15 Books

22 July 2009 | Culture, Personal, Social Media | Comments

[Cross-posted from Facebook because ultimately I realized that there was nothing TOO personal here... with the possible exception of #5...]

I saw my old friend Debbie Ginsberg get tagged with this and read her list with fascination. Coincidentally, I’d been thinking along these lines just last night when I found myself picking up book #1 on my list and starting in again. So, I’m self-tagging myself and going on to tag others.

Here are the rules: On Facebook, write a note about the 15 books that will always stick with you, post it in your profile and then tag folks. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. They don’t have to be the greatest books you’ve ever read, just the ones that stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy these instructions and tag 15 (or more) friends, including me – because I’m interested in seeing what books are in your head.

In an emergent rather than pre-thought order:

1. Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein: I’ve read it dozens of times. An old friend Fascinating and just gets smarter the more I read it. One I Always Have With Me (OIAHWM).

2. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold: something like the 10th book in her Vorkosigan series and a truly amazing book: it’s so compelling that I still get surprised by the twist even though I’ve read the book before. (OIAHWM)

3. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare: Yeah, I know I’m a big Shakespeare dork, but this was the first play that truly grabbed me in a deep way, and then years later I found myself aging out of the play as I started to sympathize with Capulet — Juliet’s father — as I started aging into fatherhood left sympathizing with Romeo (he’s SUCH a drip). (OIAHWM)

4. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare: more of the same, but the relationship between this play and Romeo and Juliet was the great discovery of my academic life and still informs how I think. (OIAHWM)

5. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: Why THIS play is the Ur-text of my marriage, the play that Kathi and I quote back and forth to each other on at least a weekly basis, baffles but consistently amuses me.

6. The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau: difficult, painfully difficult, but rewarding and changed the way I think about much of life’s experience. Similarly… (OIAHWM)

7. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson: Bakhtin’s own writings are illuminating (his notion of “eventness” powered my doctoral thesis and led to much of the useful thinking I’ve done since), but Morson and Emerson’s intellectual biography is so friendly, so usable, so damn helpful that it’s inspirational. I’m pleased to now call Saul Morson a friend… and speaking of whom… (OIAHWM)

8. Narrative and Freedom: The Invention of Time by Gary Saul Morson: introduces the notion of sideshadowing (to complement foreshadowing) and should be a must-read for every serious student of literature. A masterpiece that is sadly neglected. (OIAHWM)

9. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn: “Paradigm shift” has become a cliche the way that James Gleick’s notion of chaos has, but the original is worth reading closely and understanding, along with…

10. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Irving Goffman: we aren’t just one person, we’re a collection of many selves smushed into one bag of flesh, bone and goo. It’s important to remember that. This book is just one of Goffman’s works, most of which I’ve read around in rather than bathed in cover to cover.

11. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1760 by Michael Bristol: One of the smartest pieces of literary/cultural criticism that I ever encountered… along with Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind by Sherwood Cummings, but that one wasn’t pressing enough on my own intellectual pursuits to merit more than one read, although I still have it somewhere.

12. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 by Andrew Gurr: Andy is another intellectual hero whom I came to know personally, but the fact that he’s an incredibly kind and sweet guy doesn’t make him any less towering as a scholar. This 280 page paperback boils an entire library of information down into one useful — intoxicatingly useful — volume. OIAHWM.

13. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Just writing it down makes me realize that I haven’t read it in a few years. I’ll change that by the end of the month. I wonder if a decent edition is readily downloadable for the Kindle? “You don’t know me exceptin’ you’ve read a book call ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” by Mr. Mark Twain, which is the truth, mainly, although it has some stretchers in it.” That’s not quite accurate, but it’s about 75% of the to the first line.

14. The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp: A fantasy series that introduced me to the notion of multiverses, real people jumping into famous literary stories, as well as Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Sadly, this one hasn’t aged well with me. I’ve tried reading it again later in life and have trouble doing so (also true of the Barsoomian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs), but Enchanter was one of the first fantasy books I read and kicked me into the genre. I treasure the beaten up old paperback copy that I later loaned to Papa Marty, my late and beloved paternal grandfather, who kept it in his back pocket and flattened it. OIAHWM.

15. The Human Comedy by William Saroyan: Like Enchanter, one that I have trouble reading these days (I picked it up recently and read around in it, visiting it, relishing it, but I can’t quite do it start to finish), but it sticks in my heart. “Ithaca, California: East, West, Home is Best– Welcome Stranger.”

There are MANY other books and nonbooks worth pondering: this game doesn’t tag ESSAYS (Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or “The Contingency of Language” in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity or Stephen Booth’s 2nd appendix “Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare’s Plays” in King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition & Tragedy, for a few examples) or comic books (Starman by James Robinson, Batman: the Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller)…

… but it’s a good place to start.

P.S. Yes, of COURSE there was a Kindle Huck Finn… several in fact.