2008-07-15T20:51:00.000-07:00

JUDAH #1

Judah had a panic attack on the bus on the way to her own thirtieth birthday party. Huddled behind the blue plastic seats, she answered her little brother’s phone call in the middle, between gasps, with whispers, I . . . think . . . I’m . . . dying, while he said, hello, hello? Judy?

She stared at the pattern of black goo encircling a rip in the seat next to her, wondering if she would be able to wait it out until her stop. A bland distraction could be good. What exactly was that goo made out of? She thought of oil-covered beaches in her childhood. The summer when there was just no point to living in Galveston because you couldn’t even go to the beach. On the other hand, maybe she could hit the emergency stop button and run out of the bus, her brother calling her name all the while. Ju! Dah! It was like being underwater when it’s so clear that you can’t judge distances. Is the surface just a couple feet? Ten? Twenty? Is there any way she can hold her breath long enough? She pressed the phone to her ear.

What’s wrong, Judah? Her brother asked, like an out-of-patience parent.

She sighed, I’m afraid that I’m never going to get off this bus.

Why? What happened to the bus?

Nothing, she said. And she started to sing a Sunday song in her head. Rock of ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in thee.

You okay? Are you spazzing?

That was the day she would look back to and admit she had in fact retreated from her normal life.

2006-01-01T19:57:00.000-08:00

Books:

Let me explain. The only purpose of this blog is to list good books and why they are good. Thusfar it is mostly fiction but that is not a requirement. Maybe I'll post stuff I'm working on too, but I'm not sure about that yet. If you magically (or non-magically) find this blog and want to comment on some of the books or suggest something yourself, then rad, dude. If you don't like to read then really what are you doing right now?

First up is the list I made a few months ago when i was bored at work, followed by a few friends and relatives' lists:

Books With Bite

Books to change your life,
or at least the way you think and/or feel about some stuff

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every time I go into a pawn shop I think of this book and I start to freak out and then I have to leave. What is crime? What is truth? What is redemption? Read book. Find out.

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Three brothers, one terrible father. Four ways of seeing the world. Every way of looking at the soul. Some of the passages in this book are so beautiful that you can’t imagine anything else coming close.

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The only thing more frightening than the power of unparalleled genius is the power of mass mediocrity. Woah.

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The title pretty well covers it, but in case you missed it this book is enormous not just in pages (in fact it's a breeze once you get going) but in its eternal search for honor and meaning on the battlefield, in philosophy, in the way you live your life and love. Skip the epilogue. Ew. It utterly pales.

Wiseblood, Flannery O’Connor
Wretched awful cynical distorted characters distorting truth with O’Connor hovering over them, whispering something you can’t quite hear but you really want to, so you strain.

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
The story of a very, very good man doing the right thing when it is very, very difficult. Is there really anything but redemption to write about? What a beautiful, sorrowful, but endlessly hopeful and somewhat political sun-bleached dream of South Africa.

The World According to Garp, John Irving
The modern tragic hero, Garp is an earnest man and writer that flips through the phonebook for character names and tries to hold onto the people he loves and keep them from the “undertoad.” Irving just tell stories and this story really gets to me.

Libra (really anything by Don DeLillo)
“There is a world inside the world that you see.” I can't explain it, but DeLillo takes over. You think you really don't care about the conspiracy theory surrounding the JFK assassination, but you do. You so totally do.

My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
There is religion and there is art, and those of us that are artists who are quite religious always feel this pull, but Asher and family feel it more.

To a lesser extent …
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
Walden, Thoreau
On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Books that break your heart

The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
There are some things about the way men (as in not women) think that I don’t always want to know, but I can’t help myself. “It’s not a cry that you hear at night / it’s not somebody who’s seen the light / It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” LOVE is HELL.

Anagrams, Lorrie Moore
Life and its near-misses and half the time it’s all in your head anyway.

The Counterfitters, Andre Gide
Why the world needs more forgiveness, especially for its youth.

Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The same idea as The Beautiful and Damned, except you actually start to care about these people.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
First of all, Oscar Wilde is one of the cleverest sentence-makers in the biz (Nabokov is better), but the heart-breaking part is how people are destroyed by decisions they make when they could have chosen otherwise.

Books that Get it Right
Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood
This is the only book I can think of right now that so completely fits this category and no other category really . . . Ever been curious about what it’s like to be a pre-teen female? A couple of chapters in this book are so chillingly accurate, they embarrass the snot out of me.

Books that blow your mind (and sometimes are really, really funny)
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Muted postal horn, Dr. Hilarius, W.A.S.T.E., the potsmaster. Everyone is nuts and the USPS is not the only game in town.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Everyone is nuts except that they aren’t and that’s the whole problem! Yossarian is . . . priceless.

Anagrams, Lorrie Moore
There are relatively sane people that don’t like Lorrie Moore, and this makes me feel better about the response to my own writing. Or people think she is too clever. I say whatever. And then I read and laugh and laugh and say “oh gosh, that’s brilliant” and “holy smokes that’s bizarre” and at the end I cry. But it’s a good cry.

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood (also see The Handmaid’s Tale, but not for funny)
Like pretty much every other book I’ve so far included in this section, this book is a bit confusing at first because it is not a straight narrative. It teaches you how to read it. But then it works. It really REALLY works.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
People survive off dirt and tied to a tree in the back yard or in the study inside their house for years. And people die from witnessing beauty. And everyone has the same name so you have to keep referring to the stupid family tree and everything is a big ugly mess and there’s incest and . . . this book is incredible.

In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien
I can’t remember why this book is so cool at this exact moment but I know that when I finished it on the beach in Hawaii I felt completely full and happy and f-reaked out. And there are bits of sand in my copy.

Also anything by DeLillo, but for funny see White Noise
Oh and also Confederacy of Dunces, recommended to me by my good friend from Ponchatoula, Louisiana.

***********end of MJ's stuff************

Friend #1, a journalist who i think is still in seattle right now (um somebody needs to keep track of their friends):
Ok, some book recs off the top of my head: From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman. This is the recent history of the Middle East, as written by the journalist who was there, interviewing and living with the key players. Fascinating how he boils it down and puts everything in context. Plus, he adds in all this stuff about the culture and local values that help you really understand WHY. Love it, love it, love it. Anything by Friedman is gold. The Bookseller of Kabul. A bookseller survived three decades in Afghanistan, selling books under the Soviet Union, Taliban and now US govt control. A journalist spent three months living with him, his two wives, and a bunch of his kids. She writes in novel form, but it is all based on fact. A jaw-dropping look into the lives of an affluent Afghani family. Memoirs of a Geisha. (can't remember the author) This is coming out as a movie soon and I am soooo excited/nervous they'll ruin it. You know, typical. Anyway, this book is I think based on interviews with a former Geisha in Japan, but I forget. Either way, it's a glimpse into a cultural practice that will give you so much insight into a beautiful/horrifying facet of Japanese life. A little girl is sold into slavery but is picked to become a Geisha. It's all about her life and what she goes through and experiences. Includes Americans bombing Japan in WWII. Will blow your mind.

Good in Bed, by Jennifer Weiner. Get past the name of the book and it's actually hilariously funny. This is a light beach read, but you won't be able to put it down. A larger woman breaks up with her boyfriend who then writes a sex column featuring her, repeatedly. She tries to win him back, lose weight, start a new life, start a writing career, etc. It's delicioiusly funny but more than that, any larger girl or female who has tried to go through a breakup will totally identify with the heroine.

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Friend #2, everyone's favorite librarian, follows the categories admirably:

Books to change your life,
or at least the way you think and/or feel about some stuff

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankel
A concentration camp brings out the man's brutality to man. How did the prisoner's survive? Frankel believes it is man's search for meaning in his life that brings him the will to survive then he goes into his theory of logotherapy which I skipped.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
I think our expectations sometimes are too great in the area of love and career. This book shows you what happens when they get too wild plus an old lady in her wedding dress is always kind of creepy.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby has everything you ever desired in high school: a fancy house, wild parties, popularity, money, and alcohol. He has it all except one thing-- Daisy Buchanan. It's amazingly well written and heart felt like with a twinge of melancholy like all Fitzgerald books.

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray
I learned a lot about the opposite sex in this book. It totally changed my misconceptions.

The Book of Mormon
It definitely changed my perspective in how I live my life and what's important.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok
A choice between love, religion, and friendship. I like it the same reason you like My Name is Asher Lev

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
I haven't read it since my sophomore year in high school. I didn't like it then, but now that I've lived a bit longer it makes more sense now.

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My name is Stephen Daedelous. Ireland is My Nation. Conglows is my dwelling place and Heaven my Expectation. My AP English teacher loved Joyce and she conveyed this love to me. I like how you can watch Stephen's stream of concious development from a child using simple words to an adult who requires a peek into the Oxford English Dictionary. I'm not artistic but I can sympathize with his plight to break free from all that is "cruel, unjust, unfair" world.

Books that break Your Heart

Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
I love it's genteel ways. I laughed and I cried. I was so touched I put the last sentence in my journal when I was 15.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
I'm not a huge Dickens fanatic but Sidney Carton was awesome!

Tess of D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
I cried because she was treated like a jerk by her husband when she revealed her past. It was really tragic how fate pushed Tess around.

Books That Blow Your Mind (or are funny)

A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck
A Newbery Winner and very funny. Not exactly mind blowing, but filled with privy humor fun. :)

Holidays in Hell by PJ O'Rourke
It reminds of the time I went around Baker, California and asked people what they did for fun. One lady said they went to Barstow. PJ visits all sorts of war torn places in an attempt to have some fun.

Age and Guile: Beat Youth Innocence and a Bad Haircut by PJ O'Rourke
Watch the writing evolution of a radical liberal to a Republican Party hopping Libretarian. His What I Believed in the 1960s is hilarious.

Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson
The history of the creation of everyone's favorite deep thoughts comic.

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Friend #3 (ok relative, but whatever) and law student extraordinaire Here's four awesome books. I would suggest Great Expectations as well. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey The patients in the mental hospital absolutely fear the nurse. McMurphy comes in and through his rebellions turns the system on its head. The end makes me want to cry and the book made me want to treat everyone with respect and love. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury The importance of being able to share ideas and share the ideas of the past cannot be measured. This is the best science fiction, you are transported to a different time and place so that you can learn a lesson about today. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger So many books want to be this book. Holden Caulfield is your teenager that feels detached and has problems with how he fits into society. He is basically what every teenage male has felt like at some point. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer Oskar Schell maybe the coolest 9 year-old-ever. How he deals with the loss of his father is both heartbreaking and enlightening. I actually cried at the end of this book. The book tells us about how people deal with loss. Some (Oskar) do so in a much more healthy way then others (his grandfather). ******************************************* Friend #4, Biologist and successful corporate-world avoider, sent from somewhere in Southeast Asia I think

as for my additions. i read gilead by marilynne robinson (think that was her name) a few months ago. you should read it and see if it qualifies. i think you'd like it: an old preacher writing a letter to his young son who he realizes he'll never get the opportunity to raise because of his coming death. it was amazing.

east of eden. a family broken and one member, trying as he may to make it all better. i loved it.

as for those terrible non-fiction: guns, germs, and steel by jared diamond may be the most encompassing, reasoned, and overall best books i've read in last two years. a history and explanation of the development of human societies on earth. so good and easy to read.

mj's inspiratorium