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The Calculus Affair by Herge (1956, Casterman)

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The Calculus Affair by Herge (1956, Casterman)

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The Adventures of Tintin and his dog Snowy continue in this thriller depicting the Cold War.  When I was 10 years old, my best friend and I were ardent Tintin fans, reading our books together and copying the pictures.   Tintin was a gateway book out of children's literature and heading somewhat towards YA.  This was a book I was sharing with my friends, not reading with my parents.

I guess you could call Tintin one of the first graphic novels.  At the time I didn't even know it was a graphic novel.  It was just Tintin, or maybe referred to as a comic.  We still have Tintin in the public library I work in now.  I recommend it to patrons sometimes but I do have to warn them about the stereotyping in the books.  I like to think it was just a different time, and Herge didn't know what he was doing in terms of stereotyping, so that my 10 year old self doesn't feel bad about reading them back in 1982.

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847, Smith, Elder and Co.)

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847, Smith, Elder and Co.)

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It’s funny, I feel like I missed out on a lot of YA literature.  I graduated from high school in 1990 so I didn’t read any YA lit after then. I didn’t read much before then either.  I guess it reflects my alienation and isolation during high school as I pretty much withdrew from school social life aside from a few close friends.  I ended up going up to the attic and picking out classics from my parents’ college days, old editions of Hemingway and my Dad’s Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound poetry books with his notes written in black ink on the right side of the pages.

One of the classic books that I really “cut my teeth” on was Jane Eyre.  I often joke that it set me up with a vocabulary for life, and that I never studied for the verbal part of the SAT (which is true, but I don’t recommend).  I read my Mom’s old copy of Jane Eyre that had woodcut engraved prints in it.  (which my parents curiously sold when they moved out of our family house when I graduated from college.  The cover above is actually the edition I read).

I had a spiral notebook in which I diligently wrote down every word I didn’t know and then wrote down multiple definitions for each word.  Basically, I wrote my own dictionary, or at least a glossary of Jane Eyre vocab.  That got thrown out too when my parents moved out.  I kind of wish I still had it to show to my daughters or students.  It’s almost like part of my portfolio or resume.  It was only a notebook full of vocab words, parts of speech and sample sentences but to me it was a labor of love, celebrating language and words.

I read Jane Eyre in the summer after 7th grade.  Its darkness and tormented drama and mystery appealed to me.  I guess maybe it could be seen as a prototype for something like Twilight.  (although English teachers around the globe would probably have me drawn and quartered for comparing Jane Eyre to Twilight).   Jane Eyre was a stylistic breakthrough for me reading-wise: intense, sophisticated, dark, brooding and enigmatic.  I see it as one of the more influential novels that spawned a gothic literary style still in vogue today, especially in young adult literature.

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A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959, Secker and Warburg)

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A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959, Secker and Warburg)

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I read A Separate Peace in 9th grade English class.  The class was taught by my favorite teacher of all time whose wit and intelligence I use as a model in my own approach to teaching.  I see it as my first YA book, introducing mature themes, with an overall dourness that fit my 9th grade/adolescent state of mind. I always remember my teacher mentioning that Phineas or Finny could be a reference to “fini”, or finished, the end in French, referring to Finny’s death.  I may have also identified with Forrester,  a good student but sub-par athlete, who was jealous of his athletic friend Finny.

Fittingly, there was a student in the class who was a good athlete and became some sort of alter ego/nemesis for me.  I got cut from the freshman baseball team that year (I was a good hitter but sub-par outfielder) and became the record keeper for the freshman team after I got cut.  I ended up wearing his old jersey when he got called up to junior varsity.  I remember while I was trying out, this athletic student and his friend came up to me after math class and said “you hit some rockets out there!” referring to my at bats during practice.  For a brief moment, I felt included.  But eventually I was the last cut and it seemed to symbolize my limbo status in high school – not a jock, but not really comfortable with the “smart kids” either, always an outsider.  Basically, how most high school student feels.  A Separate Peace’s uneasy, pessimistic tone mirrored my own uncomfortableness and feeling of not belonging in high school.

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Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989, Alfred A. Knopf)

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Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989, Alfred A. Knopf)

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I read Geek Love in my junior or senior year of high school pretty much as soon as it came out.  My mom was a librarian in the local library and brought it home one day.  Although Geek Love is probably considered adult fiction, I see it as my first contemporary YA book that I could really relate to.  It’s funny that it later became known as a “cult classic”.  Not that it doesn’t deserve to be a cult classic but to me it’s always just a book my mom brought home from work that my sister and I read.

Geek Love’s plot centers on a couple who own a carnival and take drugs to give birth to children with various deformities who then work in the carnival to boost its popularity and income, before spinning off into other bizarre sub-plots.  The sheer weirdness and originality of the work appealed to me.  It was unlike anything else I’d ever read and was a wake up call to my bored adolescent self that there could be something fresh out there NOW.  It began to wake me up out of my adolescent slumber and gave me an indication that there was an alternative culture out there I should start looking for.

https://youtu.be/vZCexXrq6TQ
Katherine Dunn’s Dark Carnival of Desire | The New Yorker
Katherine Dunn’s Counterculture Parables (thenation.com)
https://youtu.be/qaVXcvQweyA

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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962, William Heinemann, UK)

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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962, William Heinemann, UK)

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I read A Clockwork Orange a year or two after Geek Love.  Like Geek Love, A Clockwork Orange was a searing revelation: dystopia before the term dystopia became so popular.  A Clockwork Orange was visceral, sensational, violent but smart dealing with issues of free will, recidivism and behavior modification.  Burgess' style reminds me of William Golding's The Lord of the Flies or Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust but more amped up, modern and extreme.

The famous scene of Alex having his eyeballs forced open to watch Nazi atrocities non stop to reform him became a joke-reference for me throughout my early-mid 20’s.  Even though Alex was a psychopath, it was a glimpse into a world I wanted to inhabit (minus the extreme violence), some sort of den of subterranean London 60’s rock and roll milk bars and underground life so different from my bored suburban blues.  To me, it was pure escapism.  My version of Harry Potter.

A Clockwork Orange’s made-up, Russian-influenced NADSAT language also really appealed to me.  The early editions of the book have the Nadsat vocabulary glossary in the back of the book.  For someone like me who made up his own glossary of Jane Eyre in 7th grade, A Clockwork Orange’s Nadsat glossary was pure heaven: a weird, cool version of my nerdy 7th grade Jane Eyre dictionary.  Curiously, this glossary seems to be omitted in recent publications.  I can’t understand why.  I always thought that was the best part of the book, and added to the realism of this made-up world.

Appendix:A Clockwork Orange - Wiktionary
https://youtu.be/CYiUKrFY4w8
https://youtu.be/EYAKTYhoIkM

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High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby (1996, Penguin)

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High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby (1996, Penguin)

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I read High Fidelity at the perfect time in my life (mid 90's) in the throes of my rock music obsession and passion for electric guitar.  I could relate to the music snobbery of the record store clerks and the daily struggles of the over-educated, under-paid “slacker” wannabee artist/musician/writer.

I think Hornby is a genius at writing accessible novels that contain enough intelligence. humor and “alternative lifestyle” (whatever that is) to prevent you from getting bored.  He opened my eyes that you could write honestly about exactly what’s going on right now in this stage of your life, and it would connect with readers (probably who were also in the same stage of their life), instead of trying to write a literary masterpiece that feels disingenuous.  Hornby has written about being a young music hipster in his youth and can just as smoothly write about the relationship pitfalls incurred by being a middle-aged obsessed music fan in a more recent novel, Juliet Naked.

High Fidelity was actually one of my first unofficial attempts at readers advisory.  I recommended it to a friend of mine who also liked to go to concerts and was passionate about music.  He’s a good writer and very smart, but I never saw him reading a book or talking about books.  He’s more social than I am (majored in marketing, works in social media and advertising now).  But I thought of him when I read High Fidelity because of the voice of the narrator,  the book's  almost conversational tone, and the alt-rock music setting.  Maybe the narrator reminded me of him, as well as of myself.  He loved it, saying with his textbook succinctness: “I’ve only read a handful of books from cover to cover in my life and this is one of them.”

https://youtu.be/_SQMl51RDIQ
https://youtu.be/0eBh6xipKYk
https://youtu.be/WykvFDfBn5c
https://youtu.be/b30SrJ5s_TQ
https://youtu.be/F3KLbFkmpRY

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Continental Drift by Russell Banks (1985, Harper & Row)

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Continental Drift by Russell Banks (1985, Harper & Row)

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I’m not sure how I got turned onto Russell Banks and Continental Drift but I think I may have borrowed my Dad’s copy of Affliction also by Banks. I remember reading this when I was 27 on the subway and it seemed like the epitome of the Great American Novel to me.  I was really engrossed in it but in a less “sleazy” way than with  The Killer Inside Me.  It wasn’t as manic and out of control as A Fan’s Notes.  Nor as accessible and simple as High Fidelity.  To me this was “high art” and I was glad that I was genuinely enjoying it.

It was the book I would recommend to literate people I wanted to impress but I also genuinely loved it and wasn’t being entirely pretentious in my recommendation.  I haven’t read all of Banks’ books, far from it, and frankly I don’t intend to.  I feel like he nailed it with Affliction and Continental Drift. For me, Banks represented a more sophisticated, modern literary sense of grittiness than Jim Thompson or other noir writers.  I felt like Banks was an important transition for me away from the past and into the present literary world (the present at that time at least, mid to late 90's).

In Continental Drift, a blue collar oil worker uproots his family from New Hampshire to Florida.  His story intersects with a Haitian immigrant woman’s story which has been interwoven throughout the novel in a parallel plot.  This novel resonated with my own sense of travel and restlessness as I tried to find my geographic home, my “globetrotting” from city to city to find someplace I could settle down in (in truth only a few cities in different parts of the country, but it took a lot to even move and experience that).

Sadly, Banks passed away on January 7, 2023 in Saratoga Springs, NY.   I always daydreamed about meeting him at a certain diner in the Adirondacks that he described in one of his stories.

The New York Times: Book Review Search Article (nytimes.com)

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A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley (1968, Harper & Row)

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A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley (1968, Harper & Row)

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A Fan’s Notes was another recommendation from my friend who went to the University of Michigan.  The frenzied tone of Exley’s writing resonated with me.  It was so different from “classic” literature but no less intelligent, probably even more so.  This was literature I wanted to read, that spoke to me.  That I wanted to write myself.   In fact, when I read it, I felt like "I found it.  Do I really need to read anything else after this?"

A Fan’s Notes is based on Exley’s life as a writer, English teacher and obsessive NY Giants fan, who felt out of place with his society that he could never really succeed in despite trying.    This was Exley's debut novel, and you could tell it was busting to get out of him.  The tone is frenzied desperation.  This wasn't a choice for Exley.  It had to be written.   As someone in my mid-late 20's seeking authenticity and truth, this was it.

I read this when I was living in Brooklyn and working at the Brooklyn Public Library (after working at an awful, pseudo-corporate “newswire” job the silver lining of which was that I made many lifelong friends there), and going to bars in Clinton Hill and Williamsburgh to watch the Knicks valiantly lose in the NBA Finals in 1998 (“Why don’t they bench Ewing?” I would demand at the bar as I concocted starting Knicks lineups).  That was my personal fan's notes, my version of Exley's obsession with Frank Gifford, the Giants quarterback.

This was another litmus test book for me.  If you read A Fan’s Notes, we were already on the road to friendship.  Curiously (or probably not curiously actually), the only person I ever met who read A Fan’s Notes and The Killer Inside Me, was my friend who had recommended them to me!  Haha.

Siren Voices (nytimes.com)

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Freedom/Purity/The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2010, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

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Freedom/Purity/The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2010, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

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I started reading Franzen in 2010 with the publication of Freedom.  I believe it was actually Barack O’Bama who turned me onto Franzen (although my Dad had also been reading his first novel years earlier I later found out).  That was one thing I loved about O’Bama: he was the first president who could actually recommend a book or record to me.  And that meant I could trust him.  So reading Franzen represented a change in my reading life in that I was now a grown up, reading grown up books that the president of the United States also reads.

I know a lot of people don’t like Franzen.  They think he’s stuck up or over-rated.  Personally, I think Franzen has accomplished making the Great American novel accessible.  I think of him as the Kurt Cobain of modern literature, turning punk rock into a quality “product” that is less elitist than its influences and allows many more people to be aware of and enjoy.  His novels start slowly (I didn’t think I would get through the first 100 pages of The Corrections), but then pick up steam and progress at breakneck speed so that they are impossible to put down.

I have been reading Franzen's latest novel Crossroads for longer than I'd care to admit.  It's not bad but it's just not riveting and I am so busy now, I'm not in a novel reading mode.  Maybe my Franzen period is finally over.  However, I am still learning from him.  The next author I plan to read is Paula Fox whom Franzen recommended in one of his essays, as mentioned in the netflix show You base on the novel You by Caroline Kepnes.

https://youtu.be/J3qjCvkQWvs
https://youtu.be/KfPXTJbEgRA
https://youtu.be/JA2Ajqwc_yQ

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AOKvIeV_BaTJRgPK-h6c_HP0oh5cirIg5Mb18zCGgVM/edit?usp=sharing

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The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson (1952, Fawcett Publications)

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The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson (1952, Fawcett Publications)

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The Killer Inside Me was a book I was obsessed with in my mid 20’s that my best friend turned me onto.  He was a creative writing major at the University of Michigan and I got some good recommendations from him.  I didn’t take any literature classes in college.  I was all art -- film and then photography.  And that was the symbiotic nature of our friendship.  He loaned me books and I taught him how to play guitar and encouraged his photography and drawing.  We spent a lot of time together at Veselka’s in the East Village, jamming in his apartment on the 8 track and in rehearsal spaces with our friends and going to see bands and art exhibits.

The Killer Inside Me reminded me of my friend: dark and smart.  This became one of my desert island books and one of my judgemental litmus tests when I met someone (had they read The Killer Inside Me?).  The Killer Inside Me is typical noir, but more extreme, intense and sensational than Raymond Chandler and its predecessors.  Apparently it was made into a movie twice, but I have zero desire to see them.  In fact, you’d have to force my eyeballs open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange because I’d rather not have my book experience replaced with movie visuals.

However, would I like this book if I read it for the first time today?  I'm in such a different place now emotionally and maturity-wise with a wife and kids, trying to make enough money to get by.  I'm not looking for a book to pledge myself to and bond with as a piece of my identity.

And the world is a different place.  The extreme violence and sensationalism of this book might not feel so entertaining now since it is basically commonplace in real life in 2023 with mass shootings occurring so frequently and tabloid grisly murders splashed across the nightly news.