My friend Anners Scribonia had a great, great idea: list ten of your favorite, or most influential, books and tell the world why you love them or why they had the effect they had on you. Well, this idea has Tigereye written all over it. As many of you know, I could, and often do, yap on about books for a day and a half without getting tired or noticing that my audience has either run away or dozed off. So here goes. These are ten of my favorites, picked in no particular order, with this common theme: I’ve read them over and over throughout my life, and with good reason.
1. Dance the Eagle to Sleep by Marge Piercy. It’s a crying shame and a loss to the world that this book is out of print. I was 15 when I first discovered it, on the bottom shelf at my favorite local bookstore, and I’ve read it every year or few years since then: it continues to speak to me as much as it did when I was a teenager who felt utterly cast out of society. It was written in the early ’70s, and is a futuristic story of a United States gone ultra-militarized and regimented, and a hippie-ish resistance movement called the Indians, led by a visionary named Corey, a rebel named Joanna, and a musician named Shawn. Oh, hell, that makes it sound silly and simplistic, and it’s anything but: it’s one of the most feminist novels I’ve ever read, beautifully imagined, tragic, with fascinating, flawed characters. It’ll give you a chill to think of this book being written in the Nixon era and still ringing true in the Bush years. You’ll never look at the late sixties the same again after reading this. I never looked at anything quite the same.
2. Watership Down by Richard Adams. This is another one I’ve reread so often I can quote large passages from it, not to mention many of the quotations preceding each chapter. I first read it when I was eleven, and I think it was the second great book I discovered in my life, right behind The Call of the Wild. To say this is an adventure story about rabbits is like saying The Great Gatsby is about a rich man: it’s an epic, every bit as compelling as either of Homer’s works and sometimes as violent. Again, the characters are key here. You become totally absorbed in the interplay of one pers– uh, one rabbit with another, you worry with them and laugh at them and, toward the end, page frantically along hoping all will end well with them. There are a lot of books published with the hopeful tagline, “In the tradition of Watership Down…” It’s never true. Accept no substitute.
3. Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff. I feel the need to lighten things up a bit, and among other selling points, this book makes me laugh out loud and convulsively, almost 20 years after I first unpacked it at work. I was a college sophomore, now employed by the same bookstore where I’d been a regular customer since childhood (and where I’d bought Dance the Eagle to Sleep), and I read it in two days, then immediately started rereading it a few hours after I’d finished it the first time. It’s a love story, a fairy tale, and a fantasy, set mostly at Cornell University in a world that keeps sliding back and forth between reality and either imagination or great drugs or both. The players are a writer named S.T. George, a group of funky nonconformists called the Bohemians, a talking cat and dog, and a world of sprites inhabiting the campus. I laughed, I cried, I read it for about the 16th time last year and plan to do it again this year. I’ve always wanted a sequel.
4. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Like other nerdy kids my age, I saw the animated movie version of this in, I think, sixth grade, and was so utterly enchanted my parents got me the book for Christmas. I think it’s the first fantasy I ever read. I still have that original copy, cover yellowed and tattered, the unicorn resembling a deer, the terrifying harpy above her head. I don’t think it had occurred to me that fantasy could be funny, or could reference the modern world, and this did both and more, shattering the boundaries between the story’s world and mine, and wrecking every fantasy I’d try to read for the next 10 years by comparison. It’s the story of a unicorn who hasn’t seen others in what seems a long time, even to an immortal beast; she sets out to find them, and along the way finds a hapless magician, a fierce friend, an evil king, and an entirely unexpected kind of love. The last chapter makes me weep unabashedly, all these years later; this is one of the best presents anyone in my family ever gave me. It’s just beautiful.
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I’d read Irving since high school, and enjoyed him mostly because he was funny and macabre and made all things sexual utterly hilarious, but this one changed the game. I bought it while working at the aforementioned bookstore in college, and quickly learned I couldn’t read it during my down time at work because I laughed so hard and so uncontrollably, I disturbed the customers and embarrassed myself. It’s the story of a boy who lost his mother and his weird messianic friend, but again, that can’t do it justice. The Christmas pageant! The Volkswagen! The armadillo! The war… As much as I’d howled with laughter all the way through, I sobbed at the end. Just thinking of the last sentence, and nothing more, always brings tears to my eyes. In a perfect world, everyone would read this book.
6. Dance With the Devil/The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth. Okay, I can feel you reaching for the keyboard to click away, disappointed with me, but I’m not kidding. I found this in a remainder bookstore at fifteen or sixteen, and until then, all the biographies I’d ever read — of anyone — were dry, plodding things, so-and-so was born/went to school/met/had a few adventures… Blah blah blah. This read like a novel, like the story of a writer who got the interview of his life with a gang of crazy people and almost became one of them by the end. The writer told the Stones’ backstory, but interspersed it with the story of his travels with the band on the 1969 tour that ultimately led to Altamont, and it was like reading story and backstory, so enthralling you forgot you knew how it ended, sort of. The band ceased being mythical figures and became weird interesting people with weird horrifying habits. Every summer, while I’m driving along blasting the Stones in my car and remembering the wild freaky elation of seeing them in concert, I want to reread this book. It changed the way I saw nonfiction.
7. The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. Don’t let me ever catch anyone saying a bad thing about Pat Conroy. When I was 15, and he was signing copies of this book at — you guessed it — the bookstore that overshadowed my entire youth in one way or another, the owner of the store introduced me as “one of our best customers (which was almost praise enough, considering I was a teenager with little disposable money — she meant quality, not quantity, she told me later when she hired me) and a writer herself.” Now, for most signing authors, especially those surrounded by fans at a bookstore reception, this would’ve meant a kind greeting and a handshake, but you’d be underestimating Conroy. He stopped signing books, stopped talking with friends, and took the time to talk to a homely, skinny, awkward kid for over half an hour about becoming a writer. Hell, none of my writing teachers had ever singled me out like that. We had a picture taken together and he wrote a lovely personal note in my book. I’ve been in love with him ever since. Not only that, The Prince of Tides lived up to the high expectations its author set. The book just vibrated with a love of language, a scope of tragedy, and an understanding of character I’d seen only a few times before at that age. It’s about a wrecked Southern family, a terrible secret, the survival and damage of a family after tragedy — I don’t know if you have to be Southern to fully appreciate Conroy’s grasp of what life down here is like, but I bet it helps. For the first and only time in my life, I made myself a vocabulary list as I read a book, which read and rolled with a beauty and poetry not unlike the Bible. I can almost smell the ocean when I reread it. Oh, and the movie is one of the worst abominations ever recorded to film, and I will never forgive Barbra Streisand for it, no matter how much I like her politics. Screw the movie, and savor the book.
8. Joe Jones by Anne Lamott. Sometimes you luck upon a book that shows you something you never realized was missing in the fiction you’d read before it, and this is a perfect example: until I was curious enough to blow five bucks of Christmas money (a not insignificant amount, in the late ’80s in my family) on a book because a couple of lines made you smile when you browsed through it, I’d hardly seen characters humanized. In this novel, about a motley group of friends and acquaintances in and around a California diner, I found people who actually talked like real people. Their patterns of speech, the way their thoughts rolled by inside their heads, their weird tics and rituals, their inside stories… These were some of the most utterly real characters I’d ever glimpsed before. This one book has probably had as much impact on the way I write as any other five or six books put together: Anne Lamott, whom I’d never heard of before that day in late 1987, showed me how it was done. It’s also funny and tragic and fascinating in the way a new friend is all of those things, by the way. Her other novels are good, but for me, this is the top of the mountain.
9. The Stand by Stephen King. I don’t know why I’d never picked this one up before, since I’d been reading King ever since fourth grade, when my mom handed me her copy of The Dead Zone and said, “You’ll like this.” (I took it to school and was reading it during a rainy recess period when my harridan of a fourth-grade teacher saw me and screeched, before the whole class, “TIGEREYE! Where did you get a book like that!? Do your parents know you’re reading that book?” Whereupon I burst into tears and said, “My mother gave it to me!” I still wish I’d been a fly on the wall in THAT parent-teacher meeting that followed.) But I got hold of The Stand, the original six-inch-sub-sandwich version, my senior year in high school, and while it didn’t make me miss class, it sure stood between me and my trig homework like The Walkin Dude himself. Wow. This is the first novel of really epic proportions I remember falling into, utterly engrossed in the characters and the way they fought against the darkness, hampered by their own humanity all the way. If you haven’t read it, well, it’s the story of the end of the world as we know it and the battle for good and evil that follows. If you have read it, you may understand the way it overshadowed the rest of my world while I was reading it, why Flagg and his grin haunted my dreams and I held my hands to my face every time Tom or Larry met the smallest obstacles… I love the unabridged version, too, most of all the coda at the end. Whenever a politician proposes some chilling initiative to this day, I mutter “I have come to civilize you!” and sometimes forget to fork the evil eye when I say it.
10. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. There are classics you choose from a reading list and classics that are thrust upon you, and then there are classics you find on your own when you’re thirteen or so that you never expected to fall in love with. Guess which category this one fits into? I didn’t even know what this book was about, only that I’d seen it around forever, and once I started reading it, I was immersed. I grew up in a town not terribly unlike Maycomb, Alabama, and this was the first book (Pat Conroy was a couple years later) I’d ever read that got it right about the south, from the rule of old people to the everpresent gossip to the rigid class system no one acknowledges to the casual and killing racism some people never think to question. I was openmouthed and weeping by the end of the book, thinking no matter how hard I tried, I’d never write anything this good. I still believe that, although I think I might catch up with Pat Conroy and Anne Lamott sufficiently to speak to them without bowing first one day. If you can write something this good, I understand why Harper Lee never wrote another novel; and if everyone on earth had to read one book in their lives, this one might be The One.
So that’s it. I left out a lot, like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye or Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy on the classics side (yeah, bite me, I like some classics — I’m rereading Moby-Dick, take that!) to newbies on my list I haven’t had the chance to read more than once or twice, like, well, lots of Cormac McCarthy, or Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant or Bel Canto, or Gillian Bradshaw’s beautiful Arthurian trilogy or early, well-researched historical fiction. I read a lot. Thank God for online friends who do too, and if anyone is curious about any of these books, let me know if I can tell you more. I’d love to have someone else to discuss some of the more obscure ones with. Oh, who am I kidding? I’d love to talk about books for ages, with anyone. How much more time do you have?…
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