Michael Dirda indulges a Robinson Crusoe fantasy and salvages “books that through their prose, ideas or storytelling, trigger in me a deep sense of contentment and well-being.” These are the sixty-six books he would take to a desert island along with “the biggies of western literature” and, presumably, matches and Halazone tablets.
I respect Dirda and once interviewed him for a story I was
writing about the novelist William Kennedy, though the eclecticism of his taste
in books is beyond my understanding. As a book columnist for a daily newspaper he
can’t afford to be too exclusive in his preferences, of course, but he genuinely
seems to love work in the sub-literary genres of science fiction and ghost
stories. I’m not here to argue with him. Life is short and filled with loss, and
pleasures are fleeting, so I can’t begrudge him his sources of literary “contentment
and well-being.”
On Dirda’s list are several books I love – Lolita, The
Geography of the Imagination, Kim, Little Big Man – and many
I’ve enjoyed: the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters, Beerbohm’s stories, Wodehouse
and Pritchett, Waugh and Joseph Mitchell, Kevin Bazzana’s biography of Glenn
Gould. Dirda limits his list to “20th-century prose by English-language authors,
one book apiece.” With that stipulation in mind, I would nominate a few more titles, all solace-giving, in no particular order:
Between Meals: An Appetite
for Paris
(1959), A.J. Liebling
The Parker novels
(1962-2008), Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)
Witness (1952), Whittaker Chambers
The Collected Essays of
J.V. Cunningham (1978)
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
(1941),
Rebecca West
American Musicians II:
Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz (1996), Whitney Balliett
The Brooklyn Novels (1934, 1936, 1937), Daniel
Fuchs
Partial Payments: Essays
on Writers and Their Lives (1989), Joseph Epstein
Enthusiasm (1950), Ronald Knox
Cultural Amnesia (2007),
Clive James
As Dirda puts it: “Needless
to say, my final list is unapologetically personal and unofficial — no other
kind is worth anything.”
2 comments:
I always read and give consideration to lists like these from writers I respect. I intend to check out "Enthusiasm" by Ronald Knox. I enjoyed his mystery stories in old anthologies long before I learned he was a priest, etc.
The Parker novels?! You surprise me by including such genre trash. But it's a good surprise - I think the books are superb. My favorite moment from any of them is when Parker points a gun at a mob emissary, an actuarial, non-muscle type. "I'm the messenger!" bleats the guy, to which Parker replies, "Now you're the message," before shooting him in the head.
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