This is the second of several (six?) posts that springs from an article, essentially listing "the most [x] book I've read." Fair warning, I'm approaching it as Free Association, because analyzing everything I've ever read to find the absolute most... whatever... is going to spin me into indecision.
Ordered from a discount catalog shortly after it was released, this book is nothing like anything I'd ever read before. Blatant, blasphemous, bizarre—and gleeful about it all. The author died of cancer while working on the novel's final revision. It stands as a strange and powerful legacy. (The film adaptation was released 2002, which I have not seen, and an IMDB rating of 6.9/10.)
"Set in Savannah, Georgia, in the early 1970s, this is a novel of the anarchic joy of youth and encounters with the concerns of early
adulthood. Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their three closest friends are altar boys at Blessed Heart Catholic Church and eighth-grade classmates at the parish school. They are also inveterate pranksters, artistic, and unimpressed by adult authority. When Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74, their collaborative comic book depicting Blessed Heart's nuns and priests gleefully breaking the seventh commandment, falls into the hands of the principal, the boys, certain that their parents will be informed, conspire to create an audacious diversion. Woven into the details of the boys' preparations for the stunt are touching, hilarious renderings of the school day routine and the initiatory rites of male adolescence, from the first serious kiss to the first serious hangover."
On the surface, this looks like a book about writing. However, if you look closely, the subtitle is "Some Instructions on Writing and Life." I read it when it was first released, hoping to get some insight into the writing part of it. However, what's stuck with me in the intervening decades is "the life stuff."
"For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and
scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s
hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the
simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in
the iconic passage that gives the book its title: 'Thirty years
ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to
get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It
was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he
was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and
pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the
task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my
brother’s shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by
bird."'"
Good advice in any situation, huh? Just take it bird by bird.
The classiest book I read: this question made me frown, and shift restlessly in my seat, and frown some more. Classy? Do I even read "classy" books?
"On the eve of her marriage, beautiful and strong-willed Soo-Ja
Choi receives a passionate proposal from a young medical student. But
caught up in her desire to pursue a career in Seoul, she turns him away,
having impetuously chosen another man who she believes will let her
fulfill her dreams. Instead, she finds herself tightly bound by
tradition and trapped in a suffocating marriage, her ambition reduced to
carving out a successful future for her only daughter. Through it all,
she longs for the man she truly loves, whose path she seems destined to
cross again and again. In This Burns My Heart,
Samuel Parks has crafted a transcendent love story that vibrantly
captures 1960s South Korea and brings to life an unforgettable heroine."
Lovely, devastating, romantic, heartbreaking, this story is written so beautifully, with not one unnecessary word. It is challenging, intensely sad, and unforgettable.
My earliest post of a Jack Gilbert poem ("The Danger of Wisdom") was in April, 2010, for National Poetry month. A couple years later, this book came out. I placed my order—for the hardcover!—before the title was released.
"Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of
poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets
prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of
previously uncollected work.
"Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh,
the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we
all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the
odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn,
he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience. Now, for
the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential
volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront
of poetic achievement in our time."
Gilbert's poetry is pure, devastating, and beautiful.
The maddest book I read: there are two ways to think about this, with two ways to answer.
I cannot recall what led me to this book, initially, except that in literature as in life, I am drawn to difficult people.
"In 1984, Jolene Iolas, a student in upstate New York, encounters
Martin Sloane's art while visiting a Toronto gallery. Flush with the
confidence of youth, she strikes up a correspondence with the older
artist, and eventually the two become lovers. Introduced to a constancy
of love she has never known, Jolene relaxes into the rituals of being
someone's other half. She learns Martin's story and cherishes it as her
own. He becomes a fixture in her life, a star in her sky.
And
then, he vanishes. There is no hint of his fate, no chain of cause to be
followed. Over a long fall, the shock slowly hardening into fact,
Jolene sheds her life, losing everything, including her oldest friend,
Molly, to inexpressible grief.
Ten years pass, Jolene slowly
learns to stop trying to make sense of it all. But before she can fully
return to life, the opportunity to confront a ghost arises. Word has
come from Molly, of all people, that someone named Sloane has been
exhibiting artworks identical to Martin's in Irish galleries. Jolene
travels to Dublin, where she reluctantly reconnects with Molly and
together, they find themselves lost in a jumble of pasts as they try to
piece together what happened to Martin Sloane."
This book is infuriating, confusing, well-written, maddening, depressing, and also, have I mentioned, exasperating? I literally threw it at the wall when I finished it. Then I hand-sold it to Fluffy. When she finished it, she chucked it across the room. For two library types, who love books and would never willingly hurt them, this is a strong response.
• maddest, meaning, most crazy?: Hard Bite, by Anonymous-9 (Down & Out Books, 2016), book 1 in the Bite series
I read this book (electronically) when it first came out. I don't recall, though, whether I read it first or if it was recommended to me by The Monkey Man. I do know that we both read it and liked it, which is a little surprising.
"The hit-and-run driver took everything—his wife, child and legs.
Now a paraplegic, Dean Drayhart unleashes payback on suspected
hit-and-runners in Los Angeles with helper-monkey Sid as his deadly
assistant.
"Dean’s gentle, doting nurse knows nothing about what
he’s up to and when Sid tears out the throat of a Mexican Mafia member,
Marcie is kidnapped in order to force Dean’s surrender.
"Armed
with nothing but his wits, Sid, and a sympathetic streetwalker named
Cinda, Dean manipulates drug-cartel carnales and the Los Angeles
Sheriff’s Department in a David-against-Goliath plot that twists and
turns to a heart-pounding finale."
Bizarre, funny, and legitimately mystifying. Well worth the read.
[based on this post; the title quotation is by Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird]
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