These Are A Few Of My Favorite Books

I was filling out a job application and many of the questions were about books--it was a job at at an antiquarian bookstore, so that made sense. One of the questions was about my favorite books, so I thought I'd expand on that and list my favorite novels here. I'm going to list eleven instead of ten, because I can.

A few things I've noticed--they are all by white men, and all but two by Americans, although the other one was written in America about Americans. I am a white American man myself, so that may explain it. Also, I read all of these books some years ago, from the ages of about thirteen to twenty-five. Either the books I'm reading are not as good, or, I suspect, I was much more impressionable then. Books, perhaps like pop music and Saturday Night Live casts, are best when you are a teenager.

In alphabetical order:

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. This is my favorite book, which I wrote about here. I have read the book three times, the first time when I was in junior high. It is the epitome of black comedy--laughing in the face of death and despair, and a brutal take-down of bureaucratic, circular thinking, succinctly described in the catch of the title: "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and he could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had do." The book is mordantly funny, and eventually horrifying, such as when Yossarian wanders through Rome or when Aarfy kills a prostitute and nothing comes of it.

The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving. For about a decade, Irving had quite a run--The World According To Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer For Owen Meany. His books since then have had diminishing returns. I loved all four of these books, but I think I liked The Hotel New Hampshire just a tick above Owen Meany, despite it having brother-sister incest as a major plot point. I've only read the book once, and that was almost forty years ago, so I'm going a lot on memory, but I have always been incredibly moved by Irving's pathos--his characters are deeply flawed and sad. There are some heavy-handed references in here that maybe I wouldn't like now, such as a dog named Sorrow and a plea by the Berry family members to "keep passing the open windows."

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Another book with a high ick factor, but the book is not about pedophilia, as much as it is about America. Nabokov was Russian, but wrote the book in English, which is remarkable, given the complex and gymnastic nature of the prose. Those who dismiss the book as pornographic are missing the larger point, although Nabokov denies that there is any allegory about Europe and America. The book is also extremely funny, which is a pattern in my choices. I wrote about it and the film version here.

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry has written some very good books, and some very bad books, but Lonesome Dove is his master work. The first of a four-book cycle about Texas Rangers Gus McRae and Woodrow Call, the story is that of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, which takes on a kind of Homeric quality. Westerns weren't really in vogue anymore in the mid-'80s, but this novel had the best of that genre, while also being literary (it won the Pulitzer Prize). The miniseries was also great.

Of Mice And Men, by John Steinbeck. The first of this list that I ever read, and it deserves a re-read, as it is short. The simple story of two men during the depression, Lenny and George, and their hope for a better life. To Lenny, who is mentally challenged, that is a farm with rabbits George tells him about. As with Steinbeck's other books, tragedy interrupts these dreams. I also loved East Of Eden quite a bit when I was in high school, but amazingly have never read The Grapes Of Wrath. 

Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. I've written on this blog many times about Roth, who is my favorite writer, and this is my favorite book by him. I've read it three times, and surely part of my love for this book is that I identify with the passages about masturbation (but I will admit I never jerked off into a piece of liver). This book is riotously funny, although viewed from a distance it may be a tad misogynistic, as I think Roth was. But a book with a chapter called "Cunt Crazy," in which our story teller realizes that every woman around him has a cunt, is too brilliant to ignore.

Rabbit Is Rich, by John Updike. I had to include an Updike, and this third book in the Rabbit tetralogy is my favorite. These books were about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, and they follow him from young adulthood to his death. This one finds him the inheritor of his father-in-law's car dealership, and is a lacerating portrait of the upper-middle-class during the Carter malaise. I should also reread this, because again I read this almost forty years ago, but I remember Updike relishing details, like the movie titles on a marquee. It also has one of the least erotic passages about wife-swapping ever written.

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow. I read this in the mid-70s, and was overwhelmed. Doctorow started the book during writer's block, when he started writing about the history of the house he was writing about. It takes place in 1906, and mixes historical figures like Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, and most notably Evelyn Nesbit, with a family in Westchester County, New York. The central part of the plot is the humiliation and then revenge by a black man, Coalhouse Walker, so the novel is really about our long, ugly history of racial discrimination.

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I love Vonnegut, but this is head and shoulders his greatest novel, a mixture of World War II memoir with science fiction. The central moment in the book is the bombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut experienced, through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, who has become unstuck in time and lives his life non-chronologically. I have always been fascinated by the idea of Tralfamidore, where Billy is kept as a zoo specimen, mated with the soft-core porn actress with whom he is enamored, Montana Wildhack. If I had a rock band I'd want to call it Montana Wildhack. Read more here.

Still Life With Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins. I've read almost all of Robbins' novels, but this one is my favorite, just ahead of Skinny Legs And All. As with most of Robbins' books, he takes a few subjects that he seems obsessed with and stitches them into a plot. This time it's the image on the Camel cigarette package, home-made bombs, and redheads. This one is due for another read as well, since I don't remember a lot of it, but I do remember Robbins writing that there are only two types of people in this world: those who think there are two types of people in this world and those who know better. He goes on to say that people can be divided into four groups, based on who their favorite Beatle is, and I quite agree.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams. If there were an outlier in this list, it would be this one, which is a fantasy about rabbits. I remember the New York Times, in its best-seller list, had a brief synopsis about it being about a group of travelers; I didn't realize they were rabbits until I started reading it. Anyway, it's about a group of rabbits whose warren is destroyed by a bulldozer looking for a new home. Adams creates a whole society and mythology for these bunnies, and it's Homeric in approach. My dad read this book, too, and we still mention some of the made-up words the rabbits had, such as silflay, which was to graze on grass, or pass hraka, which meant take a shit.