Posted by Atticus on August 4, 2004, at 13:46:50
In reply to Atticus please share your favorite books, posted by Jai Narayan on August 4, 2004, at 8:20:05
Hi Jai,
I wish I had all of my bookcases (my apartment is crammed with them) in front of me right now (I'm at work), but I'll try to recall at least a few selections until I can check my stacks. My favorite book, head and shoulders above the rest, is "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller. It is profound and hilarious at the same time (no easy trick), and I love the understated narrative voice. In terms of the sheer, breathtaking beauty of the prose, I'd say my pick would be F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" with its almost melodic poesy. I actually have an enormous horizontal oil painting I did of John Lennon hanging over my computer at work. It's a very tight shot of his eyes, rimmed by his famous circular granny glasses, and his eyebrows and a portion of his nose; it was inspired by the "eyes of T.J. Eckelberg" in "Gatsby," which are an enormous optometrist's sign that bears mute witness to many of the book's most significant events (it symbolizes a disengaged God). At any rate, the "eyes of John Lennon" gaze down at me in all their psychelic color all day during the week, and it gives me a lift. I remember John's beautiful music and Fitzgerald's gorgeous writing. "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo, which I've read in the original French, is a masterwork of social commentary, characterization, and riveting plotting. "Great Expectations" by Dickens is one of my favorites as well, for many of the same reasons; it looks at some of the bleakest circumstances under which people have ever been forced to live, and imbues its poverty-stricken characters with incredible warmth and vitality. I'm also a big fan of Twain, especially "Huckleberry Finn". On a more recent note, I also love Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and have fantasized about being Neal Cassidy. I think that book had a huge influence during my adolescence when I was trying to define my nascent independent sense of self. I like Allen Ginsberg even more, but he wasn't a novelist. Dashiell Hammett's existential and noirish "The Maltese Falcon" would be another fave, mainly for a detour in the book from the main narrative thread about a man who changes his life when he's narrowly missed by a falling I-beam from a construction site. When Sam Spade tracks the missing man down, the detective's ruminations of the repetitive and safe life-patterns we unwittingly settle back into "once the I-beams stop falling" really pin down one of the central paradoxes of the so-called "American" persona: an oft-stated desire for rugged individualism and independence, yet an unwillingness to pay the heavy price it demands and a resultant desire to climb back into the warm, cozy embrace of conformity. I've thought about this passage in the book a lot lately, since, as you know, a near-fatal "I-beam" lobbed by my illness nearly took me out earlier this year. On a lighter note, I love the wry, dry wit of British humorists like P.G. Wodehouse and Douglass Adams (the Jeeves books and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy -- which is actually five books long -- respectively). Beyond the irony and black humor, I'm drawn by their masterful use of narrative tone. This is why I think the well-intentioned BBC-TV adaptation of "Hitchhiker's Guide" simply didn't work very well; without Adams' distinctive narrative presence and phrasing, all you got was the dialogue, and thus the funniest bits of the book were lost. Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" tackles much weightier matter, but again it's the author's turn of phrase that makes it so engaging to me. So it goes. And finally, I'm a big fan of selected sci-fi novels by Philip K. Dick, especially "The Man in the High Tower", which posits a complex alternate reality where the Axis powers won the war. He focuses not on battles and the war, but on the immense degree to which the American social milieu and culture are reshaped and redirected as a result. It came out in 1962, and has been widely ripped off since then. That's a starter set off the top of my head. If anything else comes to me, I'll let you know. Happy trails. :) Atticus
poster:Atticus
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URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20040616/msgs/374028.html