Chris's Picks
Selected Poems by W.H. Auden
Auden is a poet of great versatility in his imagery, form, and content. He engages a wide range of subjects, including politics and religion, and his voice is that of the common man. Auden rarely participates in the kind of esoteric theatrics that mark Eliot and other Modernists, making Auden's poetry much more accessible to the general public. Not that the reader is spared any depth or power of language. The poems are rife with clear imagery and written with imagination. Auden is a great poet, and an excellent start for or addition to any collection.
*This new edition includes a wider selection of poems than previously printed in the Selected Poems, and prints versions of the poems that were originally published, unrevised by Auden later in his life.*
Knopf Publishing Group
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
When I say this isn't Pulitzer Prize material, I mean that in the best way possible. Chabon moves away from the grandiose, feel-good poetics of his prize winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, to the distinct vocalizations and plotting of hard-boiled detection. In an imaginative feat, Chabon transposes the twists and turns of Chandler or Hammet into a Jewish settlement in Alaska, reeking of the familiar noir disillusionment.
HarperCollins Publishers
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
In what may seem like a gimmick, James Joyce writes the chapters of his young artist's life in the proper voice of each period of his life. The effect is extremely effective, as the reader watches the prose grow in complexity with the boy's years. Joyce writes with great insight into the young man's psychology as he addresses his Irish heritage and his need for independence for the sake of his identity and artistic integrity. The boy matures, and begins to engage the world around him, and we are allowed to see into the paradoxical passion and temperance of his aesthetic genius, the rippled reflection of Joyce, himself. It's a compelling read, elegantly written and brilliantly conceived.
Penguin Group
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear
Jonathan Lear, psychoanalyst and philosopher, has written this excellent account and analysis of the last Crow chief, Plenty Coups. In a kind of cultural therapy, Lear illustrates what Plenty Coups and the Crow may have experienced when their own society was on the verge of collapse, due to the advance of American guns and culture. What Lear does is philosophical analysis, he is quick to mention that what he writes is not some kind of historical record, but rather a psychological sketch that may get at what allowed Plenty Coups and the Crow to survive the end of their systems for evaluating meaning and value. Lear's work provides a very compelling account of how individuals and societies can look beyond their own patterns of thought, beyond their limited ethical systems, and hope and work out a new way of being. I think that Lear's book is quite relevant because he provides impetus for America to analyze and evaluate the maelstrom of cultural values and traditions fighting for significance in it's society; in light of increasing globalization, we can avoid condescendingly endorsing foreign cultures as well as avoid blindly endorsing our own. Regardless of my own positions on our culture, the book provides an opportunity to consider the very critical questions orbiting the death of a culture, guided by Lear's brilliant insights.
Harvard University Press
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, 25th Anniversary Edition by Norman MacLean
In many ways, this book is the culmination of Professor MacLean's life, who, at the end of his tenure at the University of Chicago sat down to write this book. The title is a suitable metaphor for the work, which meanders and flows like a river, quickly and slowly through time and relationships. MacLean, in elegant economy of prose, describes his own efforts to relate to his brother Paul, to understand and to help him. Around that focal center, MacLean writes on his relationships with his wife, mother, and father, the intricacies of which he could not discern in the closeness and love he had for them. MacLean frames the tale in the trees and rivers and majestic stone of Montana, finding appropriate depth and color in the ancient rocks and eternal water for the mystery of human relationships.
University of Chicago Press
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
A disclaimer, this is a violent book. Literary critic Harold Bloom could not bring himself to finish the book multiple times because of the carnage depicted. Cormac McCarthy's magnum opus is a brutal, alienating epic set along the Texas-Mexico border. The story centers on the Kid, we know little more about him, and events surrounding the Glanton gang, a band of hunters of Apache scalps. McCarthy has developed one of the most terrifying figures in American literature in Judge Holden, a seemingly eternal, hairless, cultured human, who expounds a philosophy and religion of violence and bloodshed, in word and deed. He seems supernatural at times, though still a distinct personality. As the band's violent offenses increase in brutality and magnitude, McCarthy draws us closer to the fundamental violence of culture. This is a compelling, mythical tale, steeped in vivid baroque language.
Knopf Publishing Group
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy has written this post-apocalyptic nightmare, our own nightmare, giving physical shape to philosophical, ethical, and cultural devastation. A father and son have survived, and now must travel south to find warmth and food, while packs of other survivors threaten their existence. What I appreciate so much about McCarthy in this novel is that he has forcibly ripped away any object or pretense that would distract the protagonist from what is essentially and chiefly good in his own existence. The father in this story must believe that his son's survival and maturity is what matters. Many times he orders his son to look away, to shut his eyes and save himself from whatever new tragedy has bled and died on the road. It is the love between the two characters, father and son, which is a beacon, clear and distinct amidst the violent remains of the hopeless and bestial humans who course the road. All this is to say nothing of the terse and rhythmic prose, which in subdued tones, gives form to the sparse, ash-ridden landscape. A wavering tension is maintained throughout the novel, as the situation between the father and son becomes more and less hopeless, as the father's duty to his son, and their love becomes clearer. This novel is difficult work, but worth the travail for the vision of real hope and humanity that McCarthy provides in striking words and images.
Knopf Publishing Group
Buy This Book
Don't be intimidated by the size -- Pynchon keeps a fast pace, jumping from one track in the story to another. The book is a pastiche of classic pulp genres, which Pynchon navigates ably. He turns each genre styling out with depth and a good amount of absurdity. The story is crazy, the world is crazy, but real characters sort it out, real people try to make sense of it. Amidst the many threads of this story is a humanity and humor appropriate to our chaotic times.
Penguin Group
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon has written, and continues to write formidably long books, so the Crying of Lot 49 is a welcome oddity, weighing in at 152 pages. Oedipa Maas is a familiar mild-mannered middle class woman, who is made executor of an ex-boyfriend's estate after he dies. What follows is a surreal detective story, in which Oedipa investigates the Postal Service as much as her own identity. It's strange and tense, a real existential tragedy lined in ironic satire. Pynchon writes in whirling imagery that races through a centuries old conspiracy involving an underground mail system. The questions he provokes concerning the nature of knowledge and reality are pertinent and interesting. The book is well worth the effort, and an accessible entry into the oeuvre of one of America's best writers.
Harper Perrenial Modern Classics
The Lightning Thief: Book 1, Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan
If you are a fan of Harry Potter and are looking for a new fantasy series to occupy your time, Rick Riordan's series Percy Jackson and the Olympains is a great place to start again. The first book, The Lightning Thief, is a wild adventure tale that follows Perseus Jackson, son of the Greek god Poseidon, as he discovers his parentage, searches out the stolen lightning bolt of Zeus, fights with Ares, and encounters many more mythological characters.
Hyperion Books for Children
What happened to America in the years between the wars, WW2 and Vietnam, and after? "Swede" Levov is the traditional American hero, a sports star to middle-class business owner. He is the emblem of the postwar dream of success. Inside the life of the "Swede," Roth tracks the generational conflict between 1960's radicals and their more conservative postwar parents. Swede Levov, who is by all means the fulfillment of the American dream, fails to cope with his own daughter's dissent with his suburban life, which she channels through radical opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. The Swede is tragic in his naivete; he was the idol, the best American, but his life, his ideals, proved ultimately false. As American politics unravel in Vietnam and Watergate, so goes the Levov home. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter-ego, narrates in elegant and fiery prose that keeps the pages turning.
Random House
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
October 2007 saw the release of Roth's final book, Exit Ghost, narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter-ego, and there has not been a better time to return to the beginning, The Ghost Writer, where the young Roth fictionalizes arguably Bernard Malamud in the figure of E.I. Lonoff, the reclusive Jewish immigrant author. Lonoff has invited young Zuckerman, who seeks an artistic mentor, to his home for dinner, where the tensions in Lonoff's relationship with his wife are stressed near to breaking. Zuckerman finds much artistic inspiration in the evening's events, in Lonoff and his student Amy Bellette. Roth demands the reader question the legitimacy of artistic representation while waxing elegent on the state of the independent Jewish artist through the voice and actions of Zuckerman. These themes find themselves in all Roth's fiction in various ways, none so compelling as his first foray into the person of Nathan Zuckerman.
Knopf Publishing Group