In the past week or so, both Liam Daley and David David G Alm have asked me to post my Ten Books that influenced or stayed with me. Im going to cheat a bit by grouping together some by the same author. In the order that I read them: 1. Lord of the Flies (I read this at Myrtle Beach between 9th and 10th grade, and year after year I realize how deeply it embedded itself in my imagination--recently listened to an audiobook of Golding reading it and it was even better) 2. The Great Gatsby (since early high school, Ive found this to be a virtually flawless novel) 3. Portrait of the Artist as Young Man/Ulysses/Stuart Gilberts Study of Ulysses (I was obsessed with these in high school, and the Gilbert study introduced me to most of everything I was into until the end of college and beyond--Hugh Kenners Pound Era is great, too) 4. Pale Fire (when I was in tenth grade, Nabokov was god--still is; Lolitas great, but Pale Fire is my fave) 5. Everything Henry Miller wrote, but especially Tropic of Cancer/The Rosy Crucifixion (from 15 till I outgrew him in my 20s, Miller was my man--Ill always remember reading Tropic of Cancer by the pool in summer, and reading Plexus on the coast of Spain) 6. Look Homeward, Angel (Miller and Anderson led me to him--yes, he overwrites, but oh how well he overwrites!) 7. Most of what Milan Kundera wrote (met him in college and we had a great time together during my first month in Paris in the mid-90s) 8. The Confusions of Young Torless/The Man Without Qualities (I met Musil in Germany my junior year of college and have been in love ever since) 9. Franny and Zooey (in high school I hated Catcher in the Rye, but when I read the Glass family stories in my 20s, I, like Salinger, began loving his characters more than God loves them) 10. For my final choice, Ill list three new favorites that I (re)discovered as audiobooks: First, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, read by Colin Firth (I read this one in high school but clearly didnt get it, though I did like his Monsignor Quixote a lot--Firths performance blew me away, and Greene is a masterful writer); James Dickeys Deliverance (saw the movie long ago: listened to the book after getting into a several hour long conversation with a 60-something English professor at a garage in South Carolina when we broke down on the way back from Florida--Dickey is a genius); Alan Gurganuss Local Souls (made me cry on the drive up to New York this weekend--thats some pretty good writin!)
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 03:56:37 +0000
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