I don't wanna always joke. Sometimes I wanna be all pretentious. So here's a thick slab of pretension and indulgence. I forget who wrote Cyrano.
Honorable Mentions:Akira Kurosawa: Something Like an Autobiography (Akira Kurosawa) – The best filmmaker can paint with words, too. No holds barred, and inspiring.
Glue (Irvine Welsh) - Who doesn’t like a good “four guys growing up together” story? A Scottish “Stand By Me,” with lots more drugs and STDs.
Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Steve Martin) - “One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.” Read this for comfort, if you’re at the onset of your war.
On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) – "If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind."
Calvin and Hobbes Treasury (Bill Watterson) – Childhood’s charmed, warped innocence is crystallized.
Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak) – I ain’t never growin’ up.
Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution (Kevin Booth) – No literary artistry here. These excerpts, chapters and accounts from the people closest to Hicks (most written by his best friend Kevin Booth), are interesting as mosaic pieces forming a portrait, but also as puzzle pieces. You keep struggling to guess at what he was really like, through all the contradictions and gaps-- flawed, intense, lost, loving and angry – I’m a sucker for the mystery and romanticizing.
Fear and Trembling (Soren Kierkegaard) – Breaking down the idea of faith as absurd – and then breaking it down further as a necessary and rational absurdity – finding method in a madness no crazier than our faulty definition of sanity. There’s more than that, but that’s the jist, sorta….uh, just read it, I guess…
Top Books (No Order):The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky) – If you are honest and empathetic to all humans, you look pretty dumb - if the world is full of viciousness, resentment and false kindness. That’s our world, that’s our plight, and this book is the anthem of too few people.
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) – Ever been wounded and hopeful? Here’s ya book.
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) – A college gal once told me she didn’t like Jane Austen, because she read her after reading some hyper-radical feminist stuff, but Austen just wrote about “women wanting to get married.” But while these “radicals” espoused predictable stances only daring to the tame, and diluted their narrative art by putting priority on fleeting political taboos, Austen did much more for women by writing with the kind of wit, insight, humanism, sincerity and life that most men (and college cookie-cutter feminists) could only hope to dream of.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) – He’s a satire superhero.
Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh) – The poetry of the depraved. The few sprouts of very touching humanism are rendered even more profound by the tangible darkness of this filth-infested crawl through a black alley.
Winesburg, OH (Sherwood Anderson) – To Anderson, the state of people is: we’re all grotesque, it’s all off-kilter, it’s all desperate; and there’s something deep and lasting about it.
Symposium (Plato) - I can’t tell if it’s the ideas or how they’re told, but they move me as much as fiction.
Cyrano De Bergerac (Frenchie de Sacreblue) - I had a pet squirrel named Cyrano. We found him injured. He had a big nose, but was not witty or poetic. He just sat there in his shoebox until he was healthy again, and then we let him go in the woods. I think he went on to write this play, but did not even mention me in the ‘thank yous.’ It is a good play though, for a squirrel.
A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole) – This is really funny and I like New Orleans.
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (Bob Dylan) – His autobiography is a better piece of work than most artists’ actual art work.
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) - Most books describe an intense life with intensity, or a calm life with tranquility. But the calmest life is full of intensity; Faulkner knows this, and uses a raging prose to illuminate a southern family’s life—seemingly normal and still—capturing the burning furnace and damning confusion that bubbles just beneath the most straight-forward lives.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey) – BRING DOWN THE MOTHAFUCKIN SYSTEM.
Perelandra (C. S. Lewis) - A unique breed of sci-fi; more mythological in its telling, and spiritual in its themes and imagery. The pictures Lewis puts in your head are clear and different; the ideas and the images become simultaneous, and the quick fades from horror to beauty exemplify one of the most powerful imaginations in literature.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) – If you want to find what’s real, study what’s silly.
Raging Bull: My Story (Jake LaMotta) – Jake LaMotta’s reality is as intense and mesmerizing as any fabricated sports/underdog story—with a stiff dash of hard-boiled pathos.
The Glass Key (Dashiell Hammett) – This just gripped me for the whole ride. Dames, betrayals, detective shenanigans, and Hammett’s bare and pin-point prose can make you see a scene or hear an idea in a fresh way.
Watchmen (Alan Moore) – An apocalyptic circus of compelling characters and raw virtues.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (David Hume) – Anyone repelled (or amused) by Richard Dawkins’ rhetoric-driven and philosophically embarrassing “God Delusion” can take refuge here – this is hardcore skepticism, with the intellectual solidity and wisdom to make it a real threat to religious establishment.
Mere Christianity (C. S. Lewis) – Not perfect, but a strong argument that should make you think, if you don’t go into it all timid and closed off about that type of discussion. In a talk with an english professor, he told me it’s “Intolerant because all religions are the same.” Nope. Read up on your religions, drop your narrow definition of “tolerance.” I love this kinda discourse, if philosophical and clear-minded.
Selected Works of Langston Hughes (Langston Hughes) – Simple, rhythmic verses with a weight that contradicts their feather-light eloquence.
Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut) – This is real cool. It’s smart, and deep, and funny, and bizarre.
David Copperfield (Charles Dickens) – Goes off on rambling tangents, lacks a coherent thesis with follow through—a professor could have a field day nit-picking on how it fails to meet formulas. But screw that. Dickens crafts a sentence, paragraph and chapter with strength that’s super-natural. I find comfort in discovering a human is capable of piecing together words and ideas like that. Not only does he explore characteristics of life and people with more talent than any other writer; he explores characteristics that any other writer wouldn’t even know existed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Eli Sairs is 207. He has a summer cottage in Hampshire, and a winter tree in Maine, where he spends most his time on the top branch, smoking his pipe and punching a mountain goat. He is the author of the best-sellers "I Feel Silly Up Here" and "Fuck You, Goat."
