Books I Love

or, lets have a good time, pal

Since people seemed to so thoroughly enjoy when I talked about terrible books, I thought I’d talk about some books I love a whole lot.

I’m using a constraint, though, since this post could take me the rest of my life otherwise: I’m only going to mention books I think most of you have never read or heard of.

I’m going to try to keep this list to just ten books, even though the initial list I came up with is about thirty. If people find this interesting, I’ll do another one later.

Call it a recommendation!

Ulysses by James Joyce

Okay, I know, everyone has heard of this book, but I’m recommending it because almost no one actually reads it. Which is a shame.

The problem with Ulysses is one of reputation. Anytime someone even looks at it in a bookstore, someone mentions how that book is difficult and hard to understand.

These people are a menace.

The truth of Ulysses is that it teaches you how to read it fairly quickly, and it’s only difficult to understand if you’ve had some professor tell you that you need to read the annotated edition so you don’t miss any of the allusions or parodies.

But, like, Ulysses is just a book, man. It was written to be read, not studied (though, boy, do I have a lot to say about this idea!), and it is a joy to read. But only if you read it like any other book you would read.

The book is riotously funny and absurd. The musicality of the language is sometimes more important than any event happening on the page. The book is a lot of fun. And, yes, you will miss the allusions and the parodies and the puns and a dozen other things, but that’s really okay. No one tells you to read Dante’s Inferno with a list of his contemporaries who he put in hell.

All literature is full of the personal and the political, and while those may be very important to the writer and the academic, they don’t necessarily matter that much if you’re just trying to lmao while reading a book.

So give it a shot! Its famed difficulty is massively overstated and its fun and humor is essentially never mentioned. But this book is a giant practical joke (maybe more on this another time) that rewards you the same way any other book does.

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Often, for better or worse, referred to as the Scottish Ulysses, Lanark is really a singular work. Like Ulysses, this isn’t exactly a little-known book, though it’s possible you’ve never heard of it.

A vast genrebending and genre defying novel that is as much a bildungsroman as it is epic portal fantasy all set in Glasgow. The Glasgowness of the novel is the only real reason it’s compared to Ulysses, because in every other way, the novels have nothing to do with one another.

Lanark is both more and less difficult than Ulysses. It’s wilder, weirder, more willing to shatter what good sense would tell you about narrative and characterization, and also much plainer, on a sentence level.

The novel is really unlike anything I can think of, so it sort of only makes sense to compare it to books mashed together. I’d describe it as a collision of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, with a hint of Philip Roth at his most insularly meta. This may not sound like that much fun, but, buddy, it is just about the most fun you can have reading a book.

The White Hotel by DM Thomas

I remember finding this on a shelf with a cover that was barely connected to the binding. Read it in a few hours while waiting to figure out what to do with my life during the first week of living in Dublin. It led to me reading four or five of his other novels quickly after.

The novel is just wild and surreal and so deeply enmeshed in Freudian psychoanalysis that it does present various challenges to the reader. And then that this all leads towards a mass grave in Ukraine—I mean, Thomas is just fearless. And it’s this bold, wild, inventiveness that both breaks apart reality while also grappling so directly with the darkness of humanity on both the personal and political level that the book never stops astounding you.

If you like people like David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky, you’ll likely love this. Even if you find their work kind of repellent (like me!), you still may love this.

Finding my Elegy by Ursula K Le Guin

Everyone knows Ursula K Le Guin. Award winning author of a bunch of books and stories. Her influence on science fiction and fantasy is vast and near inescapable. But few people seem to ever read her poetry.

Which is too bad because I think had she never been an award winning science fiction writer, she would have been an award winning poet. I do firmly believe this and I think the lack of critical evaluation of her poetry has quite a bit to do with the way critics look at genre writers.

She has such a simple and straightforward style, but she finds profound beauty in this simplicity. She’s not going to wow you with linguistic inventiveness, but she will calmly steer you to a new understanding of an old experience.

Palm of the Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata

Nobel Prize Winner of some of the most beautiful novels I’ve ever encountered, Kawabata’s collection of short stories is fascinating. I’ve never heard anyone (besides me) talk about these short stories, but, man, they are astounding. And I don’t even like short stories!

Nearly all of these stories are under 5 pages, with most of them only a page or two, but Kawabata packs them full of so much feeling and power. Some people were baffled by Kawabata’s Nobel speech, which is essentially a lecture on medieval zen poetry, but I think it’s really the key to understanding his career as a writer.

Spare and sparse, but evocative and beautiful, Kawabata captured so much with so little, using negative space and subtlety to reveal an entire life, an entire way of life.

Nowhere is this more evident in his short stories collected here. He creates a world and breaks your heart in just a handful of paragraphs, and he does it dozens of times in this collection.

Also, there’s a fourteen page version of his novel Snow Country here. Nothing is rewritten. He chopped down his celebrated novel from its 150 already sparse pages to about fourteen, and somehow nothing is lost. It hits as hard and as beautifully and is worth the price of the collection by itself.

The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa

This is a bit of an odd one, because this novella comes inside a collection of novellas, but really only this one is great. And it is terrifyingly great. And terrifying. Elegant and haunting, The Diving Pool gutted me when I was 23 and I still think about it almost every week.

Ledfeather by Stephen Graham Jones

This is one of my favorite novels of all time. Stephen Graham Jones has become a bestselling author, but way back in 2008, seemed like no one had ever even heard of him. And so I tried to solve that!

I bought about a dozen copies of this book and gave it to everyone I could think of. I wanted the whole world to read this book.

I still do!

I’ve read it four times. Always in one sitting. Always, it leaves me crying and haunted and so full. In some ways, it’s like Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, except Jones takes this conceptual framework (writing a novel about someone, but we only learn of them through the perspectives of other people) and pushes it harder, fracturing time and place to tell a story of love, death, identity, and giving you hope, somehow, through all the horror and tragedy.

This novel shaped me as a young man. It shapes me still. I will forever be haunted by Doby Saxon.

So much do I love this novel that I’ve talked about it in various publication throughout the years. Somehow this even made it to the book’s wikipedia.

We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry

Here’s where we really get to the obscure and unknown!

I had been hovering around the periphery of what was affectionately referred to as indie lit way back in 2010, but this novel in verse is what fully brought me inside, made me want to take this whole writing thing a bit more seriously.

Gaudry is a powerful writer and one of my favorite poets. That you’ve probably never heard of her is some kind of crime, but this first novel of hers tells a devastating story of identity and personhood. It’s the kind of novel that fills me with so much that I actually find it difficult to speak about.

Part fairytale, part myth, part biography of womanhood, this novel is deep inside me.

Girl with Oars & Man Dying by JA Tyler

Sadly, this novel appears to be out of print, but it is a work of staggering beauty. I read this on a friend’s couch in Ohio while they were at work and I was temporarily between continents. Strangely, this was, I believe, a week after I met the woman who is now my wife.

I don’t know if a book about longing and desire could hit me at a more perfect time! Tyler’s prose has always been inventive and challenging, but also full of beauty and telling stories that feel like dreams. As much fairytale as it is elegy, the novel is violent and harrowing and haunting. A story of a father and daughter. The story of death and dying.

JA Tyler had several novels published over a short time period, all of them challenging and sometimes difficult, always reinventing narrative and character, linguistically wild and experimental. I’ve read most of them, though I think all of them are now out of print, and I’ve loved each one I’ve read. For all that I’ve loved his other books, I always return to this one.

If you can find it, get it. It’s unlike any other book you’re likely to read.

Quintessence of Dust by Craig Wallwork

Some people write arrange short story collections around a theme. Some attempt to highlight the breadth of styles and genres available. The former seem to be more successful, but I will always prefer the latter.

This is one such collection. Wallwork writes in a number of genres to the point that his stories should feel like they’re written by a bunch of different people. But no matter how different two stories manage to be, they all feel like Wallwork.

This short collection contains what may be my favorite short story I’ve ever read. I think about it often. Just recently, I even wrote kind of my own version of it.

It’s the story of a minotaur and a labyrinth. And as much as it plays with myth, with magic and the blurring of reality, it’s also so firmly rooted in realism that it’s even slightly a wonder the story doesn’t break to pieces just based on its premise.

It’s a story of working class kids in England. One just happens to be a minotaur. It’s a story of friendship. It’s a story of the way life changes people. How two people, once close as brothers, can become strangers. How the ghosts that haunt the people you love can come to haunt you too.

It’s a story that made me cry. Just thinking about it gets me a bit misty-eyed even now. It’s striking and beautiful.

I don’t know how available this collection is anymore, but I highly recommend it if you can find it.

The Empty City by Berit Ellingsen

I don’t remember why I bought this little book ten years ago, but it sparked a friendship that still persists.

A quiet, small novel. At the time, this was the exact kind of art I was looking for. I was in love with movies like Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron and Kiyoshi Kuroswa’s Bright Future. Quiet, strange stories full of love and longing and imbued with uncanny energy.

Ellingsen’s novel sings with this quiet, uncanny beauty. There’s such a soft touch to her prose, to her characters. I wish more people told stories this way.

It reminds me of Yasunari Kawabata. The way they use negative space has always struck me powerfully.

The Revelator by Robert Kloss

Robert Kloss may be the best technical writer to come out of the small press world that I was attached to. He writes like he’s on fire.

I remember leaving AWP on a bus and reading How the Days of Love and Diphtheria. Then reading it again. A few years later, I inhaled The Alligators of Abraham, a novel that’s both surreal, formally powerful, and grounded in history.

Kloss has an unusual ability to write historical novels that feel somewhere between fantasy and science fiction. He writes of violence with such beauty that you almost forget that the slaughter is happening.

The way he uses second person is likely divisive, but I find it intense and powerful.

The Revelator really was an artist at the peak of his abilities. A story about Joseph Smith that was as powerful and strange as his previous novels, but also incredibly human. It was at times funny and absurd, with more attention spent creating a living breathing person. It was a bold escalation of his formal skill and his narrative interests.

Sadly, his novels have never sold particularly well. This has caused him, I think, to make some unusual artistic choices for the books that followed this one. It’s not a direction that I particularly enjoy, but it is quite bold and one of a kind, for better or worse.

Still, The Revelator is a novel unlike any other. Where I once described Kloss’s writing as a mix of Cormac McCarthy and Terrence Malick, The Revelator was where he stopped feeling like a mix of different artists and began feeling like a completely new trajectory for American Letters.

I believe his novels are all out of print, but they do seem to be available as PDFs on his website.

The Last Projector by David James Keaton

I know I just said Robert Kloss was the best writer to come out of the small press world, but this is the best novel to come out of that world.

It is absolutely wild. I don’t even know how to describe it, really. It’s experimental in ways that are much more interesting than most writers who attach that adjective to their work. It is drenched in film, its history, and the history of noir and crime fiction, but it also manages to be utterly surreal and mindbending.

It feels as much like David Foster Wallace at his funniest as William S Burroughs at his most readable and Philip Roth at his most meta and Shane Carruth at his most dizzying. The novel sort of twists inside itself and wraps around itself.

But for all the wildness, it is a pleasure to read. It’s a gripping thriller, a hilarious comedy, and a brainbreaking puzzler.

The ways this novel bends what a novel can be, what a story is, it is weirdly effortless to read.

David James Keaton is a singular writer.

Black Gum by J David Osborne

I’ve written a bit about this previously. I’ll be writing more about it and a few other books soonishly. But this is a great novel that helped define and shape ideas about fiction and narrative and what a book can be.

I’d be a different writer now had I never come across it.

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner

Gene Wolfe gave this novel so much praise that I decided to pick it up. What’s maybe more surprising about this praise is that it becomes clear how big an influence this book seems to have been on his Wizard Knight duology, which is among his best work.

Thomas the Rhymer is a wild, surreal journey. Kushner takes an old folk story and then pushes on that concept, filling it with humanity. It makes the otherworldly touches more powerful.

Kushner’s other novels never quite reach this power or beauty, but they’re also worth checking out. But this novel is truly one of a kind. It’s a dizzying novel.

Unforgettable and weird.

The Brothers by Masha Gessen

I still remember watching Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hunted and caught live on TV. I was disturbed for many reasons. The one that stood out to me most then and now was how quickly they militarized a major city. An unpleasant outcome of the War on Terror.

Anyway, this investigation by Masha Gessen is definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in modern Russia or the tactics of the US government’s War on Terror. It also asks a very important question: were the Tsarnaev brothers terrorists?

Gessen takes us on a journey that raises many questions and teaches us much about life as an immigrant, as a Muslim, and how two young men became caught up in a terrorist plot.