Ten Books I Never Put Away

A Hardwick sentence is a nail in the skull. She is a dangerous writer for other writers: it’s difficult not to want to write like her after reading her. But Sleepless Nights is a one-off, a book that comes as close as possible to demonstrating how the brain collects memories, regrets, sensory impressions, and then heaves them all into a constellation, ever-changing, ever-alight.

“The Gabriel Garcia Marquez of the Antilles” is what the New York Times has called Chamoiseau, and Solibo is one of his masterworks. A wildly intricate, devastating portrait of a town bard’s death, and the absurd investigation that ensues, this book explodes any reductive notion of what a novel should be or what it is allowed to do. Solibo dies with his “throat SNICKT by the Word.” You’ll have to read to find out what that means.

Some writers we love for their technical gift on the page; others we love for their personality, their way of perceiving and being in the world. Auden is that rare mix of both: he is among the most technically skilled poets of the 20th century, and he also may be the most charming, sophisticated, and wily of the bunch. He’s my favorite writer, and my guiding light.

Treuer’s book shocks first of all in its straightforward approach: close readings of seminal works in the Native American Fiction Canon. Treuer is empowered by a simple, devastating insight: the capacious nature of these vital texts has been largely limited and misrepresented by critics and readers who’ve sought to label the novels under discussion as “Native American Fiction,” rather than simply, Literature. By recasting the works of Erdrich, Cooper, Alexie, and others, in new (and proper) light, the enormous expanse of the Novel-as-a-Form reveals itself once more. These are critical essays that transcend, and become art all on their own.

Poet and essayist Charles Simic was a man of many appetites, and this essay collection gives us him at his very best on a vast array of subjects: the blues, fried sausages, Buster Keaton, Emily Dickinson, Heironymus Bosch, and more. There is a sleight of hand at work in nearly every sentence Simic writes: these are sentences as crisp and concrete as they are lyrical and boundless. One quick appetizer: “the blues, in the end, are about a sadness older than the world, and there's no cure for that.”

Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are the two best novels in English in my opinion. Woolf is the preeminent maestro of the form, virtuosic as a sentence writer, balletic in her handling of human cognitive associations, and absolutely lethal in her treatment of time and death. For full effect, they should be read in tandem.

This book is having a resurgence of late, and like many people my age, I only came to it in recent years. Now, I don’t go more than a few weeks in between visits with the old Professor. Stoner is a catalog of our quiet dignities, our passions, the small sacrifices we make of ourselves every day to try and survive, and those few essential things we simply will not relinquish.

Painful as it is eye-opening, Klebold takes the courageous approach of investigating her son’s mental health struggles and the events that led to him committing one of the worst school shootings in American history. She is hard on herself and her husband–and the parents of Klebold’s accomplice, Eric Harris–but she is also open about the struggle every parent faces: how did her child become a mystery to her? And what does she do with the knowledge that he was in so much pain? It is an unvarnished piece of life-writing free of literary artifice or ambition, and in that sense, it is an essential piece of literature.

American poetry lost one of its lodestars with Gluck’s death, and Averno may be her very best. It is as much private mythology as it is a retelling of our most ancient stories, all in the service of asking the question that is ultimately unanswerable: “What will you do,/ when it is your turn in the field with the god?”

A new love for me, Abreu’s collection of short fictions about queer life in Brazil in the 1980’s is stylistically dazzling, formally innovative, and, most importantly, full of heart. Abreu’s characters are sometimes down on their luck, sometimes just yearning for connection, but the complex truths of their lives are never treated reductively. Fiction that is expansive and truthful about the irreducibility of certain human problems is the fiction that I return to most, the fiction that I cannot live without. To quote Abreu: “Is there anything more self-destructive than persisting without faith?”