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.