries
quayside
louche
melodeons
sartorial
laager
magisterial
penuriousness
cuboids
brocade
capo di tutti capi
sylph-waisted
Liebfraumilch
phaetons
hansoms
cupola
chance medley (British idiom)
porte cochere
whiffletree
pilaster
phylloxera
asperities
nullahs
rills
caryatids
galangal
pour memorie
xenolalia
jeremiad
maunderings
périphériques
quotidian
hectopascals

And of course the quote:
"The locals are seemingly obsessed with constant stories of death (as fishermen drowning in sudden storms, birds perishing in their hundreds of thousands, beaches made exclusively from the crushed bones of fish skeletons, various species of flora and fauna dyning out as the level of salinity, which is already close to that of the pacific ocean keeps on climbing in the hot and pitiless sunshine)."

Library Discards

Often the marking of a good book, and a tired one. I was surprised upon looking how few of my books were marked ex libris. Then I noticed how many were missing one of the the end papers. Libraries discard resellers cut off the marked pages to create the appearance of a less used book. What a shame. I'd prefer to know where it's been.

Darker Blues

I'm quoting a quote, but they re-use the passage masterfully in a meaningful place. The book is a collection of biographical essays about the musicians of the northern Mississippi. And in context the place matters as much as the people.

"On the fields, in the forests, in the streets and yards and homes and businesses, and barns, the water left a rising muck. It filled the air with stench, and in the sun it lay baking, and cracking like broken pottery, dung-colored and unvarying to the horizon..."

-Originally from Rising Tide, by John Barry.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Elizabeth Smart wrote the most overtly dramatic book I've ever read, and most of it for all of it's bloated melodrama was also a work of evocative poetic-prose. The book is epic. Most of it is senseless out of context. But the book was autobiographical, and like real life, had a sequel: The assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. They're often sold bound together as they pertain to the same characters and plot lines of the authors life.

"Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had children who were just like all children. And it rained all day."

You can smell the dissatisfaction. After By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, it's as if she learned craft to companion the intensity of her expression. Much of the book is still burdened with extreme melodrama, but the prose is still in it's own league. I'll quopte a tad more:

"Sometimes with slow understanding they make imperceptible movement towards each other, perectly balanced on their twig; their eyes outward, their snouts upwards, their tails curled permanently like teacup handles."

Smokestack Lightning

The book Smokestack Lightning is about barbecue and the gnarled fingers of elderly black men smoking cow heads and brisket in hand-dug smoke pits in the yards behind abandoned gas stations in the South. More than that of course... It is not a cookbook it's as much about the American Dream as Fear & Loathing was. The concepts are surprisingly vast in a biopic that's more often a comic foil in the middle of a morning tv show. Lolis Eric Elie makes it all artful, tangible and powerful. It courts the real for the greater sense of palpation.

"Truth being what it is-vast and yet surprisingly deceptive-what you will retain will be the tale's edited version, it's essence. And as you choose to remember then, both tale and teller, Charlie mac will become more than a historian of a small village in Georgia. He will become the griot of this whole thing-its Homer if you will."
-Lolis Eric Elie

There's a great interview with the author here. I also hear his book cornbread nation is excellent but I've not read it yet. Lolis Eric Elie is a columnist and food writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Personification

The book Kleinzeit, by Russell Hoban is not very readable, and is far inferior to his more faous book Ridley Walker. But it has more personification than I've seen any any other text. Buildings are live, colors, god and death are both living breathing and seemingly mortal characters... yet he describes them so aptly in their "human" trappings.

last paragraph chapter 8:
"Hospital said nothing, had no quips and cranks and wanton wiles. Hispital huge, bigger than any sky, grey-faced, stony faced in the rough clothes of the prison, the madhouse, Tom o'Bedlam. hospital waiting, treading its bedlam round in thick boots. Hospital mute, gigantic, with thick empty hands."

Oswald de Andrade

I cut out the paragraph and stuck it in my pocket. I found it today, years later in a book. I remembered I read it on a plane and assumed it was an in-flight magazine. I was wrong. It was Wired. The article was by Julian Dibbell, but she's quoting the modernist Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade.


"In 1556, not long after the Portuguese first set foot in Brazil, the Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha was shipwrecked on its shores and set about introducing the gospel of Christ to the native "heathens." The locals, impressed with the glorious civilization the bishop represented and eager to absorb it in its totality, promptly ate him. Thus was born Brazilian culture."
-Oswald de Andrade


Full text Here.

James Parker, Boston Phoenix

James Parker is writer for the Boston Phoenix and is clearly wasting his skills on a weekly periodical instead of somthing more timeless like a book. The strong language, and the broad vocabulary, both say Nick Tosches but the brute masculinity and the heavy use of punctuation says Fulkner. Truly a surprise find last week.

"In ethnographic terms, the bouncer is the big daddy of the liminal realm, the place of thresholds, through which participants in the rite are conducted—moved along, if you like—as they pass from one state to another. Jittery clubbers at the door, agitating for entry; the gyre of and out-of-control pit, slewing toward carnage; a drugged or boozed patron sprouting invisible tusks of hostility; the bouncer is there, filling the space negotiating the transition."
-Bouncer Lit

Love the combination of words: Ethnographic, Liminal and Big Daddy in the same sentence. Gyre, slewing and "tusks of hostility" all need a good dictionary and together manufacture a dense and powerful image. Somone give the man a book deal please.

His articles here: http://thephoenix.com/Author.aspx?name=JAMES%20PARKER

Letter from Iceland

I've always liked that Mark Kurlansky like to frequenty quote the fine language of those great writers that preceeded him.

"The towns peter out into flat rusty-brown lava fields, scattered shacks surrounded by wire fencing, stockfish drying on washing-lines and a few white hens."

From Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden & Louis MacNeice, 1967
more recently quoted by Kurlansy in the book "Cod."

Mark Kurlansky

In writing non-fiction the writer is limited. If you are too vivid and lively you risk the presentation of fiction. A good non-fiction writer skirts it and engages in artful language only sparingly and perferably late in the book after trust is earned.

This is part of his description of the former Fulton Street market in Manhattan circa 1860 or so.

"The gas lighting was dim and the air often misty from the river and this gave an eerie smudgy haziness to the busy market where deer and squirrels and opossums and wild turkeys were hanging from beams."

-From The Big Oyster

Henry Miller

Not a novel pick, it is and he are classics after all. From Black Spring:

"In fact, neither of them was ashamed of showing hsi tears, something which seems to have gone out of the world now."

Hollis Gillespie

It's not the main character, because it is herself. It's not the content, she gets cute, and sappy a littel too often. The pace is conversational like that really funny friend you had in college. But peppered throughout are single sentences that are unforgetable. One that presses you to read on. from Bleachy haired honky bitch.

"Nothing like stumbling over a dead puppy to dick up your day, so thank god that didn't happen, but it almost did."

"I dislike being bled on."

"My friend is fucking her boss, which I think is a really bad buisness move."

"the eye-catching result was that they both sported big shiny red baboon asses."

Bringing out the Dead

Now a major motion picture if you hadn't heard. I perfer the book of course, but the movie was entertaining and quoted from the book directly for the most part. Joe Connelly isn't a flowerly writer. His meaning is compressed like Hemmingway somwhat.

"We rushed the dead boy into the emergency room."

The sentence ends a chapter and tells us the outcome without walking us through the scenes, compressing pages into the single adjective "dead." if he was just a boy, the outcome would be uncertain and require more naration. But they rushed the dead boy, that tells us more about them than the boy or the future.

The Coma

"The Pavement, marked with grease and rain and chewing gum. thousands of peices of discarded chewing gum, pressed flat by pedestrians into a constellation. And if I reaches down to touch the paement, I could feel grit beneath my fingers. the grit stuck to the natural oils on my hand. If I lifted my hand and looked at the grit, I could see that like grubby snowflakes each grain was different from the others. Detail. Spectacular. Fractal. "

Alex Garland writes about a dream world experienced by a patient in a coma. the dream-like descriptions are all in first person and even his use of verb tense adds to the surreal feeling of the book. As a whole, the book fails probably for lack of density. It's more of a novella. Nonetheless, certain passages are gripping and totally original.

Bordertown

The book is titled "Bordertown" and regards sympathetically for the way los tejanos have been marginalized in the borderlands. It's an artbook, relying on design, montage and photographs to convey their rhetoric. But as well respected it is visually, there is come clever use of language as well. They set the tone for the rest of the book, not with the opening paragraph, but with a hand written blurb on the second. It clearly declares their book notjust as art, but also as ethos propaganda.

Yo Tengo un pistole

Con manago de marfil

para matar todos los gringos

Qui viennen por ferrocarril!

(I have a pistol

With a marbel handle

With which to kill all the Americans

Who come by railroad)

-Folk tune popular in Chihuahua durring the

Mexican revolution

and the Mexican american war.

HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLIPHILI

Never was there a more dense, multi-faceted tome. Every sentence, capitalization, indentation, and alliteration has secondary and tertiary meanings. The author, still unknown for certain was a cryptomaniac. Even the illustrations contain coded messages.

It was printed in about the year 1500 in a language created by its author using italian grammar with words from latin, tuscan and greek. Translation of the book into english was not even attempted until 1952, but not completed uuntil 1999. Translator Prof. Joscelyn Godwin of Colgate U. did his best to hold the original authors neologisms. The result is gorgeous but also nearly unreadable.

"In this horrid and cuspidinous littoral and most miserable site of the algent and fetorific lake stood daevious Tisiphone, efferal and cruel with her vaparine capillament, her meschine and miserable soul, implacably furibund."

The original pseudo tuscan texts are here:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyp000.htm

Béla Tarr's minutes and seconds

"...I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being - all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine - time itself: the years, days hours, minutes and seconds." -Béla Tarr

As quoted in Cineville http://mr-lucky.blogspot.com/

details accumulate

Todd Ashley, singer lyrcist, bassist and now blogger.:

"The details accumulate; the information wells up as the city closes in around me. But at first it doesn’t compute; it reads as gibberish, resembles chaos: a maelstrom of dust and smoke, garbage and construction debris, vehicles and animals and people and sewage, music and shouting and confusion."

http://postcards.blogs.com/

Pierre Boulle

Pierre Boulle wrote Bridge over the River Kwai, a book that later became a classic movie. The novel, originally in French was well-translated by Xan Fielding in 1958. It contains two spectacular bricks of language, neither of which made the movie in the inevitable exanguination that has to happen to an epic novel to make it into a 2 hour movie.

The first I print here as it appears in my 1961 time edition .. bowdlerized! The two quotes appear at nearly opposite ends of the book and really show the range of the writer and the story.

"The f---ing bridge still isn't built. the f---ing Emperors f---ing railway still hasn't got across the f---ing river in this f---ing country. The f---ing C.O.; he knows what he's talking about. If you see him, tell him we're all for him. The f---ing baboon hasn't heard the last of the f---ing British army."

"All that remained now was what the Colonel called the trimmings, which would give the construction that finished look in which the practiced eye can at once recognize, in no matter what part of the world, the craftsmanship of the European and the Anglo-Saxon sense of perfection."

Craig D. Lindsey

It's a fine day that I read a record review worth reading.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=14350

"...the most shocking slam comes when he [Josh Love] compares Winehouse to our more synthetic Stateside pop stars. “People call Ashlee and Britney artificial all the time,” Love wrote, “but they feel 10 times more genuinely expressive than Winehouse.” Yeah, he’s going to hell for that one—and let’s hope Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson and Ellen Willis are there to take turns sodomizing him with red-hot rhino horns."

All this in defense of a not-so-fair maiden; Amy Winehouse.

In the Devil's Larder

FromVignette 54 from the Devil's Larder, by Jim Crace.

"The Devil wanders with his straw sack at night through the meadows and the woods behind the town. He's there we're told, to plant the mushrooms that he's raised in Hell, where there's no light to green them, so that the gatherers who come at dawn, against the wisdoms of the coutryside, can satisfy their appetites for sickeners or conjurors, or fungi smelling of dead flesh and tasting of nothing when they're cooked. He feeds them dissapointments, nightmares. fevers. indigestion, fear."

Hot damn that's good.

Johannes Bobrowski

"How beautiful a house is, now in the night. The wind drops that little bit of dust by the roadside before it swings around and up onto the roof, bends over to the right, looks down at the bed of onions, and then jumps off the ridge, one hand on the chimney."
-Johannes Bobrowski

Bobrowski was from East Germany but as far as he was concerned he was Prussian. It makes him the last great writer in Prussian literature as he was the last one in Prussia at the time. If you're curious how he could so freely add anthropomorphize the wind, read his works. I reccomend Darkness and a Little Light as a good collection.

From the Crossing

“The man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the woman stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.”

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing