How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010)

Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Other Press, 2010.

I cannot think of a better book about Montaigne for any audience, whether curious grazer or Montaigne scholar. This ranks up there with translator Donald Frame's book Montaigne's Discovery of Man: The Humanization of a Humanist (in terms of quality of experience). Bakewell uses the very form that Montaigne pioneered, the essay, to do three things at once: (1) present an engaging biography of the Renaissance humanist; (2) give an overview of his massive compendium; and (3) use the Essais to answer the big question of how to live. Just as Montaigne does, Bakewell leans heavily on the anecdotal, but supplements it all with deft scholarship. The result is nothing short of a soaring success. For anyone at all remotely interested in Montaigne, there is no better place to begin. I dare say an unabridged edition of the Essais will make its way to your bedside table if you encounter this rare treat of a book.

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977)

Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Hill and Wang, 2010.

Roland Barthes is a name most familiar to students of literary theory, but his books certainly can be enjoyed beyond the pale of an English degree. As with Mythologies (1957), Barthes's central concern is to examine cultural phenomena for the purpose of exposing the underlying and (to Barthes) troubling strata below. In this text he takes on the concept and experience of love, starting from the common utterances of a lover and then searching far and wide for material (from his own experiences, his friends' experiences, and other great literature) to supplement and expose the sentiments. The book is composed of a series of fragments that Barthes calls figures ("The figure is the lover at work"), and the figures, collectively, constitute not a description of the lover's discourse but rather a simulation of it. There is no deliberate order, as Barthes explains, but there is a sort of progression that lends merit to the effort of reading it not as Burroughsesque cut-ups but from cover to cover. I wouldn't recommend reading the book without (1) at least a basic understanding of structuralism, or (2) reading the "How This Book Is Constructed" preface. To dive right in could yield a sense of bewilderment. The reward of taking the time to understand A Lover's Discourse is in gaining a new perspective on our contemporary treatment of love and breaking out of the "extreme solitude" of the lover.

Self-Help (1985)

Moore, Lorrie. Self-Help. Vintage, 2007.

Playing on self-improvement literature, which is as pervasive in our culture as anti-depressants, Moore's collection consists primarily of, at the core, to-do lists. Four of the titles begin with the word "how" (one title is just "How"), and give instructions on exactly what thoughts and actions must one employ to be a mistress, to talk to one's mother, to be a writer, and more. Moore's imagination and eye for detail are as sharp as the prose, which is nothing short of lacerating. Ironically, the stories that comprise Self-Help can leave one with a sense of helplessness, despair at the folly of humanity. But, seen in a different light, the book can also serve to prove what happens when people try to live a life of helping only themselves. Moore isn't afraid to expose the selfishness of so many figures that people one's life. There is, however, a humor to the stories that is quick on the heels of depressing situations. The instructions are often as frank as they are playful and serious: The first sentence of "How to Become a Writer" states, "First, try to be something, anything, else." Perhaps Lorrie Moore's greatest strength is in her ability to capture an entire life—from birth to adolescence to dating to college to marriage to children to old age—in a few brief pages.

The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (2003)

Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

This work of literary criticism aims to pioneer a new dimension in postwar literary discourse. Hungerford uses the historical event of the Holocaust and the subsequent academic movements of the New Criticism and deconstruction theory to show how the concept of personification (specifically the conflation of author and text, leading the text to be spoken of as the author) has taken on a new level of meaning in the collective consciousness, given that the genocide of WWII has made the fantastic possible (this is an antecedence to postmodernist thought). In Hungerford’s own words, “the understandings of literature and understandings of holocaust are connected by certain beliefs about the nature of representation and its relation to persons in the second half of the twentieth century” (12). This phenomenon of personification is not new (Hungerford gives the example of the destruction of Don Quixote’s library in the eponymous book), but personification takes on a new galvanization of life and death in our postwar discourse, and in reaction to this conflation, the schools of New Criticism and deconstruction place emphasis on the autonomy of the text, the divorcement of author and text. This is not to say that these schools render texts lifeless; in fact, “deconstructive critics imagined a text that was radically autonomous, even active.” Throughout the critics of this era, we find a tension between critics who want to homogenize author and text, and those who want separation. To conclude the work, Hungerford takes the stance that we should work to “resist personifying texts or tying them in literal ways to the people who wrote them” because when we conflate author and text we “constrict our freedom (to disagree, to read, not to read)” and limit our imagination (if a text truly represents a person or culture that we can directly experience, this effectively elides the need for our imagination) (155).

Re Joyce (1965)

Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

The first line Burgess sets down in the foreword is: "Another book about James Joyce?" It is a fair question and inevitably had to be spoken at the start, for it must be justified. With the authoritative James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study by Stuart Gilbert and Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork available for scholars and non-scholars alike to use as guides, why should we take time to read Burgess's book? Perhaps the strongest answer is in Burgess's own profession as a novelist. (The highly idiosyncratic language of A Clockwork Orange certainly has its antecedent in Joyce.) From this perspective, the reader not only reaps the fruit of one who has read and obsessed over Joyce for over thirty years, but has the fruit peeled and blended into a smoothie. Who better than a novelist (as opposed to an exponent of academia) to maintain sensitivity to the lay reader while also enhancing the appeal of important books by important authors? Because Joyce is important. Ulysses (the longest day) and Finnegans Wake (the longest night) are, as Burgess has it, "twin heavens for scholars" but they also contain the entire cosmos and man's relation to it. Behind the mundane events, the books are about enormous matters. Their difficulty is by design and for our benefit. Heavily laden with a lifetime's worth of reading and study, Burgess plies us with critical extracts, biographical anecdotes, close-readings, and good humor, passionately guiding us into the dense "word jungles" of Joyce's masterpieces.

Lonesome Traveler (1960)

Kerouac, Jack. Lonesome Traveler. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007.

The progenitor of what fellow Beat poet Allen Ginsberg called "bop prosody" and best known for On the Road, Jack Kerouac was not only an original voice howling on behalf of a subterranean America; he was also a rather prolific and dynamic writer who secured a new epoch in the history of American literature. His abilities were wide-ranging: Compare, for example, his early pseudo-emulation of Thomas Wolfe, The Town and the City (1950), to, say, the later Tristessa (1960). Lonesome Traveler is a collection of short works based on his vagabond travels. The Portable Jack Kerouac, edited by his biographer Ann Charters, contains Kerouac's 30 rules for writing ("Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"). The twenty-eighth rule states: "Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better." He was a firm believer that one's passion for life would find its way onto the page if one let go of inhibitions and just went to town free-writing (Benzedrine was also often a part of the equation), so we get trademark Beat shortcuts such as "less" for "let's"; "coupla" for "couple of"; ampersands instead of "and"; and frequent commissions of direct and indirect articles. This gives the prose a snappy rhythm that can be sung from the page as if a bop song. In his own introduction to the novel, Kerouac tells us that he read a biography of Jack London at age 18 and decided to be an adventurer, too, a lonesome traveler. It is always a treat to read Kerouac, both for his distinctive style and the thrill of living vicariously through his experiences. Even when he is simply narrating mundane actions, the language crackles with energy: "...Deni fishes down for the old copper churchkey and comes up two cans of beer spissing all over the sad night and we up end the tin, and go slurp...."

The Art of X-Ray Reading (2016)

Clark, Roy Peter. The Art of X-Ray Reading. Little, Brown, and Company, 2016.

Another book that follows in the wake of Mortimer Alder's How to Read a Book (1940) and Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind (2003, 2015). Behind the snazzy title is good old-fashioned close reading. Clark's book goes beyond an explication of a reading method, however, giving it a closer antecedent in Thomas C. Foster's fantastic How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003). Both authors guide the reader through an informed close reading of numerous classics, mostly from the American literary canon. This affords the reader indispensable insight into the tools of a seasoned reader. At the heart of both books is the simple truth that close, deep, fruitful reading of great literature comes "[w]ith age and multiple readings...." (Clark). Foster boils it down to memory, symbol, and pattern, which, of course, come only out of reading great literature over and over throughout one's life. Where the books differ, however, is that Clark's intended readers are not just readers but writers, so each chapter distills the results of x-ray reading down to concrete writing advice. After a warm and casual introduction, the book begins with an x-ray reading of The Great Gatsby, or, rather, an x-ray reading of a very small excerpt of the American classic. The book ends with everyone's current favorite literary form: lists! There is a list of great sentences from famous authors and the mandatory suggested reading list. 

As a Man Thinketh (1902)

Allen, James. As a Man Thinketh. Chartwell Books, 2015.

Over a century before David Foster Wallace said the same thing (albeit in a much more contemporary way) to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, James Allen produced a veritable antecedent in As a Man Thinketh. The short treatise is based on Proverb 23:7: "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he...." And in between the writing of the proverb and Allen, Hamlet uttered the words "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space...." The common stance is that it is the mind that is primarily responsible for our character, our perception, and ultimately our experience in this life. Allen's is a mind-over-matter philosophy wherein our very thoughts are the seeds of every act of man. We don't understand how powerful our thoughts are. They extend way beyond mere noetic activity. "Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance." Like other aphoristic prose stylists such as Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, James Allen has achieved a crafted piece of wisdom literature whose every sentence is instantly quotable. Toward the end of the piece, he extends the proverb: "As he thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains." In a culture where we are constantly urged to change our circumstances (which usually means an endless procession of quitting), Allen reminds us that we can alter our circumstances by taking control of what we think.

This Is Water (2005)

Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water. Little, Brown, and Company, 2009.

A few years back I began reading two Kenyon College commencement speeches as a sort of liturgy. I listened to them. I memorized them. I read them in the morning and at night, in the middle of the workday. I proffered them to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn't). The first speech, from 1990, was Bill Watterson's address entitled "Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled." This sage creator of the masterpiece cartoon series Calvin and Hobbes absolutely nails the common experience of suffering through a post-college "real job." The other is the 2005 speech by David Foster Wallace, whose 1996 postmodernist novel Infinite Jest elevated him above cult and campus status and into international acclaim. Some people think I'm crazy for spending $10 on a book whose text is available for free online, but my defense is that Little, Brown, and Company produced a small volume of the speech that forces the reader to slow down and capture the impact of DFW's wisdom-infused sentences. They do this by dedicating each page of the book to a single sentence. At first I thought this would be cumbersome and degrade the experience, but it actually serves as an enhancement. In his usual way, DFW is at once irreverent and subversive while also being didactic and perspicacious. From his two opening anecdotes and vivid descriptions of "the day in and day out" of life, he challenges us to change our thinking. We cannot help but naturally feel that we are the center of everything—but the path to wisdom, the path a learned person should follow, is in willfully determining what to think.

Autoportrait (2005)

Levé, Édouard. Autoportrait. Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.

Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, posted an excerpt of his translation of Levé's Autoportrait in the Spring 2011 issue. The title of the fragment is taken from the book itself: "When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue." I remember being struck by both the clever title and the power of the analog of strawberry and tongue. So I read the rest of the translation and ordered a copy. The paperback is a humble production: scarcely bigger than my hand; black and white cover; 112 pages of text with wide-berthed margins; no chapters, no section breaks, no paragraphs. Each page a wall of justified text. The sentences are quicksand, however, and I found myself unable to stop reading the little book, sinking ever deeper into Levé's portrait. A writer, artist, and photographer, Levé has a keen eye for detail, the ability to plumb the depths of the most mundane situations. His honesty and introspective aptitude would impress Socrates and Freud. There is no real order or flow to the endless declarative statements, yet, like a well done collage, the effect works. Sadly, this able artist took his own life ten days after he delivered the manuscript of his final novel, Suicide, to his editor. Three years earlier, in Autoportrait, we can see foreshadowing: "Because I am funny people think I'm happy"; "I sometimes feel like an impostor without knowing why, as if a shadow falls over me and I can't make it go away"; "Maybe I'm writing this book so I won't have to talk anymore." Yet, that humorous side is on display, too: "I cannot remember a single game of Monopoly that didn't end with all the players sick of it"; "Hearing someone whistle annoys me, especially with vibrato." It is a striking reminder of the complexity and fragility of human consciousness.

The Complete Poems of Cavafy (1935)

Cavafy, C. P. The Complete Poems of Cavafy. Harcourt, 1976.

Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure put this modern Greek poet on my radar. Luckily, the next day, I got a small bonus on my paycheck and allowed myself to purchase this Harcourt paperback of Cavafy's complete poems, as translated by Rae Dalven. With poetry, I like to dive right in and read poems at random from the beginning, middle, and end of the book. This gives me a sense of the poet's themes, motifs, style, and a view of their development as an artist (typically a book of complete poetry is assembled chronologically). Though Cavafy's poems aren't of epic length, they are of many Hesiodic and Homeric topics and figures. (I always imagine that, in the same way Chaucer and Shakespeare loom over modern English poets, Homer and Pindar must loom over modern Greek ones.) His style is clear, forthright, and barbed with longing. I agree with W. H. Auden in his introduction that Cavafy's poetry lacks ornamentation, but I disagree with Auden that "simile and metaphor are devices he never uses"—the first poem in this volume, "Desires," begins with the word "Like" and proceeds to be, in fact, entirely a simile. A sampling of the verses should serve to give the flavor of Cavafy's disposition: "Every lost chance / now mocks his senseless prudence"; "Body, remember..."; "they have built big and high walls around me"; "Shut up in a greenhouse"; "other echos / return from the first poetry of our lives"; "And the morrow ends by not resembling a morrow"; "And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?" The main thread running through the poems is the modernist contradiction of proselytizing carpe diem from a state of ennui.

From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (1991)

Bradbury, Malcolm and Richard Ruland. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. Penguin Books, 1991.

The subject of the history of American Literature is an attractive one. Depending upon one's position it spans roughly four hundred years, making it more palatable than, say, European or Asian literary history; and it develops rather frenetically within those four centuries, thus making its study relentlessly engaging. The trouble, however, is where to start. As Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782, "What is an American?" Can we rightly group John Smith (who wrote the first romance on American soil) or even Thomas Paine (whose pamphlet Common Sense was the death knell for American independence) in with the annals of American literature? Or does truly American literature start much later with the phenomenal autobiography of Boston-born polymath Benjamin Franklin? The answer probably depends on national sentiment, and this is where a history co-authored on opposing sides of the Atlantic stands out from the pile. Indeed, the preface and first section, "The Literature of British America," assure the reader that the authors are well aware of the difficulties of circumscribing the borders of such a history and proceed to pinpoint the figures and texts indispensable for America's national literature. While the prose is more shrewd than colloquial, the authors exhibit a fine command of their subject as they move from Puritanism (with its travelogues, letters, tracts, commonplace books, and sermons) to the Indian-capture narratives that dazzled so many Europeans intrigued with the mysteries of the New World's indigenous people (i.e. real Americans, whose lore will be explored later in the text) to the political writings that stirred the dust of revolution. A perusal of the index reveals all of the expected names and movements up to the 1980s (the book was published in 1991), and, coupled with the table of contents, it appears that the ratio of material from half-century to half-century is fair. 

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)

Eco, Umberto. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Harcourt, 2005.

For a bibliophile like Eco this is the perfect plot: our protagonist, the owner of a rare books store, wakes from a coma and can only remember everything he has learned all the books he's read. He cannot remember his name or his family, but he can quote and quip and pun liberally from his vast, mental literary repository. For the lover of literature this is the perfect book. The first chapter is entitled "The cruelest month" (an allusion to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land); the first sentence hints at the first sentence of Moby-Dick; and the second sentence smacks of Nabokov's striking opening of Lolita. As the patient grapples with his identity, he spouts off lines and characters from Poe, Melville, Dumas, Baudelaire, Doyle, and Stevenson. The protagonist will go on to reconstruct his identity by, well, reading it back into existence, naturally. Through the review of the diaries, letters, comic books, newspapers, etc. of the past, we join in the exploration and discovery of the way in which we both create and are created by culture. Eco extends the fascination with memory of such earlier precursors as Giulio Camillo (of L'Idea del Theatro fame) into the realm of the fiction novel in only the way Eco can. While the inimitable The Name of the Rose will always be the late Eco's most popular novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana maintains its own position in his bibliography.

Impossible Possibilities (1971)

Pauwels, Louis and Jacques Bergier. Impossible Possibilities. Stein and Day, 1971.

On the heels of their successful (if now forgotten) publication Morning of the Magicians, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier ran a French fantastic realist magazine called Planète from 1961 to 1972. Towards the end of that prolific decade, they launched this follow-up to their smashing debut. Once again, they are interesting in speculating on the strange, the weird, the fantastic, but in a responsible manner that will ultimately collapse the boarders that cultural materialism and consumerism have erected around our minds. As they state in the prologue: "We have no philosophy to teach, no school to found, no wisdom to propound. We are seekers, nothing more." The authors took a cue from a precursor, an American named Charles Fort, whose obsessive study of anomalous phenomena begat the so-called Fortean manifesto The Book of the Damned. All aforementioned parties are interested in opening their minds to any and every phenomenon in the attempt to make connections with the world behind the one we see and turn our collective consciousness forward into the future (instead of continuing to look backward and stay within the thinking of the ancients). As this book makes clear in the opening pages, it is time for a second Renaissance. A glance at the contents is telling: UFOs, electronic brains, magic, alchemy, infinity, magnetism, hypnosis, anti-matter, quasars, and so on. As with their first book, again, nothing is off limits. While the studies and claims may prove dubious for the twenty-first century reader, the charming exuberance of the writers' devotion makes the text hard to toss aside.

Ancient Evenings (1983)

Mailer, Norman. Ancient Evenings. Random House, 2014.

Norman Mailer, whom David Foster Wallace classed with Philip Roth and John Updike as "the Great Male Narcissists" of postbellum American realism, wrote thick volumes of historical fiction (or New Journalism as the school is called), from his 1948 war novel The Naked and the Dead to the 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of state-executed Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song, to a sprawling 1991 history of the CIA called Harlot's Ghost that secured its place on the actual CIA's required reading list. Though the credit for pioneering the New Journalism often goes to the 1966 publication of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, or even farther back to the 1930s publications of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, Mailer's personality, for better or worse, looms over the literary landscape. In interviews and articles, his ego glares and bites, and the size of his books are commensurate with this pompousness (even when he wrote a shorter book it would be something like The Gospel According to the Son, with Jesus Christ as narrator). His final novel, his final statement, was The Castle in the Forest, an intimate meditation on Hitler. The common thread that runs through Mailer's oeuvre is an appropriation and rewriting of history. It's no surprise, then, that Mailer would at some point take on the wonders and mystery of ancient Egyptian civilization. And he's in rare form here, hearkening back to pre-Judeo-Christian morals (something he seems to enjoy) and immersing himself in the mythology and culture of Pharonic Egypt. The book opens with a scene of reincarnation, as told in the first-person by the one being reincarnated (everyone should at least read this masterclass of imaginative writing), as he crosses a metaphysical gulf and awakens to his second life within the tomb of Khufu in the great pyramid. For all of Mailer's chauvinism and braggadocio, one cannot help but savor the poetic richness of the language employed to bring these ancient evenings to life; there is nothing else in his repertoire quite like this.