Ive been reading these book lists and wondering, accordingly, about their emotional provenance--rather than their intellectual origins, if you will (and you must, John Judis, you got us all started with your top ten history books). I look at Laura Kipniss list, for example, and I think, thats the most esoteric and eclectic one Ive seen so far, how did that happen? I think Ill ask her. Or I look at Connor Kilpatricks and I think, Ive never even opened half of these, why did he? Joe Gabriel and Mike Fennell point me in the right direction. They both have suggested that our reading habits reside in those formative teenage years, when everything else of importance occurs as well--when we start looking for the truth on our own because we know that soon enough we will be just that. But heres the thing. Those primal scenes are never available to you directly; theyre always mediated by subsequent narratives that make sense of what were inchoate and inexpressible feelings. And for most of us, the shock of recognition that revealed what was evident yet unknown came from fiction, during and after those formative years. In other words, most of us were reading less-than-canonical fiction when we developed the reading habits that would propel us toward the lives we now lead. With these caveats in mind, I propose that we periodically revise or amplify these lists, in keeping with the radically empiricist notion that our selves are themselves functions of narrative, of retrospection--in keeping with the notion that what we can or do acknowledge as causative from the past will determine who we are in the present. All right, then. Heres some additions or swaps Id make. Noam Chomsky, At War With Asia. I read this after being expelled from college, while working construction in the summer of 1970. Suddenly everything seemed explicable. It radicalized me before I knew what that meant. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis. I bought this Washington Square Press paperback for 60 cents when I was in 7th grade. (I still have it.) In shop class the next year, my printing project--we actually set type, like in the 19th century--was to make business cards that read James Livingston: Psychoanalyst. (Dont have those, goddamn it.) Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. I read this in 1981, in the dreary winter of Ronald Reagans triumph, while teaching four days a week at North Central College. Its an impossibly ambitious and utterly convincing book. Auerbach was writing in the 1940s, when Europe had become a charnel house, when he was himself in exile, but the principle of hope he brought to his task was inspiring. He brought me to tears in every chapter: he said, keep writing, its the best we can do. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music. Speaking of ambitious and convincing. You dont have to agree with him, though, to love the way he writes about both Robert Johnson and Elvis Presley. Always fast, always funny, often startling, and sometimes moving.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 18:17:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015