Anodyne

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Five'll Get You Ten+

Someone writes to request a list of my five favorite books of all time. I'm not Oprah, this isn't my book club, and I'm not that big on answering questionaires in the first place, but here goes. Particularly significant titles in red. (Altered overnight after some additional thought). If I had to pick one of these, it'd have to be Dick's A Scanner Darkly. This book is pitch-perfect; its unique blend of classical tragedy, jet-black humor, and stylistic shifts through several different points of view are like nothing else I've ever read.

Other titles on the list are things that exerted an enormous hold over me at certain points in my life, which I haven't returned to lately (Burroughs, Pynchon, Lowry). There are also some omissions that can only be explained by the weird ways I've assimilated certain authors' work. I have never actually finished a book by Henry Green, but I have no problem citing him as a major influence, based on individual paragraphs in Living and Back, and John Updike's enormously useful "Introduction" in a Penguin 3-in-1. Like Christopher Dewdney says, "Certain people seem to stand behind one." So, shout outs to all the other names and titles in the shadows: Dhalgren, Pylon, supernatural Margaret Oliphant, Ulysses, early Stephen King, Falling Angel, Kerrisdale Elegies, John Donne, & etc.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Kem Nunn, The Dogs of Winter

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

John Updike, The Rabbit Quartet

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar

William S. Burroughs, Nova Express

Jeff Wall, Dan Graham's Kammerspiel

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Roger Lowenstein, Buffett

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary and The Mouse and His Child (ill. Lillian Hoban)

M. John Harrison, Light

Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp

Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

Ethel Wilson, Mrs. Golightly & Other Stories

I have read all these titles repeatedly, some as many as twenty times (Buffett, Scanner, Gravity's Rainbow). Expanding the list to include short fiction and non-fiction would generate the following additions:

William Gibson, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose," "Hinterlands," "The Winter Market," "My Obsession."

Alice Munro, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain."

Peter Culley, "Gin and Lime."

Jack Spicer, "Imaginary Elegies I-VI."

Al Purdy, "Wilderness Gothic."

Ursula K. LeGuin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow."

Malcolm Lowry, "The Bravest Boat," "Through the Panama," "The Forest Path to the Spring."

Philip K. Dick, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later."

H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness."

Warren Buffett, "The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville."

- posted by cjb @ 7:49 PM

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