Tag Archives: books

Non-fiction

Some People I Would Like to Thank

Leave a comment

I’m sitting in the coffee shop and hearing a man talking to himself. There’s nothing to see her. Just keep moving.

Anyway, I’ll take this time to thank the writers who’ve come before me.

I remember going to a company party on July Fourth when I was in my twenties—close to twenty years ago. Everyone except my friend and I sat at the pool or the jacuzzi on a hot day. We perused the bookshelf inside the house in Lawndale, a trashy little town a little south of Los Angeles.

My friend plucked a book from the shelf called Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski.

“You got to read this guy,” he said. “It’s so easy to read.”

I’d read some of Bukowski in college. A roommate had kept a book of poems on the toilet in our dorm, and I remember turning it to a page where Bukowski described a trip to Bakersfield, where I lived through high school and some of college.

My friend flipped it to a page for a short story for me to read. It was about a random couple that would have sex in the apartment elevator at random times. The story lasted maybe ten pages if that, but it was largely entertaining.

I became addicted to Bukowski after that story. It was cinematic the way it was written.

Bukowski had a knack for introducing other writers. I learned about Celine, Hamsun, Hemingway, Fante, and those were just the novelists. And I tried to read all of their books but couldn’t quite make it.

Celine was too esoteric for my liking, so I never finished a book of his.

Hamsun’s Hunger is considered to be a classic among certain readers. I read it the whole way through, waiting for a payoff that wouldn’t come, but I still respected the writing.

Hemingway was Hemingway: direct, humorless, way too serious.

Fante was Bukowski without the obscenities. I think I read all of his books except for a few. Ask the Dust was really good. I even saw the movie, which starred the Irish actor Colin Farrell. He wouldn’t have been my first choice. The main character was Italian.

Anyway, those are some of my favorite writers. I don’t celebrate a genre. I could read Thurber one day and Vonnegut the next. Some days, I’m in the mood for a good detective novel, although The Big Sleep was too slangy for me with too many weird metaphors.

My favorite Bukowski book is Ham on Rye. It’s about his childhood. In the documentary Born This Way, Charles described it as a horror story. I could see where he would say that. His childhood, if he’d portrayed it accurately, did sound horrific.

I wouldn’t put Post Office far behind Ham on Rye if it’s my second favorite book of his. Factotum might be. They made a film out of that as well, starring Matt Dillon as the Bukowski character. Again, he wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was close enough, I guess.

I haven’t read Bukowski in many years. I’ve exhausted his books and want to discover someone else with a voice I really love, but I have yet to find that person.

But I do love what Jane Bowles had written. Two Serious Ladies is a book I would recommend to everyone. I just looked her up online. It was her only novel. She’d written mostly short stories and a play. So she’s someone I would want to explore further once I’m done with my reading list, which is arduous. Most of the writing, these so-called classics, has been painful to get through. I don’t recommend anything besides Bowles thus far.

Non-fiction

My Reading List

1 Comment

I read a book last year about how to read, and I didn’t get the message. But it contained a list of books to read before I die, and the list is vast. It has been well over half a year since I read it, and I’m only in the Fs.

The author had posted the list in alphabetical order. Most of the novels are tough to read, especially Jane Austen’s, Brontë’s, Gustave Flaubert’s, to name a few. Reading them was like reading the label on a bug spray can. Not to take away from their artistic achievements, but goddamn they were dense. The paragraphs continued for a page, or at times, a page and a half, and the sentences were full of semicolons.

British authors in the nineteenth century loved to use the word paroxysm for some reason or countenance instead of looks or facial expression—words I would never use in everyday speech. But again, I respect their achievements, even when I’m thinking about what I’m supposed to buy at the grocery store later while I’m reading them.

One author, however, stole my attention. Her name is Jane Bowles, and her novel is Two Serious Ladies. Her language was so direct, and it sounded as if she was telling me the story while I was going to bed. Now she was an effective writer. Nothing pretentious. No need to keep a dictionary nearby.

In Southern California, we have In-N-Out Burger. The menu is simple: hamburger, cheeseburger, double-double, fries, soda, milkshake. That’s it. (There’s a secret menu, too, but for the sake of this comparison, we won’t go there). Bowles’s prose is as direct as that menu. No crispy chicken sandwich, no onion rings, or bacon avocado burger, nothing like that. It’s needless to say, I recommend Two Serious Ladies to anyone who wants to read a novel that carries them along instead of stopping them and forcing them to look up the word countenance for the thirteenth time because they’ve forgotten the meaning seconds after looking it up.

Again, I respect Austen, Brontë, and Flaubert, not to mention Dickens—whom I tried to read for a chapter but just couldn’t stomach the language. Dostoevsky gets my respect, too. I read Crime and Punishment all the way through, but I won’t lie and say I knew exactly what was happening in the story because of my ADHD. I take Adderall, and even that won’t help with reading the goddamn book.

Raymond Carver was another author whom I could read effortlessly, although a lot of his stories bored me. He would write paragraphs about someone opening his refrigerator and drinking from a bottle of milk. It was plain and easy to understand, but what the hell?

Right now, I’m reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It’s easier to understand than the aforementioned classic British, French, and Russian authors, but it’s still a challenge because Franzen tried to fit as much description and exposition in each sentence as I got lost in translation. But it’s still an enjoyable novel. At least I think I know what’s going on.

My hope is that, in this vast list of books to read, I will find another writer like Jane Bowles. I got to. There’s no way I won’t.