Over the years, I’ve often bowed to the
closing of a calendar year by offering my
alternative Top 10 books of the year.
The past year hasn’t been a great one for
my reading list, however, so rather than look
back, this time I thought we’d come up a
knockout agenda for the coming year.
Symptomatic of 2008, perhaps, is the book
I recently completed. I usually enjoy Dickens,
but ``Hard Times’’ left an odd, uncomfortable
feeling. It’s not that I was expecting
a picture of an economic depression of 150
years ago. The environment and educational
issues were most disturbing. Their impacts
were indicted but not rehabilitated.
Let’s just say that the struggle through
the dialogues of the
circus ringmaster who
pronounced an ``s’’ like
a ``th’’ and the cockney
of the mill worker who
died after a fall down an
old coke shaft, I’d had
enough.
Time to move on.
I’m planning the
coming year’s contemporary
selections to be
``The Lazarus Project,’’
by Aleksandar Hemon,
and ``A Girl’s Guide to
Modern European Philosophy,’’
by the English
writer Charlotte Greig.
The former is about
a writer’s obsession with an anarchist’s
murder of the Chicago police chief in 1908.
Who knows where that will lead. The latter,
which will be published in May, is billed as
a cross between Bridget Jones and the ideas
of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Kierkegaard.
Enough said.
The last time I mentioned Nietzsche, I
got in a lot of trouble for my discussion of
religion and atheism. This year, however,
I plan to read ``Nietzsche,’’ by Lou Salome,
the woman who spent time in the summer
of 1882 in the mountains with Friedrich
and his friend Paul Ree. A photo survives,
showing the young woman with whip in a
cart with Nietzsche and Rees attached to
the reins.
She wrote the book in 1894, after Nietzsche
lost his mind, and she later became
a Freud disciple. (In fact, Nietzsche’s psychic
collapse occurred 120 years ago next
month in Turin.)
Moving ahead, I always like to plan a read
from the 1920s, and for next year I was thinking,
as another upper, perhaps ``The Enormous
Room,’’ by e.e. cummings. Better known
later as a poet, cummings was an ambulance
driver for The Red Cross during World War
I and he spent several months in a French
prison in 1917. His 1922 autobiographical
novel recounts his experiences there.
What could be more exciting in the 1930s
than riding the rails in a boxcar with Woody
Guthrie, and maybe encountering the likes
of Boxcar Bertha? Such adventures are
recounted in Guthrie’s ``Bound for Glory,’’
a 1943 memoir of his travels from the Dust
Bowl through the Great Depression.
Bertha, of course, wasn’t much of a
writer, having been educated on the rails by
Wobblies, prostitutes and socialists. But she
told her story to Dr. Ben Reitman, who published
``Sister of the Road’’ in 1937. A later
version was just called ``Boxcar Bertha,’’
which also was made into a Martin Scorcese
movie in 1972.
I suspect the most interesting reading in
``Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969’’
will be of his correspondence from the late
1950s as his excitement builds with the publication
of ``On the Road’’ and then ``Dharma
Bums.’’ All the Beats are there: Cassady,
Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson, Gary Snyder, William
Burroughs and more.
It will be interesting, too, to check in
with Alan Watts’ ``Beat Zen, Square Zen and
Zen,’’ which in 1958 responded to the kind of
Buddhism represented by Snyder and others
as dharma bums. Watts was still straight
at that time, so his conservative stance is
kind of funny considering what was to happen
to him over the following decade.
In deference to our new president, Gore
Vidal’s ``Lincoln,’’ published in 1984, should
be worth the time and effort, since Barack
Obama seems to feel a connection to Abe’s
controversial and short-lived presidency.
Glancing at the beginning, I found the
differences and the similarities surrounding
their respective inaugurations and security
issues striking and fascinating.
Finally, another contemporary selection
making the list for next year is by the
Englishman James Hawes, whose ``Why You
Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your
Life’’ tries to dispel the popular mythologies
that have sprouted over the decades about
the Austrian writer.
Hawes had access to the Kafka archives
at Oxford and also in Vienna and Berlin,
and his research boasts to show that Kafka
was not the lonely, submissive, minor
bureaucrat we have been led to believe he
was. Rather, he was a womanizing, wellknown
writer in the German-speaking world
who dabbled in pornography. We’ll see.
OK, that’s quite a collection of unusual
choices, which should make the year an
interesting one. If you want try any of them,
let me know and we’ll compare notes at the
end of next year.
___
Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The
Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 432-1000,
ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.
Cary Brunswick
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A reading list for the coming year
- Cary Brunswick
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