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Jun
28
The Bare Necessities—Adam Ross (LADIES AND GENTLEMEN)
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Adam Ross is the author of Mr. Peanut, one of my favorite books of 2010 (out now in paperback), and Ladies and Gentlemen, a remarkable collection of short fiction out today from Knopf. While I put the finishing touches on my review of Ladies and Gentlemen, please enjoy Adam’s unique twist on The Bare Necessities.
Not the First, But the Second
I tend to read myopically, one author straight through, sometimes even chronologically, their first work to last. Here’s a list of the books that got me hooked on a particular writer followed by a second, perhaps less well-known or esteemed work that I love just as much, if not more.
The Windup Bird Chronicle > Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
Murakami’s masterpiece is pulse-pounding, mind-bending, and, at times wildly unnerving (you’ll never look at a Mongolian the same way again). Sputnik, on the other hand, is a slim volume about a love triangle between three characters: Miu, Sumire, and K, the narrator. As with many Murakami novels and stories, people drift in and out of other planes of reality and the novel’s conclusion is deeply mysterious. For Murakami, true knowledge of anything or anyone far outstrips our meager mortal abilities. But the heartache the reader feels at the end is unquestionably of this world.
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge > Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel by Evan S. Connell
I’m cheating here. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are, of course, two novels, both inarguably great, slam-dunk recommendations authored by one of our country’s more underappreciated, broadly talented writers (Connell’s also a first-class historian, essayist, and short story writer). Which is why I’m suggesting his astonishing book-length poem about history’s cyclicality and the nothingness that bookends our brief time on this planet, a work filled with apothegms that will stop you cold: “Visions are not without their usage, however fanciful/if only to purge us of dark and sickening forms.” (And by the way, I’m cheating here again, because this book is the companion poem to Points for a Compass Rose. Can’t recommend that one highly enough either.)
This Boy’s Life > In Pharaoh’s Army by Tobias Wolff
The book that launched a thousand memoirs has, to my mind, the greatest denouement of any I’ve ever read, so American in its resolution its greatness is comparable to The Sun Also Rises or The Great Gatsby. In Pharaoh’s Army, its companion or sequel, entirely subverts one’s expectations when it comes to the lessons war teaches us, which in Wolff’s case—he did two tours with Special Forces in Vietnam—were more creative ways of managing boredom and how survival has less to do with bravery than contingency and innocuousness’s saving camouflage. It could easily be re-titled Laying Low in My Tho.
White Noise > End Zone by Don Dellilo
White Noise was this author’s apotheosis, old news to those who’d been reading him since Americana, though personally, I put Delillo’s The Names or Libra on par with it—I find Underworld as brilliant as it is baggy. However, my personal favorite may well be End Zone, the story of a west Texas football team and its nuclear-war obsessed protagonist. No doubt, White Noise is prescient, and worth the price of admission just for the dueling banjo scene between the Hitler and Elvis scholars; but End Zone may well have the funniest description of a kegger-gone-vomitous I’ve ever read and the most original play-by-play description of a football game ever committed to prose.
Herzog > The Victim by Saul Bellow
If Herzog, the story of a professor pushed to the brink of insanity over his wife’s affair, is Bellow’s masterpiece, the highest expression of his free-form, intellectually dizzying, associative style, than The Victim is where he cut his teeth, learned his scales, mastered technique—pick your analogy—a straight-ahead work of Flaubertian realism that tells the story of Asa Leventhal and his doppelganger, Kirby Allbee, a man whose life the former may have indirectly ruined after an enraged outburst during a job interview. Bellow turned his nose up at his second novel, writing it off, along with his first book, Dangling Man, as an apprentice work, but what it lacks in Bellow-esque energy it makes up for in formal control and precision.
Invisible Cities > Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
Calvino’s crystalline masterwork about a series of conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo has influenced everyone from David Mitchell (its DNA evidence is all over Cloud Atlas) to Jonathan Lethem. His five Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was preparing to give at Harvard in 1985 but died in route, manage, in a mere 124-pages, to tackle all of Western literature, conveying everything from his unique approach to storytelling (his mantra “Keep it short” seems more prescient everyday) to the five values he sees as integral to the novel’s survival: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity. Tragically, he never finished the sixth, entitled Consistency, which means it’s up to someone out there to write it.
Visit Adam Ross’s website and follow him on Twitter @escherx to learn more. Stay tuned for a review of Ladies and Gentlemen later this week.
Related posts:
I’m with Ross on WIND UP BIRD and INVISIBLE CITIES. And I’m with him on MR. PEANUT, which I am like, 75 pages away from finishing, SUPER panty-worthy.
Becks, girl, you know I’m with you on EVERYTHING. Hearts and kisses.
Books are my Boyfriends´s last [type] ..RED HOOK ROAD by Ayelet Waldman (is my FIRST EVER BOOK GIRLFRIEND)
I must admit I have only read two of the books mentioned here but the fact that I loved them so much means that I just had to note down the titles of all the others. I now have my summer reading list done for me!
Teresa Williams´s last [type] ..Baby Trend Double Strollers
Love how you categorized the authors together! Very neat and I definitely have to pick up Mr. and Mrs. Bridge!
Great books and review! I love to grab a copy of The Windup Bird Chronicle: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami, sounds like a great story!
Chryzel´s last [type] ..Eyelash Growth
[...] Speaking of books, I’ve done multiple pieces in the run-up to Ladies and Gentlemen’s publication about What I’m Reading or Recommending. Here’s one for Barnes & Noble, another for The Wall Street Journal, yet another for the Daily Beast and, finally, a fun one for the panty-throwing Book Lady’s blog. [...]