-"The Silent Woman" by Janet Malcolm. This was a book that led me to ask, What if Sylvia Plath was sort of obnoxious, and Ted Hughes wasn't all that bad? Malcolm looks at several biographies. Her point is that biographies are basically novels; they are full of lies, despite a writer's best intentions. (Note the fun and bitchy twitter messages that a new "memoir," "Chasing Hillary," have provoked from Chelsea Clinton!) Malcolm is so good at exposing various "facts" as fictions: She does this over and over, with regard to the legal system, in "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" and "The Crime of Sheila McGough." She takes the same approach to the practice of "journalism," in "Journalist and the Murderer." (Malcolm's skepticism was so bracing, in that one book, that it inspired the great filmmaker Errol Morris, a Malcolm acolyte, to write an entire, lengthy tome, "A Wilderness of Error," disputing Malcolm's claims. There really are facts! said Morris. Some things really did happen, and we have records of those things happening!) In "Reading Chekhov," Malcolm amusingly walks us through maybe five or six sober-eyed "reports" on the death of Anton Chekhov; of course, no report matches any other report. Anyway, I love Janet Malcolm because she's so strange; I imagine someone said, Write a true crime potboiler about a contract killing in Forest Hills, and Malcolm came back with a deranged philosophical treatise, asking, "What is crime? What is truth?" "Silent Woman" has all the famous Sylvia Plath juiciness--multiple suicides, filial rage--and it seems to have been written by an angel. Malcolm is a contender for a My Favorite Writer title (in my view).
-"See What Can Be Done" by Lorrie Moore. This is a book of essays that makes me laugh out loud, even when I am sitting alone in public places--trains, restaurants. Moore has a thought-through worldview, and it's pitch-black. My current favorite is her essay on memoirs. "Jill Bialosky's slightly mistitled 'History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life' is a bumpy but stirring attempt to get to the bottom of the suicide at twenty-one of her younger half sister, who after having been broken up with by a longtime beau, asphyxiated herself in the family garage, with her medicated mother sleeping well into the afternoon upstairs." Read that sentence again. Can you imagine anyone else pausing to note that "Unfinished Life" is an inaccurate phrase? Only Lorrie Moore. Another favorite sentence, this one from Ms. Moore's typically unhinged thoughts on Jonbenet Ramsay: "There is something about the killing of a pretty little rich girl that disorganizes everybody." On each page, there is at least one sentence on this high level. The memoir-essays are among the best, and it's also fun to track Moore's fearless and idiosyncratic thoughts on Obama and Clinton.
-"A Judgment in Stone" by Ruth Rendell. "Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write. There was no real motive and no premeditation. No money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman's disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished by it nothing but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing..." The Queen of the Counterintuitive, Ruth Rendell, recognized that human behaviors are not always--maybe not often--rational. It is possible to kill simply because you are annoyed by your own illiteracy. (Writing about love, Alain de Botton has said, we tend to think we need grand and pretty explanations for why we love whom we love, but it might just be that a certain guy's beard triggers a pleasant memory from twenty years ago--and a life is changed because of something as paltry as that.) Some people find Rendell's characters repellent--and they often are--but I love the icy authority of her sentences. Not a word wasted. She has been called "the Hitchcock of novelists." Joyce Carol Oates is an ardent fan; Ian Rankin said, "Rendell's output in the eighties and nineties was consistently better than the Booker Prize winner in any given year." Toni Morrison goes back--and back, and back--to Rendell, because she is stunned by Rendell's endless inventiveness. "You write a novel, and you're tired, and you think, how many new ways can there be for describing the moon? And then--there. Rendell has thought of a new one." Can I also say--I'm reading the overpraised, windy Tana French right now, and thinking her book could be trimmed by about two-thirds. (Does she really need to tell us that a certain shadow is black? Good God.) Bagginess is something you really can't ever find in Ruth Rendell's prose.
-"Dear Mr. Henshaw" by Beverly Cleary. Cleary is an American master, and almost every single one of her novels could make this list. I have a soft spot for "Henshaw." I like the daring nature of the epistolary format. I like that Cleary takes on a rather ugly divorce--without batting an eye, and while still clearly writing for children. I like that there are disturbing undertones of parental abandonment, or semi-abandonment. Of course, I like that one of the main plots is The Making of a Writer. And I'm always moved by the problem of the lunch bag. The little boy is whining, in a letter, about how someone always steals his lunch. (The boy's father does not tackle problems; he simply runs away; and so the boy himself does not have much in the way of grit, or self-starter tenacity, when the story starts.) The writer/pen pal, whom the boy has sought out, becomes a kind of surrogate father, a mentor. He says, "So your lunch keeps going missing. What are *you* going to do about it?" (Cleary was a child of the Great Depression, and she has always had very little patience with whininess. She must look at our world today and feel something like despair.) Anyway, the boy finds his own solution: He designs an alarm that will go off when the lunch gets stolen. Metonymy--a crisp, simple way of indicating deep character development. This is a moving novel.
-"Math by All Means" by Marilyn Burns. This is actually a series of guidebooks for teaching math to small children. One is on multiplication, one is on geometry, one tackles money, one tackles place value. A subject as unsexy as place value! Here's what you need to do with your little kid. Have him draw stars. Five-point stars, six-point stars, eight-point stars. Challenge him: How many stars do you think you can draw in one minute? The kid draws the stars. Now: Can you count them by ones? The child is bizarrely, intensely motivated; children are invested in their stars. And: If you count by twos, do you think the total will be the same, or different? (Many children think the total will be different, because CHILDREN ARE WACKY! This is called conservation of number.) And if you count by fives? By tens? Say your total is 23--what does the "2" in 23 represent? Almost all of Burns's lessons are on this level. They are simple and spellbinding. (Watch what she does with raisins.) Best of all: Burns's writing includes transcripts of her own bits of teaching, and she notes when she fucked up, and how lessons fell apart, in amusing ways. I can't overstate how important these books can be for an insecure young teacher--especially because teaching can be an isolating profession, and because you may weigh yourself against your apparently perfect colleagues and feel that you are floundering. But I'd recommend them, also, for anyone outside the classroom--anyone who spends a fair amount of time in the company of kids. Or, really, anyone who sometimes finds himself wondering about math, or about the natural world. They're really that good.
-"See What Can Be Done" by Lorrie Moore. This is a book of essays that makes me laugh out loud, even when I am sitting alone in public places--trains, restaurants. Moore has a thought-through worldview, and it's pitch-black. My current favorite is her essay on memoirs. "Jill Bialosky's slightly mistitled 'History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life' is a bumpy but stirring attempt to get to the bottom of the suicide at twenty-one of her younger half sister, who after having been broken up with by a longtime beau, asphyxiated herself in the family garage, with her medicated mother sleeping well into the afternoon upstairs." Read that sentence again. Can you imagine anyone else pausing to note that "Unfinished Life" is an inaccurate phrase? Only Lorrie Moore. Another favorite sentence, this one from Ms. Moore's typically unhinged thoughts on Jonbenet Ramsay: "There is something about the killing of a pretty little rich girl that disorganizes everybody." On each page, there is at least one sentence on this high level. The memoir-essays are among the best, and it's also fun to track Moore's fearless and idiosyncratic thoughts on Obama and Clinton.
-"A Judgment in Stone" by Ruth Rendell. "Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write. There was no real motive and no premeditation. No money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman's disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished by it nothing but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing..." The Queen of the Counterintuitive, Ruth Rendell, recognized that human behaviors are not always--maybe not often--rational. It is possible to kill simply because you are annoyed by your own illiteracy. (Writing about love, Alain de Botton has said, we tend to think we need grand and pretty explanations for why we love whom we love, but it might just be that a certain guy's beard triggers a pleasant memory from twenty years ago--and a life is changed because of something as paltry as that.) Some people find Rendell's characters repellent--and they often are--but I love the icy authority of her sentences. Not a word wasted. She has been called "the Hitchcock of novelists." Joyce Carol Oates is an ardent fan; Ian Rankin said, "Rendell's output in the eighties and nineties was consistently better than the Booker Prize winner in any given year." Toni Morrison goes back--and back, and back--to Rendell, because she is stunned by Rendell's endless inventiveness. "You write a novel, and you're tired, and you think, how many new ways can there be for describing the moon? And then--there. Rendell has thought of a new one." Can I also say--I'm reading the overpraised, windy Tana French right now, and thinking her book could be trimmed by about two-thirds. (Does she really need to tell us that a certain shadow is black? Good God.) Bagginess is something you really can't ever find in Ruth Rendell's prose.
-"Dear Mr. Henshaw" by Beverly Cleary. Cleary is an American master, and almost every single one of her novels could make this list. I have a soft spot for "Henshaw." I like the daring nature of the epistolary format. I like that Cleary takes on a rather ugly divorce--without batting an eye, and while still clearly writing for children. I like that there are disturbing undertones of parental abandonment, or semi-abandonment. Of course, I like that one of the main plots is The Making of a Writer. And I'm always moved by the problem of the lunch bag. The little boy is whining, in a letter, about how someone always steals his lunch. (The boy's father does not tackle problems; he simply runs away; and so the boy himself does not have much in the way of grit, or self-starter tenacity, when the story starts.) The writer/pen pal, whom the boy has sought out, becomes a kind of surrogate father, a mentor. He says, "So your lunch keeps going missing. What are *you* going to do about it?" (Cleary was a child of the Great Depression, and she has always had very little patience with whininess. She must look at our world today and feel something like despair.) Anyway, the boy finds his own solution: He designs an alarm that will go off when the lunch gets stolen. Metonymy--a crisp, simple way of indicating deep character development. This is a moving novel.
-"Math by All Means" by Marilyn Burns. This is actually a series of guidebooks for teaching math to small children. One is on multiplication, one is on geometry, one tackles money, one tackles place value. A subject as unsexy as place value! Here's what you need to do with your little kid. Have him draw stars. Five-point stars, six-point stars, eight-point stars. Challenge him: How many stars do you think you can draw in one minute? The kid draws the stars. Now: Can you count them by ones? The child is bizarrely, intensely motivated; children are invested in their stars. And: If you count by twos, do you think the total will be the same, or different? (Many children think the total will be different, because CHILDREN ARE WACKY! This is called conservation of number.) And if you count by fives? By tens? Say your total is 23--what does the "2" in 23 represent? Almost all of Burns's lessons are on this level. They are simple and spellbinding. (Watch what she does with raisins.) Best of all: Burns's writing includes transcripts of her own bits of teaching, and she notes when she fucked up, and how lessons fell apart, in amusing ways. I can't overstate how important these books can be for an insecure young teacher--especially because teaching can be an isolating profession, and because you may weigh yourself against your apparently perfect colleagues and feel that you are floundering. But I'd recommend them, also, for anyone outside the classroom--anyone who spends a fair amount of time in the company of kids. Or, really, anyone who sometimes finds himself wondering about math, or about the natural world. They're really that good.
I love your list!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mahalia! You made my day.
ReplyDelete