They say, those wizened wise and wondrous published authors, that as writers we’ll get nowhere if we don’t read. Luckily, we all read—at least those of us with common sense enough to get somewhere. As readers we all have our favorites, the books that grabbed hold of us and made us reach out to steady ourselves. There are books that have changed us, that still influence us to this day. There are books, it goes without saying, that we love.

Xenith would like to celebrate reading with a new series of articles. Part of our Reading List community column, we are now looking for any essays—personal or critical—that we can designate “Beloved Books.” Tell us about your favorites. Tell us why they’re your favorites. How have these books impacted your writing? How have these books impacted your life? Where would you be today without having read One Hundred Years of Solitude? What did you learn from reading Atlas Shrugged? It doesn’t matter what books you love. As usual, all that matters to us at Xenith is how you write about it.

That’s what we want—your literary essays, your emotionally charged testimonies, your analytical flowcharts or matrices. Remember—we’re all passionate about reading. All we ask is to see that passion so we can share it with our readers.

Submission should be sent to patrick.nathan@gmail.com with the subject: Submission – Beloved Books. We look forward to reading them.

Photo by chefranden

Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling debut novel hardly needs the help of a small webzine to sings its praises, but that’s not going to stop us from giving it some much deserved attention. Because the most adept of readers loves nothing more than to turn the pages; because we don’t let things like prose style or plausibility creep into our consciousness; because there’s nothing inherently complex about racial discrimination; because one prefers caricatures to characters, The Help is the most remarkable novel we’ve come across in years.

To call a novel a page-turner is to suggest that one can’t or doesn’t want to put it down. This is definitely the case with Stockett’s debut. It’s hard not to jump ahead, to let your eyes skip down a paragraph or two, just to get through it that much faster. One’s almost tempted to skip pages, it’s so exciting. Does it work out for Abilene and Minny and the white savior Miss Skeeter? Or is Stockett the kind of writer who lets the weight of the world crush these impossibly kind, conscious, dedicated women—women who have so few faults that it’s hard to even think of them as human beings? Will the soulless, vicious, inhuman-in-her-own-way Miss Hilly triumph and ruin the lives of everyone in her path (because that’s clearly what motivates all racist individuals)? There’s just no way to see it coming. The pages—you can almost hear them fluttering on airplanes and in waiting rooms.

One of the novels greatest successes is Stockett’s stylistic choice to highlight the drudgery and ignorance of 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi with intentionally dull prose. It’s remarkable, her eye for a forgettable sentence. “I listened wide-eyed, stupid,” Miss Skeeter says of her childhood maid. “Glowing by her voice in the dim light. If chocolate was a sound, it would’ve been Constantine’s voice singing.” When looking at a bloodstain on the bathroom floor, Minny remarks that “A chill blows through the room, like a ghost passing by.” Miss Skeeter, a guest in Abilene’s house, notices that “she stands a little taller in her own house,” after which Abilene looks at her “expectantly.” As if the racial differences aren’t quite highlighted enough, Miss Skeeter thinks to herself, “I wish I hadn’t worn such an expensive-looking dress.” Never before has an author used the ellipsis to such dramatic effect: “I wonder at how frail and inconsequential my mother has become,” Skeeter says. “She used to fill up a room by just breathing and now there seems to be… less of her.” Splendid, that dramatic pause, almost as though it were actually intended to fill us with awe at such insipid wit. That’s the real beauty of this book—it’s so poorly written that it’s almost metatextual, some kind of commentary on the literary qualities of the three women in the book. Perhaps Stockett, who illuminates Skeeter’s loneliness with a hilarious passage about an air conditioner*, is working toward something much darker here. Perhaps there is no literary hope for these three women as they work on their book. Perhaps all of us, as writers, are doomed to the confines of literary tradition, nothing left to explore and all creative outlets closed off. Stockett, it would seem, is a brilliant nihilist.

It’s this nihilism that helps us understand the rest of the book. In its pages, there is a clear divide between good and evil, between right and wrong, and its utter lack of complexity starts to nag at the reader. Then it clicks. Stockett, with her cartoonish vision of 1960s Jackson, is actually working to reveal how implausible it is to think there’s anything as possible as a quick fix, like the aforementioned clear divide. Racism, of course, is a very nuanced and byzantine topic with thousands of years of history. By portraying its complete opposite—a perfect little black and white world with such clean-cut morality—Stockett is aiding in our understanding of that complexity. We are shown a lifeless artifice, an exaggeration in its own way morbid and disrespectful, and on every page it reminds us of the truly devastating thing about racism: that it simply isn’t as simple as she makes it out to be. Stockett, without a doubt, understands the art of subtlety.

So where does that leave us, as readers? In her great nihilistic vision Stockett may one day join the ranks of our most accomplished writers, alongside Melville and Beckett. For that reason, let us hope that she doesn’t succumb to the populist ideals, let us hope that her prose continues down its path of subversive banality, that her characters go on living as lifeless stand-ins for themes, that her plots are so driven by irony that on the surface they appear as nothing more than beach reading, than novels that will be forgotten in five years. “The sun is bright but my eyes is wide open,” Abilene says as she goes off to start her new life at the book’s close. So too are this reader’s eyes, awake and aware of all the brilliant work to come.

***
* “For an hour, I hear Daddy and Jameso throwing switches and clanking tools, boots knocking on the porch. After they’ve fixed it and I sit through a lecture from Daddy to never turn it to “3” again it or will blow the house to pieces, Mother and I watch as an icy mist grows on the windows. Mother dozes in her blue Queen Anne chair, her green blanket pulled to her chest. I wait until she is asleep, listening for the soft snore, the pucker of her forehead. On tiptoe, I turn out all the lamps, the television, every electricity sucker downstairs save the refrigerator. I stand in front of the window and unbutton my blouse. Carefully, I turn the dial to “3.” Because I long to feel nothing. I want to be frozen inside. I want the icy cold to blow directly on my heart.”

For those unfamiliar with the world of José Saramago’s fiction, it’s a place where an entire city is stricken with an epidemic of blindness, where God and the Devil argue in front of Jesus over the savior’s fate, where the Iberian Peninsula suddenly breaks away from Europe and floats across the Atlantic. His books have routinely offered unique pleasures. With their paragraph-long sentences and their eschewing of traditional punctuation, they are labyrinthine fantasies that we never forget. His 2006 novel, Death with Interruptions, etches its own place in Saramago’s oeuvre. While outshined by works like Blindness and The History of the Siege of Lisbon, it still manages to leave any reader with that particular sense of awe we feel in the presence of any master.

“The following day, no one died.” In an unnamed European country, the first day of the new year is cause for both alarm and celebration. It is the first day in that country’s history that passes without a death. At first this is thought to be a fluke—a simple stroke of grace from whatever God governs up in the sky. Then another day goes without a death, and another. Citizens who by all accounts should be passing into the next life are holding on. The queen mother is constantly on the verge of death: “[She] neither improved nor deteriorated, she remained there in suspension, her frail body hovering on the very edge of life, threatening at any moment to tip over onto the other side, yet bound to this side by a tenuous thread to which, out of some strange caprice, death, because it could only have been death, continued to keep hold.” The citizens are ecstatic, having finally realized mankind’s oldest dream of overcoming mortality. They celebrate by displaying their nation’s flag on their doorsteps and in their windows. Months pass and the flags become faded and shredded by wind and weather. By this time the government has been pressured by the maphia (not the mafia) into paying exorbitant amounts of money to shuttle the nearly dead across the country’s borders where they can die and be buried on foreign soil. In all this tumult is death, sans a capital letter. Why has death, who may be more powerful than God, abandoned their country? What kind of game is death playing?

The book takes a turn when death makes her appearance. She is a frail, tiny skeleton covered in a shroud. She carries a scythe that is her only companion. She lives somewhere underground in a dark room filled with filing cabinets. When the terror of immortality becomes too much for mankind, death reveals her experiment to the public in what is essentially an “I told you so.” People are relieved to find out that death will take up her scythe and go back to work, with one exception. Death will no longer show up unexpectedly. From now on she will send a letter in a violet envelope one week prior to our preordained date of death: “a week in which to sort out affairs, make a will, pay their back taxes and say goodbye to their family and to their closest friends.” When death begins her experiment, we learn just how lonely she has become over the centuries. We learn that she is just as frail as the rest of us. We learn that she can fall in love with a mortal human being.

As a novel, Death with Interruptions suffers from its weak points. The first half recounts the country as it fails to accept its immortality, and the second half dramatically shifts into death’s personal affairs. In truth it feels like two novels. In addition, the love story comes too late for us to be engrossed in it. The only character we really get a glimpse of is death, and even that glimpse is eclipsed by Saramago himself, who may be too philosophical for his own good with aphoristic gems like “One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.” Yet that does not prevent his final novel from being a thoroughly enjoyable read. If anything, Death with Interruptions is a master’s reflection on our own shortcomings, but also our unique beauty. For so long we have feared mortality. We have trembled at the thought of death and her rusted scythe. Our lives go on empty and twisted as we wait for our day to come. Maybe we can learn from death—death who “knows everything about us, and that perhaps is why she’s sad.”

A reader who comes across the Vintage Contemporaries version of Katherine Dunn’s 1989 novel, Geek Love, will turn it over and find that The New York Times hailed the author as possessing a “tremendous imagination.” In the very first chapter of the novel we understand what the Times meant. As we read about the romantic and gruesome meeting of Al Binewski and Crystal Lil in the carnival geek pit (in which Lil is biting the heads off chickens) we are brought into a darker yet still very magical world. It isn’t long before we learn of the Binewski children—freaks in their own right, the products of intentional genetic modification through arsenic, radioisotopes, amphetamines. There’s Arturo the Aqua Boy with flippers instead of arms and legs, Elly and Iphy the conjoined twins, Oly the albino hunchbacked dwarf, and Chick—outwardly normal but in fact most unique of all the children. Right away we’re transported into the heart of a fiery imagination bent on creating what the Seattle Times called an “unforgettable world.”

The Fabulon—the traveling carnival featured in Geek Love—is an unforgettable world, yet underneath all the strangeness and the bizarre relationships the world is exactly like our own. At the core of Dunn’s novel are not the unusual and alien emotions we expect to find but the achingly human elations and desolations of familial love. Geek Love aims high, touting “wonderfully descriptive” prose and powerful themes. Unfortunately, the novel is a huge disappointment. Dunn’s “tremendous imagination” is not enough to deliver a solid work of art.

Although elaborate and deeply descriptive, Geek Love feels, more than anything, like a writer’s first draft. The prose style oscillates between the unique and the unbearably trite. Dunn always blends the high with the low, giving us wonderful passages like Oly’s moment of self discovery—“It was my secret ace, like a bluebird tattooed under pubic hair or a ruby tucked up my ass”—but to the reader’s dismay also giving us lines like “her eyes blinking at the air directly in front of her.” Characters deliver dialogue “conspiratorially” or “companionably,” at least when they don’t “proclaim” or “muse” or “giggle” their lines. To illustrate the age of a character, the narrator states, “Her hair strikes me as grey today, rather than white.” Reader’s would be pressed to find a more inconsistent prose style in what is generally considered to be one of the better books the contemporary literary scene has produced.

Of course prose style isn’t important to everyone and many readers will find themselves swept up in the book’s plot—inarguably arresting from the beginning. Although the book actually waffles back and forth between two plots—the children growing up in the carnival and Oly’s present day life in chapters designated “Notes for Now”—the true heart of the book is the story of the Fabulon. Geek Love is truly a page turner, keeping the reader’s attention at the sheer gravity of what’s at stake in the story. This, however, leads to a very frustrating and weak payoff. Like the worst sex, the climax comes out of nowhere. This is possibly the most maddening part of the novel—that it builds suspense so steadily and the reader becomes further engrossed in the lives of Oly, Arty, the twins, Chick, and a variety of other characters, only to read onto the next chapter and find everything brought to a close in less than two pages. The closing of the present day plot—Oly’s befriending of the lonely and dark Miss Lick who pays girls to undergo disfiguring surgery in order that they are freed from their reliance on their sexuality—is handled just as poorly. The real pain is that the payoff could have been extraordinary and devastating but instead leaves the reader confused and disappointed.

For anyone simply looking for an entertaining page-turner, Geek Love is worth a read. There’s no brilliant payoff and no chance of the delicate “reader’s orgasm,” yet there’s still a lot it can teach us as readers and writers. If anything, Geek Love is a wonderful reason to hire a good editor.

Not long ago, at the onset of National Novel Writing Month, Salon’s Laura Miller received a lot of flak for her article, “Better yet, don’t write that NaNo.” In a response posted in The Los Angeles Times, columnist Carolyn Kellogg called Miller’s argument “at best wrongheaded, and at worst, smallhearted.” A multitude of comments followed Kellogg’s article, labeling Miller as “mean-spirited” and “an insecure whiner.” Miller herself posted a reply, defending her position:

My point is not that NaNoWriMo contestants are bad people who do bad things and should be condemned. I don’t think that, and never wrote that. Let me reiterate: I have nothing against people wanting to write. (I will confess to being disgusted by people who want to write but don’t read, but again, I never said this was true of all NaNoWriMo contestants, only that it is often reported by writing teachers and other professionals who come into frequent contact with aspiring writers. Are there stats on this? No — neither are there stats to prove that aspiring writers read a lot. To me, it’s amazing that ANY aspiring writers admit to not reading. Yet I have met quite a few of them myself.)

What I see here is an unfortunate and age-old quagmire. Miller, like all critics, appears to have approached her article with genuine intentions. Like all of us she’s passionate about reading and wants to share that. However, like most critics, in writing her indictment of writers who don’t read she resorted to the critic’s most dexterous talent: venom. It makes for entertaining reading but unfortunately it nearly always fails to reach the addressed party, in this case the 160,000+ writers who attempted NaNo this year.

As editor of this growing literary webzine I want to use Miller’s article as a springboard. In no way do I want to inhibit a writer from writing. Write to your heart’s content. Write whatever comes to your fingertips. I do, however, want to echo the spirit of Miller’s call for readers. We all know that the best writers read. We all know that without reading there would be no writing—at least no writing worth a damn. What I’m concerned about is the passive way in which today’s readers go about reading. Literature—although elusive when it comes to defining characteristics—is not a static process. One does not create a book from nothing and cast it out back into that nothing. Literature is an interconnected network of writers and of course readers. It’s not a straight line from writer to reader but a tensile and trembling web on which all of us are flies. A writer’s task is to twitch his wings and send a vibration all throughout that web. What often goes overlooked is the task of the reader: to send that vibration back with his own shuddering wingbeat.

Things I Know:
1: The vast majority of Xenith’s contributors are or have been enrolled in some kind of higher education
2: Students read
3: Students react

Xenith could be called many things, not the least of which being an ongoing conversation. What we need from you are your nonfictions—your presence as readers. We’d love to see your book reviews, your analysis, your aspirations, your personal growth from a lifetime of reading. What are your ten most influential books and how have they affected you? What did you think of Franzen’s Freedom? Literature has always been a discourse. Too often it’s easy to think of something as final once it’s published. What we’ve forgotten is that print and web are only the beginning of a long conversation. Today we invite you to come over and chat. Xenith is not just a magazine for writers—but also dedicated to the boisterous art of reading. We all love books. If we didn’t love books we wouldn’t be here. It’s time to start talking about them.

Send articles, essays, reviews—any nonfictions—to: patrick.nathan@gmail.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Like the majority of MacArthur fellows, Anne Carson went largely unnoticed until she received a half million dollars. Unlike the majority of MacArthur fellows, readers are starting to recognize her name. Along with Derek Walcott, Charles Simic, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich, Carson enjoys inclusion in a small group of MacArthur poets who are likely to yield more than 100,000 results in your run-of-the-mill search engine. Certainly there’s something special about Anne Carson. In reading her signature collections of poetry, essays, shot lists, and dialogues, we know we’ve stumbled onto someone unique—a true genius worthy of any so called “genius grant.” Her 2000 volume, Men in the Off Hours, reminds us of the many reasons we love Anne Carson, and why, as author Michael Ondaatje reminds us, she is “the most exciting poet writing in English today.” Three of them come to mind.

1: Juxtapositions
As we learned from Carson’s more well-known work, her so-called novel in verse Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson is the all-powerful mistress of juxtapositions. Instead of a winged red monster from ancient Greece living as a gay adolescent in modern day Canada, we get—in Men in the Off Hours—Thucydides discussing the nature of war with Virginia Woolf, Antigone and Oedipus filming a made-for-TV movie, a modern look at the life of Tolstoy. In the series “TV Men: Lazarus,” the speaker—a documentary film maker—explains his thoroughly modern interest in filming a reality series of Lazarus coming back from the dead.

We are left wondering, Why Lazarus?
My theory is
God wants us to wonder this.
…
But if God’s gift is simply random, well
for one thing
it makes a
more interesting TV show.

We are left to consider this as the director goes on to explain his process of putting “tiny microphones all over the ground / to pick up / the magic / of the vermin in his ten fingers.” In all these juxtapositions, Carson reminds us of the importance of history, that history itself is not too distant. She informs us, in “The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper,” of the arbitrary nature of history: “For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?” Carson knows that history is not static, that history is open to interpretation just as our most cherished fictions.¹ Her fusing of the modern and the ancient is her own adroit way of revealing the inherent transience in each.

2: Style
A reader of Anne Carson will already know that there’s nothing quite like her style. One might interpret that she’s not a fan of commas, even when they’re technically required to be within the constraints of English grammar. Some might see this as a reason not to love Anne Carson, but for those of us with a sense of adventure she comes through as a fearlessly inventive stylist. In “TV Men: Tolstoy,” Lev’s wife writes of his diaries, “So much here is—may God forgive me— / unjust cruel untruthful dragged up invented.” In “Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve,” Catherine wonders of the ancient Greeks or her students (we never know): “These people seem bathed in goodness, yet here come the beautiful dangerous white rapids beating onto them.” Carson’s syntax is molded into a terrifying lyricism and in each verse we see the urgency at the heart of human beings. Her work is unabashedly beautiful and evocative. The entire emotional landscape of winter is set with a flag that “shreds itself in the icy wind.” Lines like “Wrist-thick on the plain a sapling bends” remind us of our own frailty. The act of writing is a surgery in which “incisions [make] a dull blue sound like silk.” In the morning, sycamore trees “are big, unbandaging themselves.” A reader of Carson understands the English language at its most ecstatic. A writer should be so in love with the words he or she uses that it tears one’s heart to pieces, just like any other love. Carson understands love. She understands language. She knows how to make them torment each other.

3: Insight
Our most cherished authors are those that evoke our most cherished emotions and help us understand who we are. There’s a lot of dialogue in the literary world about the nature of reading—what we get from it, why we do it, what it says about us. Assuming we read to better know ourselves, naturally we look to those authors who understand humanity itself. Men in the Off Hours is Carson at her most empathetic, exploring our best and our worst. In “Freud (1st draft),” we are shown a young Sigmund who, faced with repeated rejections from the girls of Trieste, writes to a friend: “Since / it is not permitted / to dissect human beings I have / in fact nothing to do with them.” In “Audubon,” the young artist portrays our destructive desire to understand: “On the bottom of each watercolor he put “drawn from nature” / which meant he shot the birds / and took them home to stuff and paint them.” After the publication of Autobiography of Red in 1998, The Nation critic Bruce Hainley called Carson “a philosopher of heartbreak.” She summons this reputation once more in “Irony is Not Enough” when Catherine laments her attraction to one of her students:

Girl mends the earpiece, drops her coat on the floor, sits beside it. Takes out her Greek book and begins to translate, as if it had been prearranged. Had it? Deneuve feels a force of life coming at her too strong to think what parts this has or why it should happen. The victim of an ironic situation is typically innocent. Gradually twilight soaks the room, now it is almost too dark to read. Girl is lifting her coat, poised in the doorway, gone. Thanks, floats back along the hall. Looking down Deneuve sees her feet are naked. Moi je comprends pas ça², she whispers to them.

As stated in the list of MacArthur fellows, Anne Carson is a poet. Consulting the dictionary, we find a startling definition of poet: “a person possessing special powers of imagination or expression.” In this sense Anne Carson is a true poet, yet her reach goes beyond poetry. A frequenter of book stores will almost always find her work huddled away in the poetry section—if said frequenter can find it at all—yet Anne Carson uses her experience and her talent to explore other mediums and break down the barriers of form. In a 2000 article in The New York Times, journalist Melanie Rehak notes that, “Her work as both a poet and scholar is based largely on making emotionally plausible connections between subjects, writers—even entire epochs—that seem as if they couldn’t possibly inform one another.” With her aforementioned juxtapositions and her experimentation with various genres, this couldn’t be more accurate. Carson reminds us what it means to go on living as a part of our rich history, but more importantly she reminds us of the real pleasure in reading—its thrills and its unadulterated rapture. As is true with all of her collections, Men in the Off Hours is not to be missed.

***
1: For more information on the transience of ancient history, see Hannah E. V. Čulík’s article, “History and Fiction.”
2: “I don’t understand it.” (Fr)

Before I started keeping track of these things, I had no idea just how bustling the literary sphere really is. I find myself bookmarking almost everything I read.

The New York Times has reported that Mark Twain’s recently published unabridged autobiography cannot stay on the shelves. Published at the author’s request 100 years after his death, this behemoth is volume one of three, and despite its length, bookstores are overrun.

“It sold right out,” said Kris Kleindienst, an owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, which first ordered 50 copies and has a dozen people on a waiting list. “You would think only completists and scholars would want a book like this. But there’s an enduring love affair with Mark Twain, especially around here. Anybody within a stone’s throw of the Mississippi River has a Twain attachment.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair, author Jonathan Safran Foer discusses his newest and very unconventional literary project, Tree of Codes.

I’m not interested in experimentation for its own sake. But I’m interested in works of art that transport a reader. That send you to a different place—pure magic. We’ve gotten used to the notion that art, if it entertains or says something interesting about our time, that’s enough. But there’s something else it can do that nothing else can do. To be genuinely transported, to have your nerves touched, make your hair stand on end, that’s what I think art can do well—or only art can do.

I’ve always believed that writing with a purpose in mind is a fairly transparent task. In reading an interview with Nadine Gordimer in The Guardian, I was happy to find that she agrees.

“Look,” she says now, “the process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It’s fatal for a fiction writer.”

Rockstar Patti Smith has won the National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids. In her acceptance speech, Smith made a plea for the book as medium. Read the article here.

“I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

With the release of Part One of the final film in the series, Alyssa Rosenberg of The Atlantic reflects on the cultural phenomenon of Harry Potter.

But what Rowling has done, and done better than any popular author of the era, is to give us the best years of her young heroes’ lives, from 11 to 17. There’s a preciousness and a specificity to the characters in the moment Rowling’s provided for them. As io9′s Charlie Jane Anders writes, “Does anybody want to read about a married Harry staring down middle age?”

Last but not least, in an attempt to get more children reading and writing, author Nick Hornby has opened the Ministry of Stories in London. Read the article here.

The author hopes that a fantastical shopfront will lure children into something rather less fantastical, if no less fun: literacy lessons. In the shop, Hornby will sell “fang floss” and “human snot”, while round the back novelists including Zadie Smith, Roddy Doyle and Michael Morpurgo might, on the right day, be found teaching children aged from eight to 18 to learn to write a little like they do.

Also, be sure to catch the trailer for Salman Rushdie’s latest release, Luka and the Fire of Life.

I’ve been trying to stay in touch with the literary world these days. As a result I constantly want to share information.

Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times has reviewed the newly released collection of Saul Bellow’s Letters. Have you had the pleasure of reading Saul Bellow? If not, you’re missing out. Why not start with his letters?

Some of his letters are yesterday’s equivalents of e-mail, catching his recipients up on the daily stuff of life, annoyances large and small, “toil, tears, sweat and business-wriggling.” Others are philosophical meditations on literature, politics, literary politics and the state of the modern world, musings that remind us of Bellow’s love of the Old Testament, Shakespeare and the great 19th-century Russian novels, and his belief that fiction ought to address the great moral questions of human existence and “account for the mysterious circumstance of being,”

This is slightly old news, but The New Yorker has released an article on the wonders of procrastination. What could be more essential reading for our generation of writers?

You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time.

Prospect Magazine has done their homework and offered a peak into a future in which e-readers are the dominant medium of reading. You can read all about this depressing future here.

After a number of false dawns, books are, finally, starting to go digital. In July, Amazon US reported that its e-book sales overtook sales of hardbacks on its website for the first time. E-books now account for at least 6 per cent of the total American market, a number that’s sure to rise steeply thanks to the huge success of both dedicated e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and multipurpose hardware like Apple’s iPad, which is currently selling a million units a month. What this means for publishers, readers and writers is the transformation not only of the context within which books exist, but also of what books can and cannot say—and who will read them.

A new anthology of 20th century American literary critic H. L. Mencken is now available. You can read the review in The Atlantic.

Mencken nevertheless championed the cultural avant-garde, and hence was scorned by the cultural establishment. He introduced a hostile American readership to Nietzsche and Ibsen; published, as co-editor of The Smart Set and editor of The American Mercury, Ezra Pound, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and the first serious studies of jazz (even though he couldn’t stand the music); and hailed Ambrose Bierce, Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Ring Lardner, and Fitzgerald (his review of Main Street and his critiques of Lardner are the most penetrating I’ve read).

And of course, Canadian icon Gordon Pinsent reads from Justin Bieber’s new memoir, First Step 2 Forever.
Gordon Pinsent Reads Bieber

It wasn’t that long ago that I mentioned one of the many quagmires of novel writing—or at least one of my personal predicaments. As one might expect of a writer, I very much love to read. As one might expect of an amateur novelist, my favorite literary form is the novel. I love novels to the extent that I fantasize about the apocalypse just so I have time to read them. Luckily for me I wear contacts so there’s no danger of my glasses breaking when they fall on a rock. I’ve been known to worship novels. I suppose it goes without saying, my reason for writing one.

This is the quagmire: when you (meaning me) are writing a novel, your focus is shifted. It’s more difficult to take it in as a complete work of art. Instead you get hung up on certain sentences, a character’s mannerisms, the overarching structure. In time the novel has your thinking so warped that you have to put it down. Not to mention the way novels haunt your own prose style. What happens when you read too much Faulkner? Your sentences try to crawl outside of themselves. You’re tempted to use the word crepuscular.

So what does a lover of books do? Writing a novel is a long process. I’m currently working through my second draft and while I’m moving at an alarming pace I realize there is still a long stretch of writing before me. Writing the initial draft took three months. With all that novel left to write and rewrite you can’t simply tell yourself that you’ll read again when it’s over. You have to compromise.

I am reading poetry. I am reading essays. I am reading philosophy and criticism. Unless it’s a singular cohesive text I don’t even bother reading the whole book. I’ve read portions of books from Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Wright, T. S. Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges. I’ve read essays both comical and awe-inspiring from Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace. I’m in the middle of one of the most fascinating philosophical literary texts I’ve ever read: Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. What is interesting, I’ve noticed, is that I’m not reading in the same way that I’ve always read. Again, novel writing has warped my sensibilities. When I read Anne Carson I’m looking for something. I’m searching. There is something she’s trying to tell me and I’m going to use it in my work. I read as a novelist these days, gathering information. I can tell that Eros the Bittersweet is going to be a strong influence on my next novel, which at the moment is only a title and a document full of notes. Reading has become research, and as horrifying as that sounds it’s more exhilarating than anything because I’m loving every moment of it.

That is how the reader in me is surviving. Yesterday I took a holiday and spent the day at home. Toward the middle of the afternoon I spread a blanket on the grass in my back yard and in what may have been a writer’s fantasy I listened to the birds and read about the triangular structure of love. I even managed to incorporate a bowl of cherries, as though the symbolic representation of happiness wasn’t yet complete. Even though reading can be a toxic enterprise you can’t put reading on hold. It keeps you grounded in the rest of the world. For a while I was wholly absorbed in my novel and I let nothing else in. You start to feel anxious. Even though you think you’re putting all your creative energy into a novel there is a piece left unused: that creativity that occurs when you encounter something inspirational—a logical conundrum or a scientific fact or a little piece of history. You have to keep feeding your creativity with books. You have to read, even if you can’t read your drug of choice.

So I finally got around to writing blurbs and selecting passages from the other books on my list. Of course they continue in chronological order. Please note that this means the order in which I was exposed to them, not the order in which they were written.

This was a very valuable exercise. Perhaps I should give it another go in five years and see what the list looks like then.

SUMMER 2006 (continued)
James Joyce – Ulysses
Speaking of experimental, Ulysses was another eye-opener, as they say. When I first read it in 2006 the vast majority of it went over my head. Well, to be fair, when I read it now (which I am, currently), most of it goes over my head, but even more so then. Even though I didn’t have even the remotest understanding of what was going on in every episode I walked away from Ulysses feeling wholly inspired, and I still do. It’s possibly the most grandiose literary stunt in history, at least in context. To be honest I’ve probably imitated this book more than any other, in both structure and prose. As I read it today I set it down now and then and ask myself if any writer in history has had more command over the English language. It does literature like nothing else.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5,000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
I don’t even know what to say about Faulkner. The man writes prose like no other and does so with absolutely no fear. The Sound in the Fury is dense and difficult and because of this extremely rewarding when all the pieces finally fall together in your head. I’ve said before that he has a run-away prose style and within it is all the madness and terror and honor and love you could ever hope to find in a book. It’s one of those books that makes me tremble but also fills me with a desire to do something just as fearsome. I want to have written a book that makes a young author tremble. Everyone needs goals, ja?

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

SPRING 2008:
T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land
This isn’t a poem with whom to fuck. To be fair I was first exposed to it in the spring of 2006 but I couldn’t read past the first section. I tried again a short time later and failed. For some reason I was drawn to it in 2008 and I read it repeatedly for several days. It’s incalculably difficult and in all aspects terrifying. Even Eliot’s footnotes (he footnoted his own poem) are dense. To be honest I don’t know what to say about this poem to make it appeal to anyone, which is I suppose why it gets the reputation it does. I love it because it’s brutal. I love it because I’m a Modernist at heart and in truth I can’t think of a better representation (with Ulysses being a possible exception—published in the same year no less).

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

SUMMER 2008
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
At first I had to ask myself if my appreciation for Madame Bovary stemmed from my having encountered it at the right time in my life. I wasn’t making any attempt to go back to school, I was struggling to pay my bills, I was shacking up with my boyfriend and not paying rent, I was missing credit card payments. Then I discovered Emma Bovary, a woman condemned to bourgeois existence by her own ignorance, suffering and only digging more deeply her grave. Then I talked it over with a few other people who pretty much agreed that this is one of the greatest books every written. It’s so painstakingly perfect that I almost want to give up. It’s intimidating. In terms of craft it really developed my sense of character psychology. At first Emma seems like a very simple black and white character, but the more you learn about her and the more you watch her spiral out of control you realize she’s incredibly complex and frighteningly real. I think that’s a perfect model for a human being and thus the perfect model for a character. It’s how I strive to write my characters.

He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believe but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

FALL/WINTER 2009:
Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West
This is the only book to appear on this list that I have read only once. Once was in no way enough and I plan to read it again very soon. Out of all the books on this list I find this one to be the most intimidating. This is the book on my shelf at which I stare longingly and hopelessly and wonder if there’s really any point in trying. But it also fuels my desire to create the best work of art that can possibly be wrenched from my fingertips. It pushes me toward perfection. McCarthy takes a genre as dead as the western and breathes incomparable life into it and turns it into not a novel of adventure but an epic tragedy of violence and death and evil. It might be my favorite on this list. It’s unparalleled. There’s nothing like it.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.

The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid’s horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw than the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes white with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

I know that’s a lot of excerpt. I just couldn’t help myself.

So that’s the top ten influences for me. Not necessarily my favorites per se. Many of them are, but that list looks a little different. I’d love to hear from others. Everyone has different tastes these days. What are your influences?