On Reading

As luck would have it, much has already been said about reading and literacy. It’s a cheap vacation, the great equalizer, etc. Read some quotes about the value of reading and feel held in the knowledge that I probably agree with it, unless I don’t. 

Anyways, here’s my current list of favourites after 25 years of staying up too late to finish one more chapter. There’s thirty-odd books I’ve perused, in no particular order:

Create Dangerously (Camus), Going Public (Groys), The True Believer (Fromm), The Shape of Content (Shahn), On Anarchism (Chomsky), Etc

- Brief, personal essay collections, such as the above, are maybe the most fun method of consuming what you might call more ‘academic’ or ‘intellectual’ topics. There is fairly little fat, they make their opinions clear, rightly or wrongly, and do little in the way or hiding behind allegories, which I would argue is the unforgivable, original sin of philosophers: not of being inaccessible or difficult, but building arbitrary, somewhat convoluted structures to cross a bridge between two even more arbitrary points of their own choosing. Descartes is a prick, is all I’m saying. Why am I discovering your bias on page 335 of a metaphysical allegory? Spare me. Keep it tidy. I think for the average schmuck who wants a glimpse into more esoteric topics, novels like these are an excellent place to start fielding opinions. 

Dispatches (Herr)

- The holy grail of war reportage. It is the journalistic representation for much of war’s reality: something that is reaching for (and failing to find) a unified thesis but chock-full of fragmented narrative. As rarely as I reread novels, I believe this one will make it. 

Rape of Nanking (Chang)

- Frank, contextually comprehensive, and specific in description, The Rape of Nanking serves as a great benchmark for what historical journalism can be. I think historians as a group must have a fairly tenuous relationship with editors and publishers, as you tend to find their work to be the most trite amongst academics, especially in the effort to storyboard a historical event. The disease of episodic memory. Anyways, hard to put this one down despite its horror. Enjoy!

The Prince of Wales: Right or Wrong? (an architect replies) (Hutchinson)

- Such an inappropriately funny read. It does much in the way of outlining the despair that career technicians feel in the face of demeaning and farcical political and cultural rumblings. I will remember the term ‘bimbo architecture’ until I am six feet under. 

Voltaire’s Bastards (Raulston Saul), The Culture of Make Believe (Jensen)

- Best described as a more honeyed and longer version of the personal argumentative essay. Much of the theses and supporting claims are rightly debated, but this style of writing tends to skip over granular details in an effort to paint a broader picture than they could otherwise. Make a wager as to what their inclusion on this list means in regards to my personal political opinions. 

Love at Goon Park (Blum), Coddling of the American Mind (Haidt), Behave (Sapolsky), Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman)

- Nothing will frustrate you more in future bar-talk conversations than having read any behavioural literature at all. Many people’s opinions regarding child-rearing, development, and social bonding amount to little more than cultural white noise. They have no interest in discerning whether or not the generalities they espouse are true. Read and be resentful. Thinking Fast and Slow would be the favourite here; the writing is dense in a pleasant sort of way, with hardly a word wasted. Robert Sapolsky has some fun personal opinions on fate and destiny. Give him a spin.

The World as It Is (Hedges)

- You can argue that Hedges ends up straying into an ideologue’s territory, much like Jensen or Saul, but Hedges openly gives his opinions on journalism having a subjective moral core and has done so for almost the entirety of his career. The more argumentation you read, whether topical or classical, the more openly stated bias appeals to a pseudo-scholar, rather than the kind of bias that is smuggled in quietly. War journalists are always an appealing read and Hedges does much to validate natural interest, whether his writing sells you or not. If you are young and unsure of your beliefs you should read more polemic writing. 

EEG (Drndic)

- Melancholic and unbelievably successful in its scope and pace. You would think giving a literary eyeball to the undercurrent of the 20th century might be clunky in some capacity, and you’d be correct - if someone other than Drndic was writing this. It feels filthy to try and describe this book any further so I would just urge you, more than most other things on this list, to pick it up. 

My Struggle (Knausgard) 

- It’s an irony for such a compelling and personal autobiography to be written by a Norwegian. It feels inappropriate to be reading much of it. He seems quietly opinionated at some points, desperate for what has passed in others. This book makes other autobiographies feel like wildly pandering marketing events. Of course, they are, but held next to Knausgard the difference is stark. 

What the Living Do (Howe), The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (Ondaatje) Crush (Siken)

- I will refrain from going on a unnecessary and dramatic diatribe about modern poetry, but it’s safe to say the parts of the genre that see the light of the zeitgeist have been somewhat debased. Most of these people should stay firmly in front of twitter and far, far away from That Funky-Coloured Moleskine They Are Thinking Of Buying. These are several instances of it feeling less pandering and more of the ‘hands inside the rollercoaster’ event that poetry can be. 

Lullabies for Little Criminals (O’Neill), East of Eden (Steinbeck), A Little Life (Yanagihara), The Chronology of Water (Yuknavitch)

- I can’t say I have much of a fix for fiction other than the obnoxiously human, soap-opera variety. These novels feel like looking in a hotel beauty mirror. The ones that blow your pores up and make you recoil in recognition. That’s me? Maybe..I’ll wear sunscreen to bed tonight. A common theme in horror movies is characters making ‘bad’ decisions, but books have the advantage (when done well) of peering into the long, winding inner world of a character without much for time constraint, being more concerned with pacing. All I’m saying is books have a greater opportunity for drawing out empathy, and these do it terribly well. I would wager some of the Russians would make it onto an updated list, but I was sick that weekend and couldn’t be bothered to bite off quite that much. 

Bird by Bird (Lamont)

- A much more interesting read on the craft of writing than Stephen’s ‘On Writing.’ More interesting read on writing than anything else, either. I have laughed out loud at this book, which is terribly embarrassing to admit, but in my defence I was on quite a bit of psychedelics. 

The Unconsoled (Ishiguro)

- Other Ishiguro is wonderful, but this one is the favourite. The book is a weird dream. Reading it is a weird dream. Am I in a weird dream? I thought I was under the influence most of the time I was reading it. It’s like being woken up from the dead of sleep and being forced to live out a vacation like that. How odd. 

Madness, Rack and Honey (Ruefle)

- In the ‘three books for the island’ challenge, this gets on every time and may be the last one I use for kindling. Did I say Anne Lamont was the better writer on writing? I take that back. A collection of Ruefle’s lectures, given wherever she was the time of giving, drifts in and out of talking about poetry and talking about everything else. 

Infinite Jest (Wallace)

- I know, I know. Fuck off. If your main contention with this book is that it’s difficult, why not complain about particle physics every time someone brings it up in a bar? Because people only bring up Infinite Jest to brag on you? Point taken. Still - having the argument that this book is intentionally obfuscating is a separate issue from, say, the fact that maybe you should just be rereading harry potter. Reading this book is an experience you can’t recreate by reading it again, so hunker down. Art is not supposed to explain the same thing over and over again, or make you feel the same way over and over again. Is it an exercise in Hedonism? It is a Micheal Bay movie? No, but Michael Bay is a canoe and hedonism is for the damned. 

When Breath Becomes Air (Kalanithi)

- Maybe the top contender for why doctors make the best writers outside of ‘professional writers.’ Obnoxiously popular and obnoxiously worth it. Sometime Oprah gets it right, okay? Go touch grass and be grumpy at a ladybug, or something else that cares as much as I do. My last book was one of David’s. I’m a man of many faces.

The Dharma Bums (Kerouac)

- I will take give no quarter in a repartee about most of my preferences, but will quietly and cooperatively accept crucifixion whenever Kerouac gets brought up. I was painting somebody’s house and they very nicely gifted me this number. Classic cornball read-while-backpacking material.

Reading and owning a stocked spice rack are the two parts of modernity that make me thank the good lord I wasn’t born during the middle ages, although the state-sanctioned buffoonery seemed fun, so long as you can ignore all the not-fun stuff. But - again - they couldn’t read or taste paprika, so really what even was the point. 

Imagine if your whole family disappeared down the rabbit hole of opening a spice route just to discover that all of you think cilantro tastes like soap? How grumpy would you be? Pretty grumpy, I’d think. 

Enjoy the reading.