The Path of the Bookseller

Steven Hart has inspired me to jump on the meme known as 15 Books That Will Always Stick With Me. Here’s my fifteen, in the order that I thought of them:

Samuel R. Delany: Dhalgren. How do people survive in a city where things no longer make sense? This book picks up reality and twists it around, managing to include conversations about everything in the world in the midst of a strong story with characters that you won’t forget (even though the protagonist can’t remember who he is). It may be about the experience of living inside a book. Or it may not. (Actually, I would have picked Delany’s complete works if I could have done so. He’s the single finest writer I’ve read.)

John Cage: Silence. Of course. New ideas on what sound, music, and silence are, still causing arguments and having repercussions today.

Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems 1956–1968. Cohen’s poetry mixes traditional influences (including a strong Jewish strain) with unexpected sensuality. I had heard a few of his songs when I was young, but this book put it all together. Nowadays, I would go for his later retrospective, Stranger Music. And his new CD and DVD. Live in London, are amazingly good: if you’re only going to get one Leonard Cohen album, get this one.

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit. A collection of tiny mind-bombs combining beauty and whimsy in koans for making art.

Robert Silverberg: Dying Inside. A haunting and often funny view from inside the mind of a telepath who is losing his gift.

Michael Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. A survey of experimental music, focusing on the British scene in the Sixties and Seventies, much of which became known throught Brian Eno’s Obscure record label. Lots of small scores and good explanations which led me toward much of the music that I have loved and tried to make ever since.

Dorothy Karp Kripke: Let’s Talk About God. The book that my parents read to me most when I was little. In the face of blossoming doubt, I keep returning to its mantra, “God is the good that’s in the world.”

Various Artists: The Bible. Whatever you think it is, however it came to be written, and whatever connection it might have to actual history and theological reality, it’s at the core of the stories that most of us in this culture tell each other to try to figure out what how we see the world.

J G Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition (Love and Napalm, Export USA). Atomized stories of distorted realities, messing with any linear sense of how a story must be told.

William Strunk and E. B. White: The Elements of Style. I’ve given people more copies of this book than any other with the possible exception of Dhalgren. Champions of brevity, long before Twitter.

Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles. Elegaic, beautiful, loving stories of a fanciful Mars and, more importantly, the people and others who land and live there. (I might have also picked The October Country, but Steven already did, and wrote about it better than I could.)

Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories. Explosive, enveloping stories, all touching on how one sees and works within a world where the old beliefs and gods are dying. Gritty, angry, daring work that succeeds because, when you dig down, Ellison cares about people so much.

James Joyce: Finnegans Wake. As John Cowan showed me, this is one of the funniest books ever written. Open to any page and read it aloud. There are whole stretches of it where no one apparently has much of any idea what was going on, and it doesn’t matter. Just open anywhere and enjoy.

Lewis Carroll: Symbolic Logic and The Game of Logic. I grasped onto this book in fourth grade or so. Carroll’s way of taking ideas, showing how they fit together, and mapping them into his peculiar system of intersecting rectangles showed me how to pin ideas down to pages and prove that some parts of the world made sense.

And one anti-recommendation:

Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow. A horrific, terribly-written, misanthropic, grim, slapdash attempt at science fiction. Well-meaning people go in search of beauty only to have it all go wrong. Scenes of torture and mental and emotional cruelty lead to nothing but ugly nihilism couched in writing that is, at best, semi-competent. Some people like this book. I have no idea why. Avoid this, unless you enjoy having horrific imagery and leaden language trapped in your head forever after. It’s the one book that I most wish that I had not read.

So that’s my list. Typing it up and doing the links, other struck me, such as Dante’s La Vita Nuova, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, and Hermann Hesse’s Demian. But I’ll stop here.

I was also surprised that some of the things that I thought that I had remembered as coming from books actually were from magazine articles,online posts,  radio interviews, music album liner notes, newspaper columns, and the like. 

What’s your list??