It's Friday night. Ryan and I are at the Jolly Trolley, in Westfield, NJ, waiting for his sister to come home and let us into her house, where we're staying for the weekend. The Yankees are on TV, and I make the mistake of jokingly shouting "Yankeeeeeees suckkkkkk!!!!" before remembering that I'm in a land where this will get me lynched. "Ha ha, just kidding!" I murmur weakly, as three beefy men turn to stare at me from behind their Budweisers, which suddenly gleam in the neon light like imminent weapons.
Ryan's having a Dead Guy Ale (fitting, no?) and I'm having an Amstel Light. We don't fit in with the general vibe, which is more "Eat-this-stale-snack-mix-they-have-sitting-on-the-bar-in-refilled-
Mason-jars-and-stare-blindly-at-the-telly" than "slowly-sip-low-cal-beer-and-blather-about-how-much-you-don't-
remember-about-the-Modernists" -- which happens to be what we are doing. We don't do this all the time -- thank God -- but we went to the same college, both majored in English, and sometimes like to reflect back to the old days when we sat around and read books all day because We Were Required To. We started down this conversational track because I asked Ryan to name his top five favorite books. You'd think I'd know his top five favorite books, since we've known each other for a decade and spend a more-than-average amount of time talking about literature, but I don't.
R: I really don't know what my top five are.
W. You have to know. Just think about it.
R: [surly] I mean, it's an impossible question.
W: [condescending] Well, I just think of which five books I've re-read over the past ten years, and figure those must be my favorites. Are they the best books ever written? No. But they're MY favorites, and that's what I'm asking you.
R: Yeah, but it's a category mistake to lump Crime and Punishment and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy into the same top five list.
W: [as to a child] Not if those are your favorites.
R: I always thought that the Modernists were my favorite writers, but all I can think of is Joyce and Woolf, and neither of them would be in my top five.
This led us into a discussion of the Modernists. Who are they? Ryan was insisting Faulkner was a Modernist, I was disagreeing. Predictably, though, I was not able to refute his argument with actual fact, and just began mumbling that Pound and Eliot were the only Modernists I knew.
The Trolley was not the place to wrap up this discussion, and now that I'm back at a computer, I'm happy to report that Conrad, Rhys, Mansfield and Lawrence are Modernists, Faulkner is not, and we don't NEED to remember what we spent hours learning in college because we have Google to do it for us. Phew.
The more lingering question is what puts a book on someone's top 5 list? Is re-readability a useful criteria? How about recommendability? If a book's ability to be enjoyed when recommended is the top criterion to rate its worth, then I'd put Donna Tartt's The Secret History at the top of my list. If it was quotability, Hitchhiker's Guide would be at the top of Ryan's. Or what about a book that when you read it, you can feel a writer's entire soul wrapped up in it? If that's part of the scale, then let's put Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson or The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt on there.
For what it's worth, here are my five, in no particular order:
1. On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
2. Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
3. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
4. Feast of Love, Charles Baxter
5. Possession, A.S. Byatt
Ryan's still working on his. How about you?
In dread,
Whitney Scharer
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Off the shelves, part one
I fancy myself to be quite the bookworm. Since I was five, and was able to actually read books instead of pretending to read them but really just reciting them from memory, I carried a book with me everywhere. I never went out to dinner with my family without lugging a tome along with me to pass the time. Granted, my family's entire dining repertoire consisted of trips to various Chili's restaurants throughout the greater Denver area, so a book was more crucial than you might think.
Of course, my parents were thrilled by how smart and nerdy I appeared, and I was thrilled too. How cool to be allowed to escape into other worlds at the dinner table! But once I was old enough to realize that it was not, in fact, cool to read Gone With the Wind while eating one's Rojo Burger, I tried to tone down the outward displays of dorkdom. Narnia might be cool, but having a social life was probably pretty cool too. Privately, though, I still devoured books, and remained the kind of child, and then teen, who would rather spend a Saturday reading than out with a crowd. By the time I reached college, I was thankful for how many books I had read, as they gave me a leg up in the hyper-intellectual atmosphere of my school.
You can imagine my disappointment, then, in the following scene: I have just started my MFA program. I invite my fellow writers over to my apartment for a party. One of the guys, also from Colorado and seemingly a kindred spirit despite his penchant for wearing Man Clogs and talking incessantly about the Denver Broncos, walks into my bedroom and starts perusing the bookshelves. The large, built-in, overstuffed bookshelves. He looks at the books for a while, long enough for me to prepare myself for the scintillating conversation ahead, the comparing of favorite authors, the bonding over short story collections. After a while, he glances at me and says, "So... where's the literature?" I stare first at him, and then at my shelves. Names leap off at me: Faulkner, Hurston, Baxter, James, McEwan, Stegner, Dillard, Coover, Cheever, a veritable canon of my literary life. I have no idea what to say. Finally, moments past the comfortable response time, I decide to be breezy. "Ha ha ha," I say, "So funny."
NOT so funny. Two things transpired from this moment. First, Man Clog man and I never, ever became friends. Second, I developed a new and incredibly tedious insecurity about what I've read and what I'm reading, stemming partly from the realization that much of my self-confidence comes from thinking of myself as a reader. To make fun of my bookshelves is, sadly, to make fun of me. And whether or not you'd look at my shelves and think they were filled with trash, they do tell you a lot about me. I like well-written books. I like sentences that sing. I also like a really good plot. The Other Boleyn by Phillipa Gregory? Loved it. Loved it so much I've now read her entire ouevre, including what turned out to be her abysmal Wideacre series (incest? No thanks).
The reason the title of this post is "part one" is that I haven't actually made it to the topic I was originally planning to write about. Stay tuned next Thursday for what I was intending to say--I'm off to read The Whole World Over by Julia Glass, which even Clog Man might think is a really good book.
In dread and books,
Whitney Scharer
Of course, my parents were thrilled by how smart and nerdy I appeared, and I was thrilled too. How cool to be allowed to escape into other worlds at the dinner table! But once I was old enough to realize that it was not, in fact, cool to read Gone With the Wind while eating one's Rojo Burger, I tried to tone down the outward displays of dorkdom. Narnia might be cool, but having a social life was probably pretty cool too. Privately, though, I still devoured books, and remained the kind of child, and then teen, who would rather spend a Saturday reading than out with a crowd. By the time I reached college, I was thankful for how many books I had read, as they gave me a leg up in the hyper-intellectual atmosphere of my school.
You can imagine my disappointment, then, in the following scene: I have just started my MFA program. I invite my fellow writers over to my apartment for a party. One of the guys, also from Colorado and seemingly a kindred spirit despite his penchant for wearing Man Clogs and talking incessantly about the Denver Broncos, walks into my bedroom and starts perusing the bookshelves. The large, built-in, overstuffed bookshelves. He looks at the books for a while, long enough for me to prepare myself for the scintillating conversation ahead, the comparing of favorite authors, the bonding over short story collections. After a while, he glances at me and says, "So... where's the literature?" I stare first at him, and then at my shelves. Names leap off at me: Faulkner, Hurston, Baxter, James, McEwan, Stegner, Dillard, Coover, Cheever, a veritable canon of my literary life. I have no idea what to say. Finally, moments past the comfortable response time, I decide to be breezy. "Ha ha ha," I say, "So funny."
NOT so funny. Two things transpired from this moment. First, Man Clog man and I never, ever became friends. Second, I developed a new and incredibly tedious insecurity about what I've read and what I'm reading, stemming partly from the realization that much of my self-confidence comes from thinking of myself as a reader. To make fun of my bookshelves is, sadly, to make fun of me. And whether or not you'd look at my shelves and think they were filled with trash, they do tell you a lot about me. I like well-written books. I like sentences that sing. I also like a really good plot. The Other Boleyn by Phillipa Gregory? Loved it. Loved it so much I've now read her entire ouevre, including what turned out to be her abysmal Wideacre series (incest? No thanks).
The reason the title of this post is "part one" is that I haven't actually made it to the topic I was originally planning to write about. Stay tuned next Thursday for what I was intending to say--I'm off to read The Whole World Over by Julia Glass, which even Clog Man might think is a really good book.
In dread and books,
Whitney Scharer
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