Of books.

I just discovered an historic document! A list of all the books I’d read from 2003 to the beginning of 2011. I began keeping the list because I thought it would pressure me to read more. It wound up just being fun, especially looking back and remembering. I’d rated them, too. I don’t really know why, its just one of those OCD-type things I would insist on being strict about.

Finding it now reminded me of why I found it fun. Reading the titles I rated highest was a trip itself. Those books took me on trips. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, she quotes the musician Tom Waits:

As a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of people’s minds.

I love that idea. These books (and plays, comics, essays…) decorated my imagination.

Another way I see them, is as adventure-vacations for my mind. The best brought me on some of my most memorable journeys. As I list them now, I find myself thinking the same thing over and over and over:

My God, THIS book was magical!

PERFECT 10’s

In the almost 9 years this list covered, there were two books I loved so much I could only rate them as Perfect:

Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version

and

Michael Malone’s Handling Sin. 

I’ve written about Handling Sin before. Its a beautiful comic epic of music and family. I’ve been reading this book since grade 9. I’ve read it a dozen times or more. Each time, I seem to get something new out of it. (The other book I read every couple years is the  The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett.)

Strangely, these are possibly the ONLY novels that my father and I both loved. They both can make me laugh out loud and cry in public.  Handling Sin is a gentle, third-person, linear, Quixotic adventure; Barney’s Version is a rough, first-person, timeline-jumping settling-of-the-record.

They could very well be the best books I’ve ever read. Apparently I’m not the only one who feels that way: they have 4.4 and 4.5 stars in Amazon ratings (too low!). Just check some of these Amazon reader reviews for Handling Sin.

The [> 9]’s (That’s right, I’m so book geeky I use decimals in my rankings)

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad

If I were to have a novel custom built for me, this is what it would probably look like. Down to the narrator-outer-story gimmick.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Twain is, to my mind, the greatest writer of words. That is, forget stories, characters, whatever. Just the words. Man, I love Twain. I remember this book as part of a set: we were travelling East Africa, and my wife and I each carried a half dozen books and shared them (pre-Kindle), which is how I wound up reading Wuthering Heights (uggh). Other books from that set included Things Fall Apart, Brideshead Revisited, Empires of the Monsoon, Mzungu Days, and Notes From the Underground.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, by Mordecai Richler

Looking back, I have to wonder if I was right to rate this book so highly. It doesn’t scream Magic in my memory the way the others do. What I do remember is, this is an angry, ugly book, about bad people, but its powerful and compelling, funny and ballsy.

The Watchmen, by Alan Moore

The series that transcended comics, yet could only be told as a comic. Mind-boggingly smart. The most intricately planned plot, constantly building momentum, and the most vivid, deep and original characters. Check it: 4.6 stars on 1,566 Amazon reviews.

The 9’s

Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

(an essay only, but I thought I should include it since it appears 3 times on the list, all with high ratings)

John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs, by Jack London

London is my favourite writer. My sadness with London is that I’ve never enjoyed him at book length as I do in his short stories. Martin Eden and The Sea-Wolf have great aspects, but page-after-page of monotonous flowery description. Then, I found John Barleycorn. This is London’s memoir as a drinker, an idea brought about in sympathy with the temperance movement. It is the story of London’s life, one of the most exciting lives in literature, told through the lens (or bottom of a beer glass) of his drinking. From his days as a teen sailor through poverty and hard labour, world travel, and fame and fortune, funny, sad and maddening tales, with themes and ideas carried along throughout. Along with the first-class storytelling is some very honest, intelligent and multi-faceted writing on booze.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Hamlet, Tricky Bill Shakespeare

The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse

Hesse is the outstanding writer  in a field other writer’s don’t even know exists: writing about something without touching it. In The Glass Bead Game, The Journey to the East, and to a lesser extent Siddhartha, Hesse somehow tells a story which is clearly about SOMETHING, but he never tells you what that SOMETHING is: In The Glass Bead Game, we never learn how the game works, just some characteristics of it. In The Journey to the East, we never learn what the Journey was for, or how it came about.

The Glass Bead Game is Hesse’s magnum opus. It is a story, a meditation, an alternative reality, and an intellectual game. One of those books that looms so large in my heart and mind, I’m scared to read it again and be disappointed (e.g. The Sea Wolf).

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain

Typical Twain. Original, funny, smart, tragic, insightful, unforgettable characters, sentences and paragraphs you wished you could read again for the first time. Come on, Twain. Pick it up a notch.

[> 8]’s

The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling (short story)

I think this is the only one where I watched the movie first. One of my favourite films: Sean Connery and Michael Caine at their peaks, with Christopher Plummer as a fantastic Kipling-outer-tale-narrator.

A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz

What a special novel. One of my favourite modern books. Its funny as hell, brilliantly weird, with an absolute world-lit-all-star roster of characters.

Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music), Friedrich Nietzsche (non-fiction)

There ain’t no one like Nietzsche. Reading Nietzsche is like being locked in the car with a madman at the wheel. You have no idea where he’s going; you’re forever anticipating a fiery crash; the scenery rolling by seems somehow more meaningful than ever before; and he’s riffing off every song as he flips through radio stations, and you begin to think maybe he understands something you don’t, and that its the Most Important Thing in the Universe. I’ve written about this book here and here. Here, Nietzsche tells the tale (or his version of it) of the relationship of Mankind’s Greatest Generation (Golden Age Greece) with their art, specifically, their highest art: tragedy. Nietzsche demonstrates the synthesis of Tragedy from the ying and yang of the human experience, explains how this synthesis within the soul was responsible for the birth of these Highest of All Men, how Western Man degenerated alongside the loss of Tragic art. While he’s doing this, insights into art, life, modernity, and science whiz by. They should sell this pre-highlighted, because if you want to mark down some of the most unique or startling bits, you’re going to need a lot of highlighter.

Koolau the Leper, Jack London (short story)

Batard, Jack London (short story)

The Seed of McKoy, Jack London (short story)

I can’t say why these particular three London books stood out at the time. They are brilliant, but I could name so many other London stories to love. I guess I’ll just have to blame it on the aughts. Koolau the Leper is a South Sea story. Race was an important theme in London’s writing. Whereas, in his earlier (Yukon) stories, the Indian was sympathetic, but the white man seemed somehow the destined winner and appropriately so. By the time of Koolau the Leper, London has really changed his view. Now, the white man is a curse, individually noble or evil men, blundering about, remaking the world with no comprehension of what they were destroying. Batard is a Yukon tale. This is a dog story, like White Fang or Call of the Wild. But there’s an edge to Batard, it seems more mature, rougher, and somehow deeper than those novels. The Seed of McKoy: well, sometimes a story’s great because its just a great story. Here is a ship of white men, out of their minds with fear, on a boat they all know can explode at any minute – and a local pilot from the Pacific islands who shares their fate (though he alone is deciding it), and experiences it from a wholly different state of mind.

The Greek Way,  Edith Hamilton (non-fiction)

A tremendous (and hugely influential) primer on Greek culture and manner of thinking during their Golden Age.

Faust, book 1, Goethe

Faust is one of our most archetypal myths: the soul sold to the devil for great, but unholy, power here on Earth. The sequel sucked, though.

America Declares Independence, Alan Dershowitz

(This is another one that I can’t really recall what I loved about it so much – again, doesn’t evoke any lingering magic).

The Master and Margerita, Bulgakov

The Devil and his entourage make a pranking visit to Moscow during the athiest-communist-brutally faceless-Stalinist era. Like Faust, it includes an orgiastic witches ball.

Oh yeah. Magic. I wish I didn’t like other books better, so I could say this is my favourite book. Because I love this book so much.

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Empires of the Monsoon,  Richard Hall (non-fiction)

I read this book, about the history of the Swahili coast while travelling the Swahili coast. The book tells an epic tale of the Arabian sea as a long-standing ‘neighbourhood’ of interacting cultures: Arab, African, Persian, Indian, and occasionally, Chinese.

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

Steinbeck wrote this with a new form of literature in mind, bare bones and intimate, like a stage play. He wanted to write in a simpler, briefer style that could be more widely palatable, because he was presenting philosophic and political ideas that he felt were of interest to an audience that was less educated.

Here is a famous, though controversial, adaptation for screen:

Night, by Elie Wiesel (non-fiction)

This is an artistic and human triumph. Wiesel turns his most torturous personal events of the Holocaust into a meaningful, coherent, illuminating story. This book is a look into Nietzsche’s abyss.

***

I’ll stop here before I get to the 8’s. I think that is where I would say we go from Magic to just great books. There is more Steinbeck, Shakespeare, and London, as well as Hemmingway,  Orwell, Stephen King and Hunter S Thompson.

Update: It just occurred to me that I stopped keeping this list shortly after my second child was born. One more thing to hold against her!

Jack

You could probably guess that I’m a London fan.

As I said in the last post, I was reading a London short story, Shin-Bones. This is one of the South Seas stories, this about an Oxford-educated, thoroughly modern Hawaiian alii or prince, just returned from the Boer War. He narrates a story to his American or European friend about a thoroughly ancient adventure he had undertaken just years before, involving his ancestors sacred bones.

London’s writings encompass the turn of the last century, the 1890’s to his death in 1916. One of the things that makes London such a unique character in the pantheon of artists is that he did not capture just his moment, nor is his work “purely universal”, lacking time or place. He captured his moment at the edges, at the cutting edge of history.

His adventure stories in the Yukon are not just about the Gold Rush. His South Pacific stories are not just sailing adventures. London sketched, in story after story, the expanding edge of Euro-American civilization, and the soft, often bleeding cultures that civilization was breaking into.

London could be called naive, even racist for his early stories about the American adventurers and the Native people of the North. The Americans, generally, are the smarter, the tougher. They are winning. Their culture is supplanting the other, darker, primitive one, and that is portrayed as a good thing. I excuse London as being young, full of Spencerian and Nietzschean ideas of power. But even in these early stories, the Natives are often portrayed with great sympathy, occasionally showing superior intelligence and character, and that victory of Euro-American civilization is tinged with question marks.

London grew, travelled further, and changed. In his South Seas stories, a different theme emerges: here, the White Euro-American conqueror is a corrupting influence; an amoral destroyer in the name of God and dollars. The heroes, tragic heroes, are generally the island Natives, or Chinese, helpless though strong themselves, not at all pathetic in the face of this unstoppable force. Even in London’s novel The Sea Wolf, that great villain Wolf Larsen (who I would put on a pedestal with Darth Vader among the great bad guys of all time) is a very Nietzschean creature, strong of will, mind and body, superior to all around him. In an earlier story, he might have been the hero. But in The Sea Wolf he is the bad guy, and the weaker artsy-boy is the good guy.

Darh Vader, Sith Lord

Wolf Larsen, Nietzschean anti-hero

Barney

I can only speak from my perspective, as a child of that White European “civilization”, but I see, in the entirety of London’s work, a complex and layered artistic representation of the encroachment of the Twentieth Century on cultures that weren’t ready for that invasion.

So much for that. My question is: Who is the Jack London of today? What would she or he be writing? What is the cutting edge of this moment? Where are movements coming together to change the world? Is it Silicone Valley? Is it in a mosque, in London or in Saudi Arabia, or in the desert domain of Islamic State? Is it in Beijing?

Your thoughts?

Jack London: Conduit to existence

Come here, I’ll tell you.

People say, ‘You can’t explain art.’ or ‘No one really knows what art is.’

Bullshit. I’ll tell you what art is. Art is a conduit between the reality we experience and the world behind the veil. Life is a mystery, and art lets us feel that mystery, to understand it, though we can’t explain it. That is the thread between music, literature, sculpture, painting and dance. This understanding imparted, this temporary harmony with existence, makes us feel peace. We touch the rock, and feel steadied by it. I don’t claim this is a new idea. I get it myself from Schopenhauer, Emerson and Nietzsche who have so much more to say on the subject, and I am sure many others have written about it. But we forget it don’t we, in a world so rational and modern, where we turn a blind eye to the mystery of existence; we twist our whole psyches to do that, and maybe suffer injuries from that contortion – and without that mystery, what value after all is there in art? Distraction-entertainment feels good, art feels elevating.

So I read Jack London when I feel bad.

My father, the comic book reading storyteller

Handling Sin: The family book

This year, a miracle has been unfolding before my eyes.

My son is becoming a reader. Yes, Grade One: Where miracles happen! Just a few months ago, we would sit at night and I’d read to him and his little sister. Now each night he takes out his school readers and reads to us. It is a miracle, because the parts of his “training” don’t seem to add up to the whole. Like the flying bumblebee, I don’t understand how the boy can read just from the handful of rules, sounds and memorized idiosyncrasies of our language. Yet there it is. Not just “the”, “and” ,”he”, but suddenly whole sentences. I couldn’t feel more mesmerized than if he came home with a super power. After all, I’ve known the kid for six years and he’s never been able to do anything like this before.

Reading is akin to learning a language in that once opaque communications all around you suddenly become understandable. The world becomes so much of a richer place, and one’s ability to travel in it leaps: Ah, a MEN’s room! OK!

But as a writer, and a reader, I can’t help thinking about books and stories. These are powerful and durable goods; they not only shape one’s mind in a way, I think, no other art can, they are shareable like ideas and values, handed from friend to friend and from generation to generation.

My father was a storyteller. A surgeon, he was no reader (if you know a surgeon you may know what I mean, they prefer to think of themselves as macho plumbers than intellectuals). He revelled in the fact that his favourite books were Archie comics or Calvin & Hobbes collections. But he was a magnificent storyteller; an embellisher of the real, and an improviser of the fictitious. I’m sure he read to us, but I don’t remember that. I remember his own storytelling very well. To the three boys, he used to make up adventure stories of three OTHER boys, named Oogle, Poogle and Wook. When a fourth brother came along, the protagonist group also grew, becoming Oogle, Poogle, Koogle and Wook.

My father was no reader, but he encouraged it, pushed it, on his kids. He never refused to buy us a book (a pledge I reminded him of when I wanted some encyclopedia of pro tennis). By the time I was in middle school, I was reading up to three hundred pages a day, often holding a Tolkien paperback open under my desk as the teacher went on about – well, how would I know?

I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that reading and books helped make me the man I am. That miracle of reading birthed another miracle: the creation of whole worlds in my imagination from deciphering ink spots on bleached tree pulp. Now I’ve become lazy in the comfort of reading. I love my favourite authors so much I often fail to experiment with the new and unknown. I can always find something from Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Mordecai Richler or Herman Hesse that I haven’t read yet. Although now I’m lucky to read three hundred pages in a month.

Sometime as a teenager my friend Claude passed me on a magnificent book called Handling Sin; a comic epic about an aged, larger-than-life father and adult son. I loved the book, and my father, the Archie aficionado, read it, and read it and read it again. He passed it to his brother, and my brothers, and it became our family book. I read it first when I was 14, and I’ve probably read it over a dozen times since. When Mordecai Richler’s last great work, Barney’s Version came out, it became another shared treasure for my father and I (another comic epic about an aged and imposing  father and his adult children).

Those books, and the Archies and Calvin & Hobbes, were something beautiful that we shared, even as we found little else to talk about some years, as I tried to distance myself from my father’s enormous shadow.

I was always expected, by my father, by myself, to become a doctor or scientist (my brothers became a surgeon, an engineer and a computer scientist – I wish that rhymed!). At last, after some wandering, I became a writer: of non-fiction, of fiction, of business and political communications.

When I saw the movie Big Fish, about a young journalist who resents his father’s lifelong proclivity for spinning tales, but finally rediscovers the beauty of his father’s gift, I felt like the movie itself had been one of my father’s narratives of our lives – except for the resentment. (Yes, another comic epic about a big-persona old dad and his mundane kid).

Now, my son. When he was a baby, I read to him whatever I was reading. What was the difference? He didn’t understand it. He’d sit in his baby seat and I’d read from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and Homer’s Iliad. I always loved reading aloud, and he and his sister gave me an excuse to.

Now my son is a reader, and my heart is bursting with excitement for him to discover Roald Dahl and my other childhood favourites. I imagine Tolkien or Robert Louis Stephenson or later, Douglas Adams, opening his imagination the way they opened mine.

Though the kids love my improvised storytelling – grand epics of a young boy and his little sister, Oogle and Poogle – I have an even greater urge to share the treasures of other writer’s books with them.

Someday we’ll share Handling Sin, of course. There was a rare new book that I tried a couple years ago that I’m sure we’ll love together, A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz. A comic epic about a larger-than life, aged father and his adult son.

**My father was a widower, raising four sons by himself, but I don’t want to give the impression my mom had no hand in that-part-of-me-that-writes. I have strong recollections of her encouraging my earliest creative efforts, taking the time to painstakingly illustrate my early school-work stories. My mother was, for some years before she passed, a Jewish folk singer. Her duo’s album: L’dor va dor, Hebrew for “From Generation to Generation”.

One way in which fiction writing is unique as an art is the degree to which idea can exist with form, thought with feeling. In this, Jack London was a master, his stories incredibly balanced between emotional whallop, visceral thrill and intellectual challenge.

It is well possible you’ve never heard of Jack London. There are a lot of tragedies in the world, for sure, but surely one of them is how few people still know who Jack London is. (I know this to be true, I once demanded it of the crowd on a Toronto subway car.)

Jack London is my award winner for Best Writer, Ever.

London was the first celebrity-in-his-own-time writer, his success outstripping Mark Twain’s. He was the first millionaire artist. He is remembered now (if he is remembered at all) for his Klondike Gold Rush stories, and South Pacific tales. The Call of the Wild, his book title, is now an English phrase. Yet he was barely literate as a teen.

All his work is free or near free on any ebook reader. Here are links to on-line versions of some of my favourite London short stories:

• The Sheriff of Kona
• A Piece of Steak (my brother loves this one. Also The Mexican.)
• To Build a Fire (London’s best known short story)
• The Law of Life
• Mauki
• Koolau the Leper
• Batard (best ending)
• The League of Old Men (ok, this one’s really a favourite of mine)
• The Chinago

Looking back at this list, I can’t say these are representative London. They are my choices. Just making a list at all kills me: each one of these, and a dozen others, I could call his best.

London’s stories bring you so fully into an exotic place, that suddenly entering grand cosmological and philosophical battles, played out by mortal men, seems natural. Like a science fiction writer who uses unfamiliar situations to highlight human questions, London uses foreign cultures and non-compatible world views to expose the richness of human experience and often the tragedy of it. But it’s never forced. (well, rarely.) When you begin a London story, you enter an adventure, not a debate. His stories are thrilling, human and scary. His style is unique. Having grown up without much exposure to books, then suddenly teaching himself to write and reading an almost random array of what was available at the library, London writes with a unique vocabulary. He uses words you don’t expect, because he hasn’t been pre-trained what words normally follow what. It is like reading a foreigner who has mastered English, like Joseph Conrad or Vladmir Nabokov, except in London’s case it is grounded in the wholly un-literary English he grew up with.

Jack London is also one of my favourite historical characters, so much so that he has a permanent seat on my Triumvirate. My Triumvirate? That’s the three people I keep in my imagination to advise me. My Triumvirate has, over the years, included Jimmy Buffett, Beethoven, Niels Bohr and many others. London has been there from the beginning. Advising. Never judging.

One of three books I don’t like to loan, because I go back to it so often.

One of the great things about Jack London is that he was primarily a short story writer, which meant you’d pick up his collections. Each collection would usually include a London bio. And are they ever great. London grew up dirt poor in late 19th century San Fancisco. He was an oyster pirate in his early teens, and shipwrecked while whaling near Japan by seventeen. With a few years back in San Francisco reading everything he could find; hobo-ing across the country; spending time in jail; and becoming a socialist rabble rouser, he set off for the Klondike Gold Rush. Later, after celebrity hit, he returned to sailing, exploring the South Pacific (telling the world of Hawaiian surfing).

He is the model for adventure and experience writers from Hemingway to Kerouac, to any who try to live exotically to have stories to tell from it, including Chris McCandless, the kid who dies living in the bush in Alaska in the Krakauer book Into the Wild.

London was a genius and a man of iron strength (his work ethic and physical endurance are legendary). His novels, sadly, are not in the same class as his short stories (at least the one’s I’ve read so far; I live in hope I’ll discover a great London novel, it would be like discovering a forgotten Beatles album).

If you read any of hist stores and want to read something bigger, I’ll let you in on his best kept secret. John Barleycorn. It’s the closest he gets to a memoir. It is, in fact, a memoir of his life as a drinker, written as an examination of what alcohol meant to him during the first prohibition debates. It is, first of all, for London lovers, an intimate social portrait of the man that only touches on the events of his life as known in his standard bios. It is also the most honest and intelligent assessment of booze I’ve ever seen. It’s a brilliant read.

The Sea Wolf is an interesting read as a novel purely because it introduces one of the greatest characters in all fiction, vicious ship captain Wolf Larsen, who I am convinced was ripped off by Ayn Rand (who turned him into a hero). If you can stomach the slow, flowery first parts before getting to the great Wolf Larsen, you will be well rewarded for having him in your life and imagination.

Ah, Jack. I can see you know, as a teen in the sailor saloons of San Francisco, trying desperately to learn to be tough. Pouring through Spencer, Marx, Darwin and Nietzche as an exhausted, starving young man in the library. Whooping and hollering on a skiff running deadly rapids in the Yukon. I wonder what we today would make of an artist this strong and sure, with the skill to tell us in story the story of our world right now. Once, they listened to that kind of stuff. He was the first millionaire artist.