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Oct
04
The Bare Necessities—Peter Geye (SAFE FROM THE SEA)
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which writers and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of the books they love.
Peter Geye’s debut novel Safe from the Sea was published last week by Unbridled Books.
I keep my fifty favorite books on a bookcase in my living room. It’s a pretty eclectic list that includes books as old as Don Quixote, and as recent as Jon Clinch’s Kings of the Earth. With the exception of three titles, they are all books from the twentieth or twenty-first century. About a third of the books are translated, another third were written in the last quarter century. Cormac McCarthy, William Gay, and Knut Hamsun are the only writers with more than one title, and McCarthy has the most, with four. There are five books written by Norwegians. The most recent addition—Kings of the Earth—bumped Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing from the shelf. I’m sure Ms. Atwood will have trouble sleeping when she finds out.
Most of the books share certain qualities. They usually achieve a kind of lyricism more generally associated with poetry than prose, but never at the expense of a stirring story. They’re always character driven. And the most recent additions have the universal quality of being placed in rural settings, where the landscape is as important as any of the characters.
I mention all of this only as a means of explaining how the exercise of picking my “Bare Necessities” is less whimsy than a serious endeavor. I can literally count the hours of sleep I lost pondering this list. I’m a nerd, I know.
I had a whale of a time winnowing a list of fifty down to five, but this is what I finally came up with.
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
I can just imagine Melville’s query letter to his would-be literary agents. “Dear Sirs! I write to gauge your interest in my novel, tentatively titled Moby-Dick. It’s the story of a peg-legged whaling ship captain hell bent on killing the white whale that lamed him. Even I don’t understand the metaphors (there are countless of them!) fully, but the manuscript is brimming with whaling lore, homoerotic tensions, and just plain madness. I hope you’ll give it a shot. Even though it seems destined to be a complete commercial failure, I bet someday, say a hundred and fifty years from now, people will be tweeting about it. Maybe they’ll even read it in high schools and colleges.”
This is, without a doubt, my favorite book. It’s incomprehensible, but at the same time, easily the best action novel ever published.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
“With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight.”
The only book I’ve ever read that approaches Moby-Dick for stylistic achievement. Harold Bloom called it “[T]he authentic American apocalyptic novel” and I agree. Blood Meridian makes McCarthy’s more famous The Road read like a children’s book. The story of the Kid and the Judge, riders in a gang of Indian killers on the Mexican border in the middle of the nineteenth century, the book is a horrific, baroque, investigation of human nature and the nature of war. There is not a single moment of peace in this novel, nor is there a moment’s reprieve from the slaughter. Definitely not a book for the faint of heart (or stomach).
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
“Pa leans above the bed in the twilight, his humped silhouette partaking of that owl-like quality of awry-feathered, disgruntled outrage within which lurks a wisdom too profound or too inert for even thought.”
I generally find Faulkner’s tragic life more interesting than his books, but this one’s the exception. An exploration of the “American Family” (so much discussed recently in the blogosphere) that puts Jonathan Franzen to shame, it tells the story of the Bundrens, a misfit southern brood trying to lay their matriarch to rest. I can’t help but wonder every time I read it: If I lived next door to the Bundrens, would I move away? The answer is yes, absolutely, but not until I understood very well how not to be a family. There are as many moments of humor as tragedy in this book, and every one of both is piercing.
And don’t be afraid of Faulkner’s famously difficult style. Though this book is plenty lyrical, it lacks the rhetorical idiosyncrasies Faulkner so often employs.
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
“Among the windblown bushes the widow knelt, unmoving, waiting as an animal waits and watches.”
The best new novel I’ve read in the last five years. This novel combines a tale of breathtaking adventure with the laconic prose of a master stylist. I’ve never read a book that so immediately puts the reader into the throes of its narrative while simultaneously making them pause to reread the exquisite sentences. Plus, it’s a love story worthy of comparisons to Emily Bronte or Jane Austen. I’ve never read a book I so much wish I had written.
Under this Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell
“Maria has planned the menu: white borshch, the last jar of jellied chicken, three potatoes per person, a pickled cabbage salad, and, for dessert, halushky with wild strawberries and syrup.”
The sadness and despair and desperation of this book builds with such a symphonic elegance that by the time you realize how devastated you are, it’s too late to do anything about it. The story of Ukrainian immigrants on the Canadian prairie, of unfailing determination in the face of enormous odds, the book catalogues a year in the life of the Mykaolayenko clan. If the Slavic name looks like something out of a Russian novel, it might be because this book is as beautifully bleak as anything Gogol or Tolstoy ever wrote.
If you liked this post, don’t miss:
Book Review: Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye
Other Bare Necessities annotated reading lists
Related posts:
- Book Review: Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye
- Tough Love: Four YA Novels That Aren’t Afraid of the Truth (The Bare Necessities—A.S. King)
- The Bare Necessities—Michele Filgate (River Run Bookstore)
- The Bare Necessities—Sandra Brannan (IN THE BELLY OF JONAH)
- The Bare Necessities—David Bajo (PANOPTICON)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rebecca Schinsky, Jeff. Jeff said: The Bare Necessities—Peter Geye (SAFE FROM THE SEA) | The Book … http://bit.ly/aIW88u [...]
[...] Peter Geye kickstarted the week with a wonderful Bare Necessities post about his all-time favorite books, then I ran with the fun by reviewing What’s Up Down There? by Lissa Rankin, M.D. I also [...]