Anthony Lane

Anthony Lane was the first New Yorker writer I loved. I have read The New Yorker since I was little- my parents have subscribed to it for God knows how long and my father would either read articles to me for "bedtime" stories, or would dog-ear a page of it, hand it to me and tell me to read it. I would always oblige, but would greatly become annoyed reading them- I was a kid, probably 10 or so, and I was most definitely not sophisticated enough to understand pieces from The New Yorker. I liked the cartoons the best as a kid; they were complex too, but the pictures were always nice to look at and I liked the feel they had to them.

It was in 2005 when I started liking The New Yorker and reading it thoroughly, and I remember the year because it was the issue where Anthony Lane, (one of two film critics for The New Yorker- the other being David Denby) reviewed the final installment in the Star Wars franchise, Revenge of the Sith. Prior to this movie, I had never really hated a movie. Despite being the daughter of a critic, I wasn't one, and I would often get frustrated with my father 'ruining' movies for me by explaining everything wrong with them. But I really hated Revenge of the Sith, and when I saw there was a review of it in an old New Yorker, I picked it up, began reading, and began my obsession with Anthony Lane.

To this day, I am highly impressed with some people's talent as a writer. The phrasing and word choice all seems to fit and people who are able to express themselves well have always been my idols, Anthony Lane being the first. Like with any criticism, it's more fun to read a scathing review of something than something laudatory, and Anthony Lane is unabashedly harsh on the film (justifiably so, in my opinion), saying:

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent. “Another happy landing”—or, to be precise, “anothah heppy lending”—he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves. 

 I believe that was the paragraph that made me realize how awesome Anthony Lane is, and from that point forward, I always read the film reviews in The New Yorker. About a year later, I became hooked on the rest of the magazine itself, and I still read it cover-to-cover each week. 


Anthony Lane published a book of his reviews titled Nobody's Perfect, (the title being a nod to Some Like it Hot) and I bought it for my father for Christmas two years ago. It's oddly enough become a family book, for my mom found it one day and began reading it as well, and now it rotates between being at my father's house to my mother's. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who enjoys reading extremely well written essays. Probably my favorite one in there is when he goes through the bestseller lists of the 90s and tees off against The Bridges of Madison County, among others. Or just go to the newyorker.com website and look through any of his most recent reviews. (The Clash of the Titans review was particularly hysterical.) And I shouldn't be completely ignoring the other film critic for The New Yorker, David Denby. He's just as good, although I still hold Anthony Lane in higher regard just for the fact that Denby wrote a positive review about Avatar. In this week's New Yorker, Denby has a particularly good review of the film The Social Network and a profile of David Fincher. (I saw The Social Network last night and was blown away. It's rare for me to be thinking about a movie so much the day after I've seen it, and it's all I've been thinking about today.)


A lot of his reviews cannot be accessed online unless you have a subscription to the magazine, but the New Yorker website is another alternative to reading Anthony Lane's stuff if not by buying his book. Here's some of his best, in my opinion, that can be found and read online for free:

Revenge of the Sith:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/23/050523crci_cinema

Clash of the Titans and Everyone Else:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/12/100412crci_cinema_lane

Mamma Mia! and Journey to the Center of the Earth:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/07/28/080728crci_cinema_lane

Frightening Literature

I'm almost done with Zombie. I thought it would be a quicker read than it has been, it's a pretty short book, but I'm working through about 3 books at once; I've also started the Haruki Murakami book The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Plus, since it is my rule to not read Zombie at night to not get freaked out, and night is usually the time I have to read, I've been getting behind. 

The scariest book I've ever read was probably I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier, which I read when I was in 6th grade as per (like always) my dad's recommendation. The book is narrated by a kid called Adam, who's story is told in two different formats: first person, as he accounts about his life and his family/girlfriend before everything horrible happened and his bike journey to visit his father, and the third person, which is written in a transcript form and is his interviews with a psychiatrist. Adam's family have joined the Witness Protection Program, and his family is being targeted and are eventually caught. The book's ending is probably the bleakest ending I've ever read, and I remember feeling very freaked out by that book. It was actually worse in that due to the odd formatting of the book, I wasn't totally sure what the ending was, and thought it was more optimistic than what it actually was. (It has a twist ending that's not exactly out there; you have to be a somewhat savvy reader to catch it which I wasn't.) 

It also doesn't help that I Am The Cheese's title is obviously taken from "The Farmer in the Dell," a rhyme that has always been creepy to me. Adam sings it throughout the book, and the book ends with the last few lines of it:

The cheese stands alone
The cheese stands alone
Hi-ho, the merry-o
The cheese stands alone

Creepy.

I used to think that books and stories could never be as scary as scary movies, but reading Zombie and I Am The Cheese are two books that I find just as frightening as any horror flick out there. However, I do think that the mindset you're in has a lot to do with how scary whatever book/movie you're reading/watching- I always find films and books the scariest when I'm home alone at night and it's dark out. I watched Silence of the Lambs twice- the first time, in broad daylight, I thought it wasn't scary at all- the second time at night freaked me out so much I had nightmares. 

A couple of years ago, my dad told me about a story that had always scared him, even though his details of it are quite fuzzy. He heard it when he was a kid, probably 11 or 12, and he always insists to me that he's probably not remembering it right, but the gist of it was there was this young man who is really violent and harming all these innocent people, and he goes to his doctor/psychiatrist, who asks him why he's doing all these horrible things. The man explains that it isn't him, that it's the voices in his head that are telling him to do so, and that he cannot control it. The doctor of course thinks he's insane, and sort of kiddingly tells the man that if it's the voices telling him to do so, that he should just tell the voices to go into his (the doctor's) head instead, which they then do. I know there's more to the story than that, probably something about the doctor going insane, but my dad can never remember it, and even that little bit of the story always sounds scary to me. Zombies, ghosts, vampires, whatever- those things can be scary, but it's always farfetched, whereas people losing their minds is not something fake or imaginary. That, to me, is incredibly more frightening, and it's the main plot of both I Am The Cheese and Zombie. 

Manipulation

For a while now I've been curious about the memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg, and I finally was able to get a copy of it. I was curious about it after reading a write up of it in The New York Times a couple of months ago, despite the fact that it was a genre I don't exactly love: the memoir, followed by something I dislike even more: the addiction memoir.

I read A Million Little Pieces a couple of months after everyone hated James Frey, mainly to spite Oprah. Her public humiliation of him really unnerved me, as did her systematic way of turning all of her viewers and basically everyone against him because of the fact that she's basically a deity at this point. I don't know if this is a controversial viewpoint, but I really do not care if memoir's are complete fact or not. David Sedaris, one of my favorite writers, was questioned in an interview about fabrication after the Frey  scandal, and how a reporter had determined that some of the elements in his stories weren't true. (They were unbelievably superficial details and more exaggerations than lies; Sedaris has said many times that the fact-checkers at the New Yorker are pretty thorough.) He admitted straight away that he exaggerated, and said that he equated people getting all upset about lies in memoirs to that one person who, after another has told a joke, ruins it by saying "oh, that's not true; it didn't happen like that." If the joke was funny and served its intended purpose by providing humor, who cares if it's fact or fiction? Well, a lot of people do, but I'm not one of them. A Million Little Pieces was nothing particularly groundbreaking, but it was quite interesting and well-written, and I still feel that way knowing that he fabricated a good deal of it. 

I don't like memoirs, and my love of David Sedaris is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. Angela's Ashes, which I read this year, was unbelievably tedious, and more than that, joyless. I have a lot of trouble feeling sympathy for characters in books in general, and by the end of Angela's Ashes, I was so annoyed and fed up with the continual "My family is poor/ My father drinks away all of our money" reprise that I wished for all of the character's deaths by the end of the book. Same with a short story titled "Under the Influence" about a man's father's addiction to alcohol- by the end of it, I felt nothing close to sympathy for the protagonist. 

I could just be heartless, but I think I was really more turned off by both of these stories because they were something I cannot stand- manipulative. In "Under the Influence" moreso than in Angela's Ashes, there was a clear message at hand: do not drink, this is what happens. "Message" pieces are something I cannot stand, and try to stay away from in general. The movie Avatar that opened last year and was all the rage completely frustrated me, making me a member of a handful of people who really hated it. There were many things wrong with Avatar: the acting was sub-par, the villains were 2D, the whole thing was a copy of Pocohontas, the element that the villains wanted the land for was actually called "unobtanium"- but my biggest issue with it by far was it's message that we have to protect the environment and be green and save the planet. The go-green movement is something I think is a great thing, and really love, but even agreeing with the movie makers position, I was annoyed at it being shoved in the audience's faces for the duration of the picture. Mixing movies with politics is a tricky thing, and the audience should be aware of it. People going to see a Michael Moore or Citizens United film are going to know that there's a political bent to it, but if you're putting out a movie like Avatar, and then putting in a strong political message in- there is a great deal of manipulation going on. The preservation of our environment and Earth should not have to be a political movement or message, but it is.

Manipulative books do this all the time, and I saw it with "Under the Influence"- the man's father drank, the man himself ends up emotionally wrecked and resents his father, his father dies an early death, etc. All while sending an obvious message- you shouldn't drink. Again, a message I mostly agree with, but it's presented in such a way that it almost seems like a cause and effect: if you drink, ever, you will become an alcoholic who abuses your kids and dies young. It's a tactic that seems so disingenuous to me:  getting your audience to become fearful. It also seems like a tactic that helps you isolate yourself from criticism: granted, critics are great and still do it, but for the everyday person, people are judgmental, and when I said I hated Angela's Ashes and "Under the Influence" many people I talked to looked horrified that I would find such a sad book about alcoholism and poverty to be "tedious." 

More than that, there is something sort of... unnerving to me about using your personal tragedy to sell books. I feel that way anytime I see a People Magazine article about some horrible family tragedy. There was one where this father was interviewed about losing all of his children and his wife in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. It was about a year or so after it happened, and the article was just about how his tragedy and how he was coping with this unimaginable loss. I of course felt overwhelming sympathy for this man, but I also couldn't help but feeling uncomfortable about him selling his tragedy and personal grief to a national magazine, for everyone to see. Grief is a personal thing, and reading that article left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

Manipulation is hard to avoid, and I'm liking Portrait of an Addict so far in that it doesn't seem to be doing that just yet. I like stories that are more like "this is what happened, make of it what you will," rather than a book that feels like it was written solely to send a message. 

Bildungsroman

I've always been annoyed with people who feel the need to have a personal connection to what they read. That mentality has always bugged me, and I know many people who subscribe to it: "It doesn't apply to my life, I couldn't relate to the main character at all" is a common complaint when I loan books to friends. For one thing, that's just lazy- you can always find something to relate to if you try really hard and if you're pretentious/narcissistic enough- and second of all, nothing limits you more in your reading life than making random declarations that you will not read anything which doesn't impact your life personally. 

I've come across this in my time with the exact opposite nature- I haven't felt a connection with books that I felt the similarities were there. This is a genre known as "Bildungsroman," or the coming-of-age story. (It's always fascinated me and made me sort of proud that most teenagers my age can define 'bildungsroman.') A short list of books with this theme I've read include:

1. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

3. Good Times Bad Times by James Kirkwood

4. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

5. The Chosen by Chaim Potok  

6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky 

7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

8. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

9. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery 

I liked most of the books on the aforementioned list, and felt very moved by some of them, especially The Catcher in the Rye, Good Times Bad Times and The Perks of Being A Wallflower. But I didn't like the books because I felt any sort of relation, even though I'm currently at the age where 'coming-of-age' should maybe mean something to me, being on the brink of adulthood and leaving home for the first time. I liked the books because they were funny or interesting, or had likable characters and an interesting plot. (Except for Anne of Green Gables, which I found terribly maudlin, and Siddhartha which I felt was dishonest.) 

I'm currently trying to read The Promise by Chaim Potok, and that's what got me thinking about bildungsroman. It's the sequel to the aforementioned The Chosen. I loved the first book, and am a little afraid the sequel will ruin my fondness for how the story ended. I have only read one chapter, and I think it'll be okay, but we'll see.

I think it's a tricky thing in books, when you want your character to get somewhere, and come to some sort of resolution without being cheesy or worse, dishonest. This is a big theme in bildungsroman books, and it is important to the story I suppose, but it's difficult to do it well. Having that great "moment of clarity" is something I've seen in many books (Eat Pray Love comes to mind- a book I would not recommend) and it always seems disingenuous to me. I think The Catcher in the Rye does it well, and Perks of Being A Wallflower came close to being very cheesy but managed to be moving instead, at least for me. 

I think I'm simply too stressed out by school right now to feel the full weight of truly "growing up," plus I have a few months. And I really don't think there's going to be one moment in my life where I feel like everything has changed. Life's nice in that everything moves in increments, and except for moving day, I'm not going to have to face a ton of change right at once. At least that's what I hope. I could never handle a "moment of clarity" where I realize everything is different and I'm a different person. Plus, I don't really want to be a different person. 

Nightmares

The last book to really give me nightmares was Night by Elie Wiesel. We read it in 8th grade, and I've always sort of resented my 8th grade teacher for making us read it. I am as pro "read whatever books you want to, banning books is ridiculous and horrible" as you can get, but I don't think that book was anything that any of us could really handle as 13 year olds. It is such an important book, but I've never revisited it since 8th grade. I couldn't sleep for about two weeks while we were reading and studying the Holocaust, and I was plagued with the most graphic nightmares I've ever had. I don't think I'll ever forget this passage from the novel:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

How are you even supposed to be able to read that and not have nightmares? I cannot elaborate on Night at all, and to be honest, I never know what to say when people ask me what I think of it. I understand why it's so incredibly important, but the selfish part of me just wants to set it aside and never think of it. Some things are too horrific. That's one of a select number of books I've had to just put aside. 

I bring this up because of the current book I'm reading; Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. It's pretty disturbing, and I've made a point to only read it during the day when I'm around people, because I don't want to have any nightmares about it. The concept is creepy: it's based off the life of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and focuses on the character Quentin, who is also the narrator (he is referred to as Q__ P__ in the book) who becomes obsessed with the idea of performing a lobotomy on someone to turn them into a virtual "zombie" who will always love him. 

The murders are depicted in gruesome detail, and Joyce Carol Oates really gets into the mind of a serial killer, which is extremely frightening, to say the least. As one reviewer put it, "What Joyce Carol Oates has done is not write about madness but write in the voice and with the logic of madness itself. The horror of the novel is in the very absence of horror, as we enter the mind of a murderer who has no trace of what we like to call conscience as he depicts the people he manipulates and the sexual savagery he perpetuates upon his victims." 

I've only sparsely read Joyce Carol Oates; I remember her best for her short stories, particularly "June Birthing," (not my thing) "Life After High School," (probably my favorite) and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" (creepy but good). I'm going to wait until I finish this book to see how I feel about her. I think it's very interesting how she is able to completely inhabit her narrator, and she makes me feel uncomfortable because it's hard to hate the main character. Because to him, what he's doing is not wrong, and he does not have any sort of moral compass whatsoever, and comes off almost sympathetic at times. 

I never know what to think of myself when I feel that way, and similarly, when I watched a documentary about Jeffrey Dahmer last year for psychology class, I felt horrible for feeling sympathy for the man. He savagely murdered 17 young men; he was a monster. And yet, whenever I hear about anyone getting bullied when they were young, I cannot help but feel sympathy. For Dahmer's mother as well- after Dahmer was killed in prison, she said, "Now is everybody happy? Now that he's bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?" 

On a lighter note (this is the darkest blog entry I've posted in a while; I'm not in a sort of dark mood or anything, it's very odd), I was discussing Joyce Carol Oates with my dad, and his response was, "Eh, she kind of makes me uncomfortable," and when I asked why, his response was, "Well, I don't know, I feel like I'd be having coffee with her, and I'd leave to go to the bathroom, and when I got back she'd have published a new anthology." I was not familiar with how prolific she truly is, I can be surprisingly ignorant that way, but after a quick google search, I understood what my dad meant. She's certainly published her fair share of novels and short stories, and I'm going to have to wait and see what I think of this in order to see if I want to read more of her stuff. 

Why Tony Kushner is brilliant

Tony Kushner has been in the zeitgeist recently, due to the fact that his magnum opus Angels in America is being revived off-Broadway this fall, as well as a new play of his being released. I came across an interview Kushner did in Vanity Fair, and devoted a few hours this past weekend to re-reading this play. I've been thinking about it a lot since then.

Whenever someone asks me to name my favorite piece of literature, the answer is always the play Angels in America. I came across it when I was 15, because my dad was watching the miniseries of it that HBO had produced. The miniseries was six hours long, he told me, and had Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, and Mary Louise Parker in it, among others. (A random aside- it always felt wrong to me that the first three I listed were always treated like the stars of this film, cause of the name recognition I suppose,  when they really weren't the main characters.) Just from the title and length I immediately brushed it off; I figured it was some weird Touched By an Angel esque thing all about the glory of God, some religious movie. I overheard one line, though, that made me interested in it: "It's 1985. Fifteen years till the third millenium. Maybe Christ will come again. Or maybe the troubles will come. And the end will come. And the sky will collapse and there'll be terrible rain and showers of poison light. Or maybe, maybe my life is really fine... maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise." 

I watched the entire six hours of it that night. The basic plot of it is that it takes place in 1985, during the AIDS crisis and Reagan administration, and it's politics are one of the main aspects of the book. The protagonist is Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS in New York City, who is abandoned by his boyfriend Louis soon after his diagnosis. Another character, Harper Pitt, is a Mormon woman also living in New York City who has a valium addiction and agoraphobia, who has hallucinations that get even worse once she finds out that her husband Joe is gay, and Joe's boss is the real-life character of Roy Cohn, a Reagan controlled lawyer who hid his AIDS diagnosis from the public, calling his condition liver cancer. 


Prior begins to get very sick, and is visited by an Angel who tells him that he is a prophet who's mission is to "stop moving." She tells him that God has left Heaven because of human beings moving and changing and causing so much suffering by continuing to progress, and the sadness human beings face is echoed in Heaven. In the meantime, Harper's delusions get worse as she imagines she is living in Antarctica with a man named Mr. Lies. I don't want to ruin the play for anyone who considers reading it, or spend this entire blog summarizing, and at any rate it is a very difficult play to describe. 


Kushner wrote this play in response to the AIDS crisis, and the Reagan administrations appalling reaction to what had happened. The play is horribly heartbreaking in some parts, and the few friends I've loaned it to have said that after watching the six hours they've felt emotionally drained. And it is pretty heavy material. Kushner gives us one of the saddest, most sympathetic characters with Prior Walter, who's incredible isolation is felt after his abandonment. (A scene that never fails to make me cry.)


 It is most definitely a political play, and Kushner is an unabashed socialist. Each character discusses and laments over the politics over the time, none more than Louis, Prior's erstwhile boyfriend, who in one memorable excerpt from the play has an almost two page monologue describing democracy in America with Prior's best friend, an African American drag queen named Belize (who also turns out to be Roy Cohn's nurse.) It's pretty dense, but interesting:


Louis: It's the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America...
Belize: Here in America race doesn't count. 
Louis: No, no, that's not... I mean you can't be hearing that...
Belize: I...
Louis: It's- look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It's not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist-- only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts or spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people. 


I really think this is the play that got me invested in politics, and I started researching the Reagan administration after I read this play. But it also invokes religious issues, as you see characters who are Jewish, Christian, and Mormon and got me interested in different religions. Parts of the play you really do feel Kushner's intense anger and frustration with what had happened in the 80s, and I liked the emotional aspects of it, but I think the main reason I like it so much is that it's so intellectual. I know how pretentious that sounds, but it deals with such intense topics, and holds nothing back. It most definitely has a "liberal agenda," whatever that means, and focuses pretty heavily on the detriments of being individuals instead of communities. Kushner points out the larger culture's disingenuous response to suffering that was seen with the AIDS crisis, and puts out a message of compassion and tolerance, but in no part does the play cross the line to be preachy or manipulative. It rejects the idea of America as it was during the 80s, and strives for something better. In another one of my favorite excerpts, Belize discusses this:


Belize: Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean.


I've had a hard time getting people into this play, and I think going straight to the text might be difficult as like I said, it is pretty intense. But I think everyone should at least watch the miniseries, which was one of the best miniseries (or just movies, for that matter) I've ever seen. I've posted the trailer below:







I wish I could just comb over every single detail about this play and discuss it at length. Everything about it is so wonderfully written, it switches from being unbelievably devastating to hysterically comical to spiritual within pages, and each of the characters is written in such an in depth way. Roy Cohn isn't caricatured, and somehow is seen as semi-likable even though he plays one of the most disturbing and horrible people of the 20th century. Kushner doesn't shy away from anything political, and his open condemning of our past is a hope to pave a way for a better future. Or as Harper puts it in one of the plays final scenes, "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so."

Dad's books

When I turned 18, my dad wrote me a letter and in it he told me all the books he read when he was 17 through when he was 24; ending the list at the age where he lived in New York City for a couple of months. I've always liked my dad's NYC stories, because they always sound sort of Holden Caulfield-esque, and he had some really interesting experiences that almost sound too fantastical to be real, but I've never doubted him. Anyway, the book list he gave me was as follows:

1. Something Wicked This Way Comes- Ray Bradbury

2. Sweet Thursday, Cannery Row, East of Eden- John Steinbeck

3. World According to Garp- John Irving

4. The Cheerleader- Ruth Doan Macdougall

5. Kinflicks- Lisa Alther

6. Lady Oracle- Margaret Atwood

7. The Razor's Edge- Somerset Maugham

8. This Perfect Day- Ira Levin 

9. Every book by James Kirkwood

10. One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

11. Every Stephen King novel until It in 1986

12. Ghost Story and Shadowland- Peter Straub 

13. Catch-22- Joseph Heller 

14. Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions- Kurt Vonnegut 

His commentary on the novels he read when he was a young adult was also pretty interesting; he described This Perfect Day as a great dystopian novel-- "obviously a rewrite of Orwell but who cares," and said that he remembered liking Kurt Vonnegut but turned away from him after he read those three books when he was in college; he said that Vonnegut's writing was okay for college students, but not "real adults." He said that the Garcia Marquez novel was way over his head and he remembered liking Catch-22 a lot but never revisited it after his first reading. 

As I've alluded to in earlier posts, many of my reading choices are directly influenced by my father, and I trust his judgment greatly. Of this list, I've read Catch-22, most of James Kirkwood books, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, and that's it. Some of these books listed I have no desire to read: I think One Hundred Years of Solitude is way over my head as well, and I'm not much of a Stephen King fan, (though I do appreciate him mocking Stephanie Meyer in a column for Entertainment Weekly) but I'm going to keep this list as a reference for the future. My dad has given me a huge list of books that he thinks I should read in addition to those listed above; I'll list the ones I'm actually looking into reading:

1. Leviathan- Paul Auster

2. Bright Lights, Big City- Jay McInerney 

3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami (also his short story "Sleep") 

4. War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy (I've read this but I was too young to "fully understand it" as my dad puts it and need to revisit it as an adult) 

5. Operation Shylock: A Confession- Phillip Roth

6. All short stories by Ray Bradbury 

I think my relationship with my dad is different than anyone else's. All he does is give me books to read and fight with me about politics. I don't think he's ever asked me "how was school" in my life.