I recently heard this interview with an author on NPR where the topic
of “Top Three Books That Define You” came up. Let me just say up front that I think it’s a pretty silly concept, both in terms of having to choose only a top three and also as yet another
aspect of image crafting (it turns out people often choose at least one classic like The Grapes of Wrath to seem cultured). That
said, I got to thinking that I might actually enjoy the exercise of trying to
come up with a top ten list of books I’ve read that I might choose to define
me. So I did.
Here’s the list of my top five:
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
And here’s the why for each:
The Hitch-Hiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I’m letting the first book stand for: the original trilogy
of three novels; the radio show screenplays, which I read in a collected volume
published in the mid-80s; the LP versions, which were later put out on cassette
tapes in the late-80s by Simon and Schuster, both of which I bought and wore
out; and the 1980 BBC television production. While some of the stuff is dated
now, much of it was spot on (the guide book of the title is essentially a galactic
Wikipedia on a small iPad). The wit is still as sharp as ever, and the
observations on culture, religion, and absurdity remain topical and astute.
Among the most delightful concepts Douglas Adams came up with are the babel
fish, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, flying as the art of hurtling
yourself at the ground and missing, and the entire over-the-top sequence where
a giant battle-fleet of war-hungry spaceships gets swallowed by a small dog due to a miscalculation of scale.
With a glorious explanation for the origin of the Earth, there’s also a pervading
sense that in a very real way, things really aren’t what they seem. Some of my
favorite lines, and there are many, include “they hung in the air in exactly
the same way that bricks don’t” and “He gazed keenly into the distance and
looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at
that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way
off.” But rather than re-create the wheel there, here’s a link to 42 of Douglas
Adams’ best lines.
Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.
When I was an invincible new marathoner living in northern
Virginia in my mid-twenties, a runner friend maybe a decade or so older gave me
a copy of this book as a gift. Initially, the title made me think it had something
to do with being washed up or something, but I was wrong, and I loved it.
Written by a runner in a style that clearly betrays a life-long love of the
sport, the novel is alive with energy and humor and tears and joy. Perhaps it’s
too dated now, being set in the eighties and all (I think, or maybe it was the
seventies), but I hope the inspiring lunacy and infectious enthusiasm I found
in it is timeless.
The Forever War by
Joe Haldeman
I love science fiction. GOOD science fiction, that is. I'll be the first to admit that 95% of what is out there is utter garbage, and I
don’t blame anyone who hates the genre based on their exposure to it, since it’s
statistically likely that they’ve probably only seen the crap. I don’t know why
the disparity between good and bad is so huge, but the fact
remains: when science fiction is good, it can be REALLY good. Such is the case with this book
from 1974, which is the best of the best. Yes, it’s about a future war, in space, and
it has plenty of colorful elements of space opera to it, but it’s also very
much about Vietnam and the disconnect from society that soldiers often feel
upon returning home from “over there.” It’s got laser weapons and tech-heavy
space suits, but while there are exciting battles, there’s also the physical, psychological,
and surgical horrors of warfare. It’s also a romance that takes place as two
lovers skip ahead of each other through time due to relativity issues
associated with interstellar travel. It’s amazingly progressive with respect to
gender and sexuality for it’s time period and genre. It’s damn near perfect.
Letter to a Christian
Nation by Sam Harris
Here is where I probably alienate many of my religious
friends (who, let me be clear, I like very much and would very much like to keep). Actually, I say that jokingly. I trust them to let me speak my mind just as much as they trust me to speak their faith; we're still friends. Anyway, the thing is, I'm an unashamed atheist; I feel I should need no defense
for saying that, but I find it’s still often necessary. I live in New England,
and I certainly don’t feel persecuted or anything, and we’ve come a long way
since the 1950s when atheist was synonymous with communist, which was
synonymous with traitorous enemy. But I’m always cognizant of the implications
of things. For example, it's never lost on me when religion intrudes into
politics, where it so very much should NEVER be in a society of free,
intelligent people. Anyway, in the last decade or so, I’ve become increasingly
of the opinion that I do not want to or have to pretend that I don’t find the
fundamental foundations of religion ridiculous. Specifically, believing in
things based on faith. Not the good kind of faith that you would place in a
friend, but the kind of faith where you cast aside reason and really believe in universal “truths” and the supernatural despite any actual evidence whatsoever simply because another human said so at some point, and
maybe even wrote it down. I don't think mystery needs to be explained with myth. Yes, I acknowledge that some good things have come out of religion, but none of it ever needed faith; people can still do good stuff without believing in fairies. Except for an elegant essay by Douglas Adams (link to essay removed, sadly), I’d
never come across much writing that I liked about the subject. I was
disappointed to discover what a dick Richard Dawkins is when I read his book, The God Delusion, and I didn’t think Sam
Harris’s book The End of Faith was
very well written (despite containing some excellent ideas and arguments; he
needed a better editor for that one), so I was pleasantly surprised to find
this short book / long letter to be a mini-masterpiece; a perfect distillation
of the absurdity of religion (my words). I also
really enjoyed God is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything by
Christopher Hitchens, which is a wonderfully articulate and heartening rebuke
of religion.
Catch-22 by Joseph
Heller
Speaking of ridiculous, this intensely cynical satire
remains my touchstone of all that is laughably ludicrous and preposterous in
the world. Set in the U.S. air force during World War II, it feels a bit like
the movie and TV show M.A.S.H. I
first read it in 1989 during my senior year in high school, at which time I
felt like I’d discovered a secret treasure (“why the hell has no one recommended this to me??” I wondered), and it
instantly became my new favorite book. When I re-read it in 1996, I found it to
be a bit tedious at times because I saw much more clearly through the style and
realized that it repeated the same joke pattern over and over and over again,
but I still really appreciated it. Like Kafka and Camus, except much funnier,
it mocks red-tape bureaucratic bullshit and considers the absurdity of life in
general. It savagely heaps satirical scorn on simple-minded people in positions
of power. And near the end it contains a shocking scene of nauseating visceral
horror that I just didn’t see coming, and that haunted me for many years after,
much as I suspect it was intended to do.
Here are my many runner-ups:
· The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert (warts and all non-fiction examination of the author’s friend, Eustace Conway; she makes you shake your head at him and admire him)
· Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (flawed but thought-provoking didactic novel; his non-fiction book Beyond Civilization picks up chewing on big ideas where it left off, and offers a vision of our culture that I can now never un-see: us as a rider on a bike that’s just gone off a cliff and is falling but we don’t know it yet because we’re still in free-fall, but the ground isn’t all that far away…)
· Neuromancer by William Gibson (the original cyberpunk sci-fi novel, written over a decade before the internet was invented; interesting and insightful)
· The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac (an all-time favorite; majestic and alive)
· Contact by Carl Sagan (Lots of thought-provoking ideas)
· Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins (pure sex-intellectual enjoyment; his novel Jitterbug Perfume, while far from perfect, also often feels harmonically attuned & full of sensually shrouded aliveness)
· Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray (a funny, strange, and honest modern-day soul quest)
· Anagrams by Lorrie Moore (this woman slings words like Pollack slapped paint; very clever)
· The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham (a good friend once said of Maugham: “this guy’s tuned IN!”; this book is his memoir; The Moon and Sixpence, his novel based on Paul Gauguin, is awesome too, with invigorating insights into art and passion)
· The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen (inspiring ideas; genuinely moving)
· Team Rodent by Carl Hiassen (acerbic, funny little diatribe against Disney)
· A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (very funny AT hiking descriptions)
· Augusta, Gone by Martha Tod-Dudman (written by a family friend; as real as they get, and set in Northeast Harbor, with 3 references to my mother)
· Straight Man by Richard Russo (hilarious, heartbreaking, and perceptive)
· Kiwi Tracks by Andrew Stevenson (non-fiction account of tramping in New Zealand; full of hiking, heartache, and humor)
· There’s This River: Grand Canyon Boatman Stories ed. by Christa Sadler (vividly paints people and geography; really felt alive)
· A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby (1950’s British travel adventure; smartly self-effacing and funny)
· The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz (non-fiction: Men escape a Soviet prison in Siberia in 1941 and trek south all the way to India!)
· Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams (a masterpiece of interwoven grief and healing, using nature writing about the shores of Salt Lake for analogy)
· North Country by Howard Frank Mosher (my kinda road trip; traveling east to west along and near the US/Canada border)
· Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino (excellent, subtle short stories set in Italy; really, really good writing)
· In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (a very good read; full of intersting thoughts and tidbits about eating and health)
· Rising from the Plains by John McPhee (has a strange structure, and no real ending, but a fascinating read about geology and life in Wyoming)
· The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
· Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
and several key lines
from The Great Gatsby, including the
extraordinarily rich and layered last two pages, and this passage:
“Most
of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except
the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose
higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware
of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes – a fresh,
green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way
for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all
human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath
in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he
neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with
something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
While I believe there are still so many things to truly
wonder at in the cosmos (most of which Fitzgerald couldn’t have even guessed at
the possibility of at the time), I still think that line is one of most amazing
bits of writing in the history of ever.
And my least favorite book of all time? That’s easy: Ulysses by James Joyce. Don’t even get me started.
