The "Desert Island" Books
All of these books are DESERT ISLAND books … books I have already read at least TWICE, published before I was born (1955) and of the stuff that can endure. I did not include Dostoyevsky despite reading most of his works because I cannot reread them. They are brilliant horror films I want to watch only once. I did not include Huck Finn despite reading it many times. I had to teach it and learned to hate the second half. The big cut in all of this is the act of rereading. It really is the highest compliment.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I do not have a choice. I taught it for 20 years. I have read it maybe 26 times. It was the inspiration for me to consider teaching. My handling of it in front of his book club prompted my father to finally acknowledge that maybe it was a good idea to leave finance for teaching. It should be read by everyone. If you have read it, it must be reread. Treat it as a poem. Remember, despite the title, it is Nick’s story.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
I am waiting for a couple more years to pass to reread it. I came to it late in my reading life. I first read it in three days while staying on the beach in Hawaii with my family – in my darkened room! That says it all. My son picked it up off the bookshelf one afternoon and later called me to tell me that he was almost halfway through in one sitting and found himself sitting against the wall of our street’s concrete bridge and could not remember walking there. This is what she does in this book. She arrests time. The dining room scene is unforgettable. Read much of it out loud. It might be the most purely emotional piece of great literature I have ever read.
War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Of course … the last chapter on history, God and man is a bridge too far. Don’t bother with it. Please find an edition with maps and character outlines. Good footnotes matter a lot. I just reread the Simon & Schuster 1943 red hardback with all of the above. It was the edition I read in my twenties while looking for work in New York in 1980. I carried it with me everywhere and read it on subways, on benches, in bars and on trains. I was bereft when I finished weeks later. My second read (winter of 2019) took a couple months. I read several other books while getting through the red book. I loved it. I remain in utter awe of it. It is the Chartres cathedral of fiction.
Note: get that 1943 edition!
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
I first read it in Green Park, London at the end of a sultry afternoon with a thunderstorm rumbling on the horizon. What Vermeer is to Dutch painting, Wharton – and THIS book in particular - is to American fiction. In The Age of Innocence (a stunning title btw), she recreates a lost world so precisely and poignantly with such arresting insight and vision that I could easily have remained pinned in that park chair until lightening had struck me dead. She requires a disciplined start but rewards with not only an unforgettable ending but with prose that shimmers and characters that will survive any version of our toxic cancel culture.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
This is her first famous collection of short stories and the best. In fact, they may be the finest collection of short stories in the American canon or in the English language. You do not have to be a Catholic to appreciate her. You are not complicit in her personal racist attitudes if you read them. She kept such things separate. The stories are about God. They are about the blind, sinful and selfish nature of man. They are strange, beautiful and as truthful as anything I have read. At their heart is the concept of God’s grace. Do not let this scare you away. Much comes with this theological prism and know that films as different as Pulp Fiction and Babette’s Feast cover similar terrain. Ignore the thought police. Read her.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
When I first read this book thirty odd years ago, my very western sensibilities knew it was good, better than the overrated 100 Years of Solitude. I struggled with the surrealism and the lack of a linear plot line. It was miles away from Jane Austen whose books I was devouring at the same time. I pretty much missed the point.
Flip to 2014, middle age and a lot of confusion and you get a reread of this novel that left me copying and then framing one of the many great passages that festoon this masterpiece. The book left me both emotionally empty and full. What had happened over those many years was that my life had become surreal in unanticipated ways and now Gabriel Garcia Marquez was speaking to me in ways that Jane Austen couldn’t and still hasn’t. Throw in corrupt leaders, disease and environmental degradation and maybe no book on this list is more topical. Maybe … it is a love story, however, first and foremost.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
This difficult book has followed me around in unanticipated ways. I first read it in its entirety in an American Literature survey class (don’t we miss those now?) my sophomore year. The lectures were in front of hundreds of students but my section in this class just happened to be the one led by the chain smoking terrifying lead professor. He cold called and put his head down once you no longer made sense to him. He rubbed out his cigarette and lit another and stared right at you if you were on to something (very rare). We read every word that was assigned. We read Moby Dick in one week and when we gathered in our windowless, smoke-filled basement classroom , he listened to a few responses and pretty much dismissed us saying it was not meant for this kind of discussion. That was it. I was crushed. Later, in graduate school, an American History professor assigned it as part of a 19th century economic history class and unpacked it as a critique of capitalism in such a brilliant fashion that it has stuck with me ever since. I read most of it while visiting the retreating glaciers of Alaska. Later, after several books and essays on this shocking book, I remain a little like the student in that survey section class – in awe and a little overwhelmed. It is bigger than the Great American Novel and too American to be The Great Novel. Easily a fifth of it can be tossed out and the incoherence is real and not necessarily part of Melville’s message. The language feels archaic because it is. A bookstore in Sag Harbor reads it out loud over a week with townsfolk taking turns in 30 minute shifts. This is a good way to take it in. My wife wants me to finish reading it out loud. We began four years ago while spending two months in a tiny cottage on the edge of the sea in Maine. We are halfway there. You know you should read much of the Bible before you die, atheist or not. You know you should have read the great tragedies of Shakespeare at least once in your lifetime. I believe you should read Moby Dick at least once before you are too tired.
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
These days it feels as if Charles Dickens is out of favor. He might be too white, too English, too male or it might simply be that the wordy, often preachy world of Victorian Literature is a bridge too far for our identity obsessed world. Victorian writers, even Jane Austen and her novels of “manners”, wrote with the world at large in mind. In fact, it seems that was the great gift of the 19th century novelist. They were our cinema, our television and even parts of our Internet wrapped into one. There was a lot they had to cover and when they did, the novels rank among the great pieces of writing in human history. Dickens never wrote a bigger, more profound book than Bleak House. Very little is spared. Philanthropy, the law, the courts, inheritance, the poor, veterans, vanity, love, adulthood … it is all subject to his often hilarious but much more frequently, damning treatment. The characters are unforgettable in ways I have not discovered in his other great books. Finally, I think it is his best-written novel with an opening description of London for the ages. As for its being dated, I assigned it in an Independent Study where two very strong willed young women read it three weeks. They were so enthralled that their “map” of the novel and it characters remains framed on the wall of my office. I marvel at the sheer complexity of their “map” and how close a read was required to generate it. That was in 2011. This book is far bigger than the cancel police.
NOTE: if you read it, watch the terrific mini-series produced by BBC in 2005 but … read it first.
Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
I write about Hemingway and his short stories on another post. There I argued that the quality of his best stories offset his life as a misogynist boor. His best stories are close to perfect though there will be women being treated as second class citizens, native Americans portrayed as characters from a John Wayne film and blacks and foreigners being pigeon holed in ways that might even make a Trump supporter blush. The fact, despite this slam-dunk conviction in the cancel court, that I insist one still read them is a testament to just how good they are. Most everybody who writes today have some bit of Hemingway’s DNA in their sentences – like him or not.
The best stories (not in order):
Indian Camp
Hills Like White Elephants
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
A Clean Well-Lighted Place
Big-hearted River Part 1
Big-hearted River Part 2
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
In Another Country
The Killers
Buy the Scribner anthology and read one each week … you might find yourself developing an aversion for hyperbole, Facebook and adjectives.
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The same two remarkable senior girls from that 2012 Independent Study thought this was the best novel they had read in their very literate 18 years of life. A relatively recent discussion with one of them revealed the novel remains her number one. Henry James is not for everyone. I, in fact, cannot (not will not) read many of his most famous, particularly latter, works. His art is too much HIS art. He flirts with inaccessibility, which, for me, is cause for dismissal. I will “cancel” the book, the poem or the film that intentionally creates an impenetrable artistic wall. A small example is when a writer messes with traditional punctuation and the rules of traditional dialogue – all for reasons I never have understood. I will still pardon such choices. I love Cormac McCarthy. However, James wrote huge novels filled with sentences that required a literary GPS to understand. This novel is the great exception. First read on a college spring break in Bermuda, then reread 10 years later then reread in consecutive years for Independent Studies, this novel not only holds up, it shimmers more gloriously with each read. James, a repressed, elitist Anglophile creates one of the great female characters in all of literature. James, reigning in his desire to obfuscate, draws some of the most striking descriptions I have ever read. James, restrained and trapped in his own mind, creates a potboiler with an ending for the ages. An ending that just recently seduced one of our finest contemporary writers (John Banville) to write an imagined sequel (the title is a bit of a plot spoiler). The sentences are long and the syntax can be labored but it will be worth the effort. I promise.
Honorable Mention (for now)
Ana Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Howard’s End by E.M. Forster
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne
The desert island list
books or collections from the “canon”
(maximum of 10)
Fiction
Latest update: 9/1/20
