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.

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.

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. 

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.

The Magic of Math: Solving for X and Figuring Out Why (2015)

Benjamin, Arthur. The Magic of Math: Solving for X and Figuring Out Why. Basic Books, 2015.

For a publisher (Basic Books) who brought out Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in 1979, I will read just about anything. And if the book purports to make math simple and fun I am all the more for it. Despite achieving a bachelor's degree in computer science, which forced me to endure three levels of calculus, linear algebra, statistics, and so on, I must confess that I've always had a love-hate relationship with math. It doesn't come as easily to me as reading and writing, so I shy away from it (some would call this playing to my strengths). Yet whenever someone, like the aforementioned Hofstadter, shows me some mathematical splendor I cannot help but be enlivened and interested in learning more. Luckily, Arthur Benjamin could rightly be called America's math teacher in the way Stanley Fish is America's English teacher. His passion for math and his profession as a teacher shine on every page. As the playful subtitle implies, the text reads like something written by that uncle who has an endless store of magic tricks and puns so awful you cannot help but laugh. In the first chapter, Benjamin employs amusing anecdotes and easy-to-follow examples to show how we can discover patterns in the particular to derive algorithms for the general. And he concludes the volume with a chapter on the endlessly-fascinating (see what I did there?) topic of infinity.

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy (2017)

Lamott, Anne. Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. Riverhead Books, 2017.

Like yesterday's book, this one takes its title from a song: Candi Staton's eponymous gospel song. And, as the title entails, Lamott's position boils down to radical mercy, looking circumstances and people directly in the face and saying, "Hallelujah anyway." Lamott reminds me of Marilynne Robinson, another exquisite novelist turned religious essayist. Both authors are of sound mind and high learning, easily shaking off accusations of narrow-mindedness and absence of erudition. Where they differ, however, is in Lamott's more colorful and pop-art tone against Robinson's controlled, mighty sentences. In the opening paragraph, Lamott captures something that Walker Percy hit on in his 1961 book The Moviegoer: we are often struck by revelation while doing or looking at the most meaningless, mundane things. There is something refreshing about a novelist writing of theological matters, and Lamott easily compels me to continue beyond my self-imposed twenty-five pages. The production of the little hardcover from Riverhead Books is also a joy to the eye, in the same manner of the recent Spiegel & Grau publication of Harold Bloom's The Daemon Knows: the incorporation of color, especially blue, in place of the standard black-and-white offers a riposte to the age of digital print and makes me long for a revival of illuminated manuscripts. 

My Back Pages (2017)

Moore, Steven. My Back Pages: reviews and essays. Zerogram Press, 2017.

Steven Moore—an irreverent but supremely knowledgeable literary critic, editor, and writer—is new to my radar, following in the footsteps of my recent fascination with Michael Dirda and Alberto Manguel. Reading book reviews wasn't something I ever thought I'd enjoy, but, after reading through a handful of glorified reading lists (like that of Clifton Fadiman), I started to enjoy the craft of capturing just enough of the spirit of a book to make the reader (of your review) feel that the book must be purchased and read at once. The first twenty-five pages of My Back Pages are taken up by Moore's own introduction, which is pleasant and inviting, so I will exclude that from my format and focus on the book proper. Since Moore chooses to arrange the reviews alphabetically by author surname (so as to eliminate bias), the first twenty-five pages are spread across Héctor Abad to Anne Beattie, with names like Nicholson Baker, Djuna Barnes, and John Barth in between. Already within the handful of reviews, it is clear that we are in the hands of an enigmatic literary scholar. Moore exhibits an engaging conjunction between casual, crisp writing (as if you're discussing books over coffee) and a database-like mind buzzing with search and retrieval algorithms from a petabyte of data about books. Given Moore's previous two publications (two volumes that construct an alternative history of the novel from beginnings to 1800), one will never be at a loss as to what to read next if one has access to Moore's reviews.