On your nightstand now:
David Michaelis's Schulz biography, The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler, Lapham's Quarterly (the "Eros" issue) and Somebody in Boots by Nelson Algren.
There's a story behind this last one. I bartended with a guy in France who said his two favorite books were The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and Somebody in Boots by Nelson Algren. I agreed that the Bulgakov was good, but I had never heard of the Algren book. I loved the title--Somebody in Boots--and went looking. It proved impossible to find. For years it didn't even show up on search engines, but now I notice there are some copies floating around. A few weeks ago, my friend Jeff mailed me a copy. He came across Somebody in Boots in a used bookstore in Silver Lake. The type is tiny and packed tight on the page. There seems to be a lot of dialect ("he commence gittin' the all-ovah fidgits again"), which makes me a little leery, but I will crack it open at some point this year. The real question, I guess, is why I was so invested in finding an obscure book recommended by a cokehead bartender who said that, for the most part, he hated reading books. It fascinated me that he had chosen these two as his all-time favorites. I wanted to read them through that particular lens.
Favorite book when you were a child:
One day, by mistake, I took home an Edgar Allan Poe collection from the bookmobile. I was in third grade. Reading Poe was like learning a foreign language. I understood every third word. After I'd finally cracked the code of "The Black Cat," I got it, and I cried. I read the story again the next day, and I cried again. The nasty drunk man plucked out a cat's eye and then hung (hanged) the cat! It was so crazy. So I read it again. Finally my mom said, "Why do you keep reading it if it makes you cry?" And my answer was always the same: "I don't know." Now, 30 years later, I would like to believe that at such an early age I apprehended truth and beauty in a great work of art, an interpretation that pleases me more than the more probable explanation that I was really just a budding masochist.
Your top five authors:
Poe was the first, so he deserves a spot, even though I don't read him with as much enjoyment now. Raymond Carver hijacked a couple years of my life. Donald Barthelme was huge for me; much of 60 Stories still cracks me up. Flannery O'Connor's stories and novels are beautiful, courageous and savage. My number one, though, has to be Chekhov. I keep coming back to those short stories. Some people think he's depressing, but I never feel depressed after reading him, just as sad songs rarely make me feel sad. In fact, I feel pleased and exhilarated that somebody brought the news from that place.
Book you've faked reading:
The Lord of the Rings. For a few years that book was everywhere. A number of times, when I was asked if I had read it, I admitted that I hadn't, and I was met with surprise and scorn. Some of my friends looked at me with pity, as if to say, "What kind of childhood did you have?" (See answer two.) So, for a few years, I heard myself lying about Tolkien. "You've read this, right?" "Yep." End of discussion.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. It's a perfect book. I buy a copy every time I see one in a used bookstore. I have given away six or seven copies by now.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. The Dylan Thomas quote on the cover sold me. He says, "This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl!" That's the best blurb ever to appear on a novel, as far as I know.
Book that changed your life:
Raymond Carver's Fires. I was 20 years old and living in Buffalo when I "discovered" Carver. During a snowstorm I ducked into the Village Green bookstore and perused the Village Green Recommends wall, always a good source for cool stuff. I flipped open Fires to a poem called "Drinking While Driving." I can't explain my delight and confusion when I finished the poem. How was this literature? If my professors were any guide, literature ended some time around D.H. Lawrence's death, and yet here was a guy who was so new. I read the next poem, a longer one called "Luck," and I just knew: This was my guy.
I tucked Carver under my arm and headed to the cash register. The book was $9 in the U.S. $11.50 in Canada. According to the faded receipt, which I still use as a bookmark, the total was $9.72 and I paid $10.02, receiving 30 cents change. I walked home in a blinding snowstorm, from time to time opening the book, peeking in at the words that were going to change my life, but I didn't want to soak the pages, so I slipped the paperback under my coat, pressed it to my gut. That night I read the entire book in my frigid apartment, couldn't put it down, and the next day I went back to the Village Green and bought Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
My life had just changed.
Favorite line from a book:
An important moment for me as a reader, and, I guess, as a writer, was when I read the last line of Denis Johnson's story "Dundun" in Jesus' Son: "If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that." The sudden shift to the second person, this direct aggressive address to the reader, blew me away. I didn't know you could do that. This is not a typical second person point of view. Here he's actually addressing you, you the reader, sitting there safe and sound in your world. He's smashing the wall and grabbing you by the shirt. That whole collection astounded me when I first read it in 1992, and it's still sending out aftershocks.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Donald Barthelme's 60 Stories. I read most of it in a park. I couldn't sit down to read it--I was too excited--so I walked around the park, reading. A friend of mine was out there with all the dogwalkers. I stopped briefly to chat, but then I continued on, reading and walking. It was a warm summer day. I was in my early 20s and desperate to become a writer. Barthelme was showing me how far I still had to go.