Dirty Baker's Dozen

Back in college I started writing down every book I read. I kept the lists and compiled them at the end of the year (the school year: June to June). At the time, I was frustrated with my inability to remember precisely what I’d been reading a few months back. If you named a specific title, I could tell you if I read it, but if someone asked what I read during the summer, maybe half a dozen books came to mind and that was it.


As it turned out, the lists were fascinating. Going back over them, I could find patterns in my reading, some of which I was unaware of. I discovered predilections I hadn’t noticed over the year (like the reading of five John Sandford novels one year, more than I read any other author).


As a spin off, it allowed me to recollect at the close of each school year and recommend to folks the best of what I’d read for the year. I read a lot of books (I didn’t print the whole list here…trust me, I spared you), and I like to think I have good taste. People are always asking if I’ve read anything good lately.


Well, this is my answer. The 08-09 dirty baker’s dozen, listed in the order in which I read them.


Enjoy.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner

Stegner is not well known today, which is unfortunate. He is a great western writer the way John Steinbeck and Larry McMurtry are great western writers. He doesn’t do cowboys and Indians, he does everyday people out West, and he writes passionately and beautifully about the land and the geography shapes our destiny.

He is also a heck of a storyteller.

This novel about Bo Mason and his courting and marriage to his wife Elsa and beyond into his days as a rum runner during Prohibition is a wild, ruckus tale filled with so many wonderful, funny and heartbreaking moments. Bo is a fascinating character, a man you grow to both love and hate. His fate is obvious throughout the story, but he tries so hard to break free of it and beat it you can’t help but root for him.

His relationship with Elsa is at times romantic and tempestuous, and Stegner’s understanding of marital relationships is profound. He digs deep throughout the novel, and when you close this book you’ll find yourself wondering why Stegner isn’t as highly praised as his contemporaries.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I read this book the first time in high school. Wowed by it then, it sealed my love for Steinbeck, and since then I’ve read everything Steinbeck ever wrote. I finally am making my way through him a second time, and it seemed time to return to this seminal novel, which many consider his best.

This book is not as good as they say. It’s better. It’s not great. It’s a titan. This is a heavy, hard-swinging, head-cracking, thunder on the mountaintop kind of novel. It knocks the pants off the few books you can mention in its company. Great Gatsby. Wimpy by comparison. To Kill a Mockingbird. Too soft and sweet. Huck Finn. Too playful.

It’s not that other novels aren’t great, it’s that Grapes lands with such a impact it’s like standing in the aftermath of an F5 tornado. Other books just seem weak after this.

I think it’s important people read this one again as adults, because as a kid you have so little perspective. You need the knowledge of adulthood and responsibility to feel the full weight of what the Joad’s go through on their trek from Oklahoma to California. Also, you need an adult’s conception of righteous anger.

And yes, this really is Steinbeck’s finest novel.

United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal

This book is a monster. The essays span forty years and some 1,000 pages and cover every topic imaginable. Divided into three sections, Art, Politics, Other, Vidal rampages through literature and American society with an incisive wit and unparalleled insight that makes other critics look like little boys in need of dunce cap.

What I love most about Vidal is that he’s the only critic I’ve ever read who inspires not just thoughtful nods but wicked chuckles and roll out of your chair laughter. He writes with beautiful, elegant sentences, but he is bluntly observant and he never keeps his acerbic pen under control just for the sake of political correctness.

Only Vidal would state that James Baldwin’s inclusion by critics as one of the best American writers of his generation was not because of Baldwin’s extreme talent, but because the elderly white establishment of critics needed a “token nigger.”

I don’t read a lot of essayists, but I plowed through this tomb and looked forward to every moment I spent with it.

Leather Maiden by Joe R. Lansdale

Lansdale wrote one of my favorite short stories of all time, The Night They Missed the Horror Show, and since then I’ve always been on the lookout for his latest work. He is a quirky and mighty talent, churning out dark, brooding Southern-gothic fiction that puts most writers to shame. It is a sad story that he is not at the top of the bestseller lists, because his mystery novels blow the socks off his weaker contemporaries like Mary Higgins Clark, Tony Hillerman or JA Jance.

Further, Lansdale is damn funny. Especially when writing dialogue, which he does as well as anyone. When Lansdale’s characters start talking, the feeling you get is one of both awe and jealousy. He makes it look so friggin easy.

I won’t spoil the plot of this story for you, mostly because trying to explain it doesn’t do it justice. It’s a thriller of a story though, and it gets my award for Best Book Cover of the Year.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Token nigger indeed. Baldwin really was one of the greatest writers of his generation, an elegant disciple of Henry James only with old Henry’s reservations about graphic sex. Baldwin’s fiction is sadly under-appreciated, although his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain is still popular.

It is, however, as an essayist that I find Baldwin the most compelling. When reading his essays you are instantly and reverently aware of the power of the man’s mind. His writing is so light and smooth and elegant with the most polished fluid sentences that you can’t hardly believe it’s possible for someone to produce such beautiful writing. Matching his style, though, is his deep, profound insight into humanity.

In our day in which everyone seems content with the Twitter version of modern thought, Baldwin’s complete essays ought to be required reading. This, his first collection, is a stunning diatribe on race relations in America, as relevant today as it was in the 60’s. You want to know what it really feels like to be black? Read Baldwin. He’ll open your eyes.

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

This is the novel I always hand out to the uninitiated. So many people know of King only through the media attention he receives, not through his actual written works. Thus, they have built up in their minds the idea that all King writes is ghastly, ghoulish horror fiction. If that ain’t your thing, but you want to see what King can do, start here. I gave this book to my best friend, who was extremely skeptical, and she read it and loved it. Now she’s a believer.

This is a late novel for King, a modern ghost story blended with a modern love story. The haunting is there, but not in the ways you will imagine. This is a big, complex story, a story about marriage, love, memory, and the sins of the past.

It is the story of Mike Noonan, popular writer whose wife has suddenly died. The story begins with Mike identifying his wife’s body at the morgue, and moves swiftly to his discovery that his wife was pregnant at the time of her death…a fact she had hidden from him.

The novel unfolds as Mike returns to the summer home he and his wife shared as he tries to pick up the pieces of his life, a house they called Sara Laughs. But when Mike returns he finds he is not the only occupant at Sara Laughs.

This is my second reading of this novel, and I reread The Shining as well this year. Looking back over the both of them, I discovered that while The Shining is a brilliant novel and the one King will be the most long remembered for, I honestly felt Bag of Bones was the better, stronger book, the one which hit me deeper and resonated with me longer. It packs a whallop.

Absolute Brightness by James Lecesne

I wrote about this fine novel late last year write after I read it. Everything I said about it then holds true even now. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. A story that should have fallen in on itself half a dozen times, a plot that should have been nothing but reheated and overly sentimental hash, a cast of characters that should have worn and grated on, and it never was any of these things.

This is one of the most unpredictable books I’ve read in years. It is funny, astounding, and deeply moving. I know teenagers well, and this book nails them, a fact that ought to win Lecesne a dozen awards. Almost every YA writer insults their audience time and again by either making teenagers idiotically simple or perversely immoral. Lecesne does neither. His teenagers are as real as they get.

For the time being, this is the finest YA novel I’ve ever read, and one of those rare novels that can be recommended to anyone of any age group. It is a powerful, memorable read.

Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago

What would happen if Death decided to take an extended holiday? What if Death simply up and decided that there would be no more dying? What if Death put down the scythe?

It ain’t the pretty picture you might imagine. You see, people don’t stop getting injured. They don’t stop getting older. They don’t stop falling apart or suffering or getting into horrific traffic accidents. All of this continues.

They just don’t die.

Saramago is one of the most original writers I’ve ever discovered, and his writing style is so simple and fluid and ingenious that he is the envy of the literary world. He is one of the writers of whom it can be said that nobody writes like him.

This slender little novel is one of his best. A brilliant meditation on death, love and politics. They don’t make writers better than this.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Simmons’s takes off on the actual disastrous Arctic voyage of Sir John Franklin, whose ships The Terror and The Erebus disappeared into the Arctic ice in search of the Northwest Passage in 1845. While Franklin’s expedition was never heard from again, Simmons’s imagines their fate.

When the ships become stuck in the ice, the men in the expedition quickly discover that the cold and the ice are the least of their worries. Captain Francis Crozier must keep his men under control as they find themselves under siege from a demonic beast that stalks them upon the ice, a beast that rips men apart with and feeds on their bodies but moves with such stunning speed and ferocity that no one can catch a glimpse of the thing.

At first, the men think it is a savage polar bear, but Crozier soon comes to understand this is no bear. This is something far worse, and it will not stop stalking his men. And since they’re stuck in the ice, they will be here with this monster for a very long time.

Simmons is a fantastic writer, full of imagination and intensity. This novel kept me riveted in my seat for days on end. A taut, nerve-racking tale of adventure, the Arctic, terror and brutality, I haven’t read anything quite like it in a long time. This is not a novel to be missed.

The Brother’s K by David James Duncan

Another book I wrote about previously. This novel has a little bit of everything. It is laugh-out-loud hilarious, full of tragedy, crammed with emotion, stacked with insight into family, baseball, religion, this is one giant, towering American novel.

Reading Duncan, the thought that comes again and again is that this is exactly what a real family is like. Real families really are this crazy, this loving, this wild, this strong, this out and out funny. Duncan tackles almost everything, including the turbulence of the 1960’s and the searing effects of the Vietnam war. Many writers attempt to cover this ground, and few succeed.

If you want to step into a novel that will keep you up and night and make you feel good about the long struggle of raising a family, this is it. I haven’t read more than a small handful of books as good as this one.

The Erotic Poems by Ovid

I read a good deal of poetry, though my favorites are an eclectic mix. I generally prefer clarity and simplicity of approach over the willful obscurity of many modern poets (with the exception of TS Eliot, who I love). I also love humor, a quality not often found in poetry.

With Ovid, it’s found in abundance, as is his simplicity and clear, clean writing. This guy is a hoot. You can’t read these poems with a straight face, and it has nothing to do with the sex. Ovid isn’t really that explicit, rarely mentioning the details of the actual acts of love. He remains focused on the before and after, and his pen is always sharpest on himself.

If you thought rakishness was invented in the modern world, you need to read these poems. Ovid is the classic bad boy, but his delightful, intelligent, outrageous, comic genius shines through in every line, and you can’t help but find yourself on his side, wishing his mistress’s maidservant really would stop being such a prude and let Ovid through the door and into his mistress’s room.

Light in August by William Faulkner

Many of Faulkner’s works can be difficult and demanding. Thus, many readers are turned off and walk away long before they should. Light in August is an exception, an easy-on-the-eyes read that unwinds in spectacular fashion. Faulkner really is a master storyteller, and when he doesn’t let his style get in the way but lets it unfold simply there are few writers who are his equal.

This is a large novel, but one that reads briskly. What strikes you most throughout is the way Faulkner winds in and out of his characters’ lives, the way the story seems to grow in unexpected ways and then circling back on itself and changing the outcome over and over again. You constantly find yourself surprised and then realizing that you should have seen it coming all along.

Faulkner’s vision of the South and of America is not often cheery, but this is a big book that encompasses the whole range of emotion. By the end, the real question is how he manages to squeeze so much out of a very simple and very common story.

If you want a good place to begin with Faulkner, this is it. Many people begin with Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying, both of which are much shorter…and much more difficult reading.