The Bare Necessities—Alexander Yates (MOONDOGS)

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.

Alexander Yates’s debut novel Moondogs is just out from Doubleday, and it is the most fun I’ve had reading in a while. He’s here today discussing the books he’ll take with him no matter how many times he moves.

When I was a kid, we moved a lot. I mean a lot. Haiti to Mexico. Mexico to Virginia. Virginia to Bolivia to the Philippines to Ecuador. The life of a Foreign Service officer (my dad) and his trailing wife and brats (mom, my brother, me) required that we become excellent movers. I’m talking about the particular Tetris of packing; filling suitcases and cardboard crates as snugly as possible. I remember that before every reassignment my parents would stare at our bookshelf, kind of mournfully. In packing terms, they may as well have been looking at a wall of wooden bricks.

I’ve kept moving around in my adult life, living in six different apartments in as many years. Each move tempts my wife and I to cull our collection of books. Do we really need to keep that old hardcover of War and Peace which, let’s be honest, is mostly a shelftrophy? Or the collected Sherlock Holmes—can’t we just sort of let it live inside us (or at least on Project Gutenberg)? We usually end up keeping almost all of the books, condensing them into preposterously heavy crates. But we’re young yet, and might get stricter as we get older. So here are six books that I’m sure will survive any move. These are books worth hauling.

Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen
Matthiessen is better known for his nonfiction (The Snow Leopard won the national book award in 1980) and his recent monster-long novel, Shadow Country (NBA winner in 2008—the showoff), but nothing I’ve read from him punches quite as hard as Far Tortuga. It’s a strange, sad, brilliant novel. Any short description raises all sorts of cringe-worthy red flags—no attributed dialogue; white guy writing about a cast that is entirely Afro-Caribbean and Latino, in dialect no less; whole pages left blank followed by inky pseudo-illustrations, sentences scattering and fading between the white space. But this story about sea-turtle fishermen on a doomed trip is not a formal experiment, nor an extended prose poem. Matthiessen’s novel may be one of the most perfect examples of narrative content informing literary (and typographical) form, but it’s also a viscerally realist dive into lives and landscapes. His respect for the humanity of his characters and affection for the natural world they inhabit make even the more difficult scenes stunningly beautiful.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I have difficulty talking coherently about this book. A girl I was dating in high school gave it to me for Christmas, and it totally redefined my sense of what is possible in fiction. A young girl skips the whole dying bit and ascends directly to heaven, butterflies erupt as though out of pure love, and the blood of a murdered son winds its way along streets, through gutters, and under the front door of the family home to let his mother know what’s happened. This was the most immersive and surprising reading experience I’ve ever had, and left me moved and inspired and scared as all hell.

A postscript: that high school girlfriend is sitting across from me as I write this. That gift was the first of many good signs, and we got married 6 years ago.  Read more