This
week's question: What one book would you most like to make the rest of the
world read?
Tasha
Robinson
I
suspect this list is going to generate a lot of intellectual, literary wonders
("Why don't more people read and love Ulysses the way I do?") and
political / social / philosophical world-understanding books that shaped
people's lives, so I'm going to counter with a quick, lively read that shaped
how I read fiction: Diana Wynne Jones' Dogsbody, a strange little fantasy
I first encountered when I was 9, and have been in love with ever since. To
this day, I don't quite understand why J.K. Rowling is such a history-making
success, while Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote very similar books but started
decades earlier, is so overlooked. Even so, amid all her twisty, funny novels about
troubled kid wizards and complicated curses and such, Dogsbody stands out as one of the
most different
books I've ever read. It's a thoroughly accessible YA novel in which the dog
star, Sirius, is forced into the body of an actual dog and sent to Earth as
punishment for a crime he doesn't remember committing. Maybe nostalgia and
affection for one of the first really creative speculative novels I ever read
have colored my tastes, but this remains one of my all-time favorite books, and
proof positive for me why Jones belongs on the shelf next to Rowling (or above
her), and for that matter, C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and other classic purveyors
of enduring fantasy.
Jason
Heller
Sometimes
I wonder how the world really sees J.G. Ballard. As a Burroughs-ish, postmodern
provocateur? A clinical social satirist? That sick dude with a hard-on for car
wrecks? He's sort of all those things, but to me, he'll always be the
science-fiction master who ushered my love of the genre—and maybe the
genre itself—into adulthood. When I was 17 and in the midst of falling in
love with Joy Division, I read that the band's song "The Atrocity
Exhibition" was based on a book by some guy named J.G. Ballard. I tried to
track down some of his stuff and eventually found a collection of his mind-warping
short stories from the '60s, Chronopolis—but it didn't prepare me for the
next Ballard book I discovered, The Crystal World. The 1966 novel is a
sluggishly paced, oneirically plotted metaphysical mind-fuck that seemed to
break most of the rules of literature I'd learned up to that point. I'd later
figure out that it shared much with Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness—anyone who's read
or watched Empire Of The Sun knows Ballard's view of colonial decay—but
with The Crystal World, Ballard encased his demons in a vision of the world that was
slowly turning, as if by some quantum leprosy, into crystal. And his prose?
Like a hypodermic needle hovering over my eyeball. The book marks Ballard's
turning point from the catastrophe-of-the-month formula of his early work to
the richer, ingrown dystopia of his '70s masterpieces like Crash and Concrete Island. It's also the novel that
changed my idea of what science fiction could be—and rewired my teenage
brain along with it. If, God forbid, you only get to read one Ballard book in
your life, The Crystal World should be it.
Noel
Murray
Every
summer, my wife and I meet with the teachers that our son—a
high-functioning autist—will have in the fall, and recommend they read
two books. The first is Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The
Night-Time,
which offers an entertaining, moving, and reasonably accurate introduction to
the particular behavioral quirks of the autistic. The second book—the one
I'd push on the rest of the world if I could—is Paul Collins' Not Even Wrong:
Adventures In Autism, which combines a kind of shadow-history of the disorder with
Collins' memories of how he reacted to his own son's diagnosis. By bringing the
stories of "Peter The Wild Boy" and modern computer programmers into
his own personal narrative, Collins looks to expand our understanding of the
autistic spectrum and see that some people we encounter every day may be
undiagnosed autists. The point isn't to make otherwise normal-seeming folk
start thinking of themselves as disordered, but to keep parents of autistic
children (and all the friends and acquaintances of those parents) from thinking
of autism as binary. Dealing with the autistic can be difficult, even
life-consuming, but just as there are autistic traits in a great number of
people who seem neurotypical, so there is a degree of normalcy to the autistic.
We're all on a series of scales, from smart-to-dumb or weak-to-strong or
easygoing-to-irritable, and we'll do better with the autistic in our midst if
we think of them as having specific gifts and challenges, just like anyone
else.
Andy Battaglia
Mine is Robert Musil's The Man
Without Qualities, a big novel that methodically sifts through all that it might
and might not mean to be a sentient being in the world today. It was written
between 1921 and 1942 (when the author died before finishing), but its
inventiveness and instructiveness make it more than contemporary still. I've
never come across another book so diligent and precise about the very act of
thinking—its prospects and limitations, each always more present than we
ever seem to know. Whether he's off on a wowing metaphorical riff or dialing
into a conflicted emotion that rarely gets anointed with a name, Musil is the
most controlled writer I've ever read. And he's fun, if control in the midst of
an open-armed embrace of chaos is your thing. One other note: The book is split
into two volumes (the second one incomplete), but Vol. 1 could stand just as
well on its own.
Keith
Phipps
Okay,
I don't want to sound like I'm assigning homework, but if I could push one book
on everyone, it would be The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. And—and this is
where I tend to lose people—not in translation, either. It takes about half
an hour to learn the basics of reading Chaucer's Middle English, assuming it's
well-annotated, and the payoff is worth it. It's another language, sure, but
it's a language you already know on some level, just waiting for you to reclaim
it. You may never read Dante in Italian or Flaubert in French, but reading
Chaucer in its original form is the birthright of anyone who speaks English.
From
learning a different way of speaking, it's only a small step to learning a
different way of thinking, and part of the beauty of The Canterbury Tales is the way Chaucer
establishes a plurality of points of view drawn from a cross-section of the
world around him. United in their journey to a holy place and their love of
storytelling, Chaucer's pilgrims share stories rooted in their characters and
their stations in life, which sometimes are at odds with one another: The
Knight delivers a noble-but-already-almost-antiquated story of adventure; the
vile Pardoner contributes a haunting morality tale; the Wife Of Bath uses her
own lively autobiography to segue into a story of perhaps-undeserved redemption
that asks what women want; the Miller, Reeve, and Cook try to top each other in
obscenity. The stories themselves, generally speaking, hold up brilliantly as
stories, but, beyond Chaucer's mastery of the language, the genius comes from
the framing. Some of the pilgrims are more right than others, but nobody here
speaks with absolute "auctoritee." They're traveling together
explaining the world around them—and those above and below—using
stories, the best tools at their disposal. What emerges is a snapshot of
another time filled with people who want from life much what we want today:
security, knowledge, happiness, sex, a sliver of the divine knowledge, revenge,
intoxication, wealth, and power. If you don't recognize the best and worst
parts of yourself in these pages, you aren't really looking.
If that's checked out, try You Can't Win, Charlie Brown by Charles Schulz, which is good for many of the same reasons.
Donna Bowman
My
must-reads aren't really world-relevant—they apply to the population with
which I interact daily. College students (and prospective college students, and
their parents) have certain gaps in their perception of the world which, as a
professor, it is my job to fill. To me, those lacunae are so egregious, and
cause such harm, that I find myself pushing the same books on bewildered undergraduates
over and over. In my field of Christian theology, it's Richard Friedman's Who
Wrote The Bible? or Marcus Borg's Meeting
Jesus Again For The First Time. And
most of my Southern-born-and-bred evangelical students are in need of education
about their faith's scriptures and founder; I rarely meet a student who
couldn't benefit from those books. But there's no doubt in my mind that all
young people need to read Daniel Pink and Rob Ten Pas' manga career guide The
Adventures Of Johnny Bunko. If I were a billionaire philanthropist, I'd
finance a project to get it in the hands of every American age 16 through 25.
They need to hear the book's half-dozen simple lessons about how to prepare for
the rest of their lives—that they can't formulate an ironclad plan for an
unpredictable economy, that persistence trumps talent, that what you can give
is as important as what you can get, and more. If my students (and their
parents) would read and listen, I'd see more young people following their
passions and developing flexible, fungible skills instead of training for a
career ladder that's already melting away under their feet.
Chris Bahn
Howard
Zinn's A People's History Of The United States: 1492 To Present. Because you don't really
know where you're going unless you know where you've come from.
Nathan Rabin
If
I could force just a single book on the sum of mankind, I think it would be
Samuel Fuller's A Third Face, a wonderfully written, deeply humane, utterly
essential memoir of a glorious American life. Or rather lives, since Fuller
packed at least three or four kick-ass, colorful lives into his own
larger-than-life existence. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Fuller began
as a paperboy on the streets of New York, worked his way up to being a teenage
crime reporter, then segued into script-doctoring before serving as an
infantryman in the Big Red One in World War II. Like so many of his fellow
soldiers, Fuller returned from war a changed man; he evolved into a filmmaking
maverick revered by the French New Wave, but woefully underappreciated among
his countrymen. It would be easy for Fuller to be bitter. Following Shock
Corridor and The Naked Kiss,
he found less work as a writer-director than as an instantly iconic bit player in movies directed
by his fans, like Jean Luc-Godard's Pierrot Le Fou and Wim Wenders' The American Friend. Fuller struggled to get
projects off the ground, then watched his films get taken away from him and
butchered. But A Third Face is informed by an enormous spirit of generosity
as well as a smart, informed, iconoclastic patriotism. It's the work of a man
at peace with himself and his legacy, in addition to an epic look at what it
means to be a man, a citizen, a journalist, and a storyteller. Utterly fucking
essential.
Steve Hyden
I would never force anybody to read a
book, because if the American education system has taught us anything, it's
that forcing people to read is the number-one way to drive them to videogames
and shitty reality shows. But I strongly recommend that every man, woman, and
child pick up a copy of my favorite book of all time, Greil Marcus' Mystery
Train. Part music criticism, part history lesson, part blowhard ramble,
and all mind-expandingly brilliant, Mystery Train is a love
letter to American music and myth. It's a book that will make you fiercely
patriotic for all the right reasons. Marcus' America is populated by weirdoes,
sex addicts, con men, and visionaries, and they're all grooving to the same
honest, filthy, heartbreaking music that forms the bedrock of pop culture to
this day. Mystery Train will also turn you into an Elvis fan, if you
aren't one already, and loving Elvis is good for the soul.