These are a few of my favorite things in adult fiction . . .
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick (1851). The prose is as stylish as the best poetry and raises goose bumps throughout but especially in the chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale" and in the introductory descriptions of Ahab and Starbuck. If not the best bit of non-verse lit ever concocted, then it misses by a millimeter, at most. I'll call you Ishmael and you can call me a drooling fan. But the book didn't even sell its initial printing of 3,000 copies in HM's lifetime and, even then, people didn't read it but used it as a paperweight or doorstop since the hardcover version weighed seventeen pounds.
Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897). First novel I ever sank my teeth into, at age twelve. Transported me on leathery wings to eerie, dank Transylvania. Literary Count much spookier than Béla Lugosi (who was Hungarian anyway). It was here that I came upon the word stertorous, meaning "marked or accompanied by heavy snoring," which was overused by BS, quite frankly, but which, before I die, I'd like to use just once in a sentence myself. Wait, I just did.
Stephenie Meyer: The Twilight series (2005-2008). SM gets a shout-out for proving the vampire genre undead a century-plus after Van Helsing drove a stake though Drac's ticker. Good story, great characters, lousy writing mechanics. If I had a nickel for every intransitive verb she uses transitively I'd have a lot of nickels.
Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine (1984); Tracks (1988); The Bingo Palace (1994); The Antelope Wife (1998); The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001); Four Souls (2004); The Painted Drum (2005). Delicious intermix of the lives and times of Fleur Pillager, Nanapush, and Father Damien, dished up with a distinctly Ojibwe flavor by one of the best contemporary authors cooking. Spicy, zesty, and nourishing to the soul.
Barbara Kingsolver: The Bean Trees (1988); Animal Dreams (1990); Prodigal Summer (2000). Okay, so she really writes for females but men who are true bibliophiles, whether secure in their masculinity or not, will have little trouble appreciating BK's exquisite turns of phrase and artful doses of inner musing once they start turning pages.
Sue Monk Kidd: The Secret Life of Bees (2002). Set in the South during the racially charged sixties, it's a honey of a story that flows sweetly (and poignantly) around the central icon of a wood-carved black Madonna. Again, manly readers might balk initially since there's a strong sisterhood thing going here, but ultimately it's a book for anyone pleasured by magnificently simple wordcraft. The voice of Lily Owens is among the clearest and most memorable you'll ever hear. Would buy Secret Life of Pill Bugs and Secret Life of Earwigs from this author.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005). Imagine a nine-year-old Stephen Hawking who can walk and talk. Well, that's Oskar Schell, who embarks on a quest across New York City to locate people who may have met with his father just before the dad was killed in the 9/11 attacks. Using the technique of "visual writing," JSF creates an outside-the-box work unlike anything else you've picked up and perused. You will either love it or hate it, one of the two.
Nicholson Baker: A Box of Matches (2004). Middle-aged Emmett arises each morning, mostly between four and six a.m., and loads his old-style fireplace with wood he chops himself. Stoking the fire while adding such random combustibles as pizza boxes, paper-towel tubes, and navel lint, is the physical work of it along with the brewing of coffee in the dark beforehand. After come musings of the widest assortment - about the duck he keeps in the dog kennel in the backyard, the scratch inflicted on his leather briefcase decades ago by a careless cousin, the last lonely days of the sole surviving ant in his daughter's ant farm hobby kit, and the finer points of fruit-eating ("I just took such a deep bite of red apple that it pushed my lower lip all the way down to where the lip joins up with the chin. There is a clonk point there, and a good apple can do that, push your lower lip down to its clonk point . . ."). If you prefer tiny details over grand schemes you will greatly enjoy Matches, I think.
James Clavell: Shōgun (1975). Massive epic of feudal Japan replete with English sailors, samurais, and geishas, plus a sushi recipe or two. Sneering Jesuit missionaries are the designated pot-stirrers/crap-flingers here. The fact that certain peasant villagers are doing judo on each other when this martial art hadn't yet been invented, and wouldn't be for another two centuries or so, didn't ruin it for me.
Jonathan Franzen: Freedom (2010). Though extolled by Oprah as the Novel of the Decade or somesuch, it has nevertheless earned more one-star reviews at Amazon.com than five-star ones. Too hyped? No, just too anti-formula for the masses who consume books basically for entertainment and escapism, who'd rather not have to work beyond rapidly turning pages after skimming them. Freedom is the intense, intimate chronicle of the interrelationships of spouses, children, friends, and neighbors set against the political and cultural backdrop of an America that changes dramatically (à la Toffler) over the course of a generation. It's complex, rambling, focused, obsessive, and almost impossibly rich. Too rich for a lot of people to digest. Too much to savor and ponder if you're conditioned to quick reads, fast food, instant everything. This book requires time and effort. You have to wade through it, unconcerned with the destination, and enjoy the meandering journey itself. Love the story and its places and inhabitants (which I did, immensely) or not, it is still 600 pages of terrific style, exquisite description, and very lush character development. I can't remember when, upon closing a book, I've known someone better than I did Patty and Walter Berglund (the wife and husband), and Richard Katz (the lover and best friend). Even the ancillary cast of extended family and acquaintances, in the course of things, became thrillingly honest and therefore genuinely human. And it was all made possible by sublime writing. Here's a sample paragraph that bears numerous rereadings for the language alone, where Patty has just committed adultery with Richard:
He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality. She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.
Stephen King: The Shining (1977); The Stand (1978). Okay, the first half of Shining is awesomely atmospherically creepy and pretty cleverly styled, but the second half is dopey (topiary animals coming alive?) and way too deus ex machina (hotel boiler exploding?). The Stand has a good bad guy, a diverse ensemble cast, and, um, a nuke that detonates at the right moment to neatly tie up all the loose ends. One general knock on SK, though - his characters' names usually blow, sounding hokey and contrived. Yes, I said it. Though I find SK a bit smug at times, he's still a very important and original story-teller.
Dean Koontz: Strangers (1986); Cold Fire (1991); False Memory (1999). DK hits it out almost every time throughout his 50-novel bibliography. Less smug and cynical than SK, actually daring to be uplifting.
H. P. Lovecraft: The Color Out of Space (1927); The Dreams in the Witch House (1933); The Shadow Out of Time (1936). Cosmic horrormeister and creator of Cthulhu Mythos. If you hate big, arcane vocab and weird, unpronounceable names or you simply dislike having your reality messed with, you should probably pass on HPL. But I didn't and I'm glad.
Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles (1950). Though slotted in the sci-fi genre it's not all about gadgets and lasers and tech. Earthlings go to Mars and wipe out the natives with chicken pox and establish their own colonies. One enterprising guy erects a hotdog stand thereafter. So very American, I liked that.
Algernon Blackwood: The Wendigo (1910). I devoured this novella when I was a kid (around the same time I drank up Dracula) but I could never eliminate it from my system. It has remained with me ever since (in my mind, not my colon), this tale of an Algonquin cannibal-spirit that inflicts psychic terror on a hunting party in the Ontario wilderness, so I've decided to write my own wendigo story (current working title: Burning Knife). If that doesn't work I'll take Metamucil.
William Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (1595). If you thought I'd leave WS off this list, forget it. Go to any play or sonnet of his and select some lines at random. Read them, savor them, love them. For example, here's old Romeo in rapture after catching his first glimpse of medieval hottie Juliet at the feast of Capulet:
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear -
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
Some effortless poetic styling, a unique metaphor, an exotic simile, and a subtle but tragic foreshadowing through the mere use of the adverb too - all within a couple of couplets. How do you improve on that? I dunno either.
Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897). First novel I ever sank my teeth into, at age twelve. Transported me on leathery wings to eerie, dank Transylvania. Literary Count much spookier than Béla Lugosi (who was Hungarian anyway). It was here that I came upon the word stertorous, meaning "marked or accompanied by heavy snoring," which was overused by BS, quite frankly, but which, before I die, I'd like to use just once in a sentence myself. Wait, I just did.
Stephenie Meyer: The Twilight series (2005-2008). SM gets a shout-out for proving the vampire genre undead a century-plus after Van Helsing drove a stake though Drac's ticker. Good story, great characters, lousy writing mechanics. If I had a nickel for every intransitive verb she uses transitively I'd have a lot of nickels.
Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine (1984); Tracks (1988); The Bingo Palace (1994); The Antelope Wife (1998); The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001); Four Souls (2004); The Painted Drum (2005). Delicious intermix of the lives and times of Fleur Pillager, Nanapush, and Father Damien, dished up with a distinctly Ojibwe flavor by one of the best contemporary authors cooking. Spicy, zesty, and nourishing to the soul.
Barbara Kingsolver: The Bean Trees (1988); Animal Dreams (1990); Prodigal Summer (2000). Okay, so she really writes for females but men who are true bibliophiles, whether secure in their masculinity or not, will have little trouble appreciating BK's exquisite turns of phrase and artful doses of inner musing once they start turning pages.
Sue Monk Kidd: The Secret Life of Bees (2002). Set in the South during the racially charged sixties, it's a honey of a story that flows sweetly (and poignantly) around the central icon of a wood-carved black Madonna. Again, manly readers might balk initially since there's a strong sisterhood thing going here, but ultimately it's a book for anyone pleasured by magnificently simple wordcraft. The voice of Lily Owens is among the clearest and most memorable you'll ever hear. Would buy Secret Life of Pill Bugs and Secret Life of Earwigs from this author.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005). Imagine a nine-year-old Stephen Hawking who can walk and talk. Well, that's Oskar Schell, who embarks on a quest across New York City to locate people who may have met with his father just before the dad was killed in the 9/11 attacks. Using the technique of "visual writing," JSF creates an outside-the-box work unlike anything else you've picked up and perused. You will either love it or hate it, one of the two.
Nicholson Baker: A Box of Matches (2004). Middle-aged Emmett arises each morning, mostly between four and six a.m., and loads his old-style fireplace with wood he chops himself. Stoking the fire while adding such random combustibles as pizza boxes, paper-towel tubes, and navel lint, is the physical work of it along with the brewing of coffee in the dark beforehand. After come musings of the widest assortment - about the duck he keeps in the dog kennel in the backyard, the scratch inflicted on his leather briefcase decades ago by a careless cousin, the last lonely days of the sole surviving ant in his daughter's ant farm hobby kit, and the finer points of fruit-eating ("I just took such a deep bite of red apple that it pushed my lower lip all the way down to where the lip joins up with the chin. There is a clonk point there, and a good apple can do that, push your lower lip down to its clonk point . . ."). If you prefer tiny details over grand schemes you will greatly enjoy Matches, I think.
James Clavell: Shōgun (1975). Massive epic of feudal Japan replete with English sailors, samurais, and geishas, plus a sushi recipe or two. Sneering Jesuit missionaries are the designated pot-stirrers/crap-flingers here. The fact that certain peasant villagers are doing judo on each other when this martial art hadn't yet been invented, and wouldn't be for another two centuries or so, didn't ruin it for me.
Jonathan Franzen: Freedom (2010). Though extolled by Oprah as the Novel of the Decade or somesuch, it has nevertheless earned more one-star reviews at Amazon.com than five-star ones. Too hyped? No, just too anti-formula for the masses who consume books basically for entertainment and escapism, who'd rather not have to work beyond rapidly turning pages after skimming them. Freedom is the intense, intimate chronicle of the interrelationships of spouses, children, friends, and neighbors set against the political and cultural backdrop of an America that changes dramatically (à la Toffler) over the course of a generation. It's complex, rambling, focused, obsessive, and almost impossibly rich. Too rich for a lot of people to digest. Too much to savor and ponder if you're conditioned to quick reads, fast food, instant everything. This book requires time and effort. You have to wade through it, unconcerned with the destination, and enjoy the meandering journey itself. Love the story and its places and inhabitants (which I did, immensely) or not, it is still 600 pages of terrific style, exquisite description, and very lush character development. I can't remember when, upon closing a book, I've known someone better than I did Patty and Walter Berglund (the wife and husband), and Richard Katz (the lover and best friend). Even the ancillary cast of extended family and acquaintances, in the course of things, became thrillingly honest and therefore genuinely human. And it was all made possible by sublime writing. Here's a sample paragraph that bears numerous rereadings for the language alone, where Patty has just committed adultery with Richard:
He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality. She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.
Stephen King: The Shining (1977); The Stand (1978). Okay, the first half of Shining is awesomely atmospherically creepy and pretty cleverly styled, but the second half is dopey (topiary animals coming alive?) and way too deus ex machina (hotel boiler exploding?). The Stand has a good bad guy, a diverse ensemble cast, and, um, a nuke that detonates at the right moment to neatly tie up all the loose ends. One general knock on SK, though - his characters' names usually blow, sounding hokey and contrived. Yes, I said it. Though I find SK a bit smug at times, he's still a very important and original story-teller.
Dean Koontz: Strangers (1986); Cold Fire (1991); False Memory (1999). DK hits it out almost every time throughout his 50-novel bibliography. Less smug and cynical than SK, actually daring to be uplifting.
H. P. Lovecraft: The Color Out of Space (1927); The Dreams in the Witch House (1933); The Shadow Out of Time (1936). Cosmic horrormeister and creator of Cthulhu Mythos. If you hate big, arcane vocab and weird, unpronounceable names or you simply dislike having your reality messed with, you should probably pass on HPL. But I didn't and I'm glad.
Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles (1950). Though slotted in the sci-fi genre it's not all about gadgets and lasers and tech. Earthlings go to Mars and wipe out the natives with chicken pox and establish their own colonies. One enterprising guy erects a hotdog stand thereafter. So very American, I liked that.
Algernon Blackwood: The Wendigo (1910). I devoured this novella when I was a kid (around the same time I drank up Dracula) but I could never eliminate it from my system. It has remained with me ever since (in my mind, not my colon), this tale of an Algonquin cannibal-spirit that inflicts psychic terror on a hunting party in the Ontario wilderness, so I've decided to write my own wendigo story (current working title: Burning Knife). If that doesn't work I'll take Metamucil.
William Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (1595). If you thought I'd leave WS off this list, forget it. Go to any play or sonnet of his and select some lines at random. Read them, savor them, love them. For example, here's old Romeo in rapture after catching his first glimpse of medieval hottie Juliet at the feast of Capulet:
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear -
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
Some effortless poetic styling, a unique metaphor, an exotic simile, and a subtle but tragic foreshadowing through the mere use of the adverb too - all within a couple of couplets. How do you improve on that? I dunno either.
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(Click to go ahead to Young Adult Fiction in FAVORITE BOOKS)
(Click to go ahead to Young Adult Fiction in FAVORITE BOOKS)