Some recommended books

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by Eric Bourland

created fall 1996

Text of this page ("Recommended Books") copyright © 1994–2005 by Eric Bourland. All rights reserved. The content of this page is a public resource and may be distributed freely if unchanged and credited to the author. Thanks.

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I have not updated this page in years, but these are books to which I return often. If you want you can obtain these books by clicking on their titles and adding them to your Amazon.com shopping basket. See Disclaimer. I hope these books give you as much pleasure as they have given me. —EB

Hayden Carruth

Carruth is one of the most mature and skilled poets writing today. His poems are observant, often sad, often really funny, and told perfectly. Carruth has the ability to stop at the edge of something excessive; or to acknowledge calmly a truism or platitude and turn it into a compelling remark.

Poems:

Essays:

 

Stephen Dobyns

Calling on his considerable experience, Dobyns gives practical advice to poets and would-be poets, and slips in useful suggestions for fiction writers too. If you have an interest in creative writing, you will find this book engaging and useful. Dobyns begins by pointing out the deceptions that writers must uncover within themselves. He goes on to talk about clarity and how poems sometimes fail in clarity, in communicating to a reader the full content of the poet's idea. He talks about the perceptions and reactions that readers experience as they read. He allots chapters to metaphor and tone and pacing, basing his remarks on a vast personal knowledge of poetics. In four brief and respective chapters he discusses poems by Rilke, Chekhov, Mandelstam, and Ritsos, and he does a good job of explaining why the poems are successful. More to the point, he teaches useful skills by studying the successes and mistakes of these poets. He compares the first draft of Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem "Amaryllis" with the final draft and gives an illuminating discussion of the differences between the drafts, and why Voigt chose the revisions that led to the published poem. He finishes the book with a brief discussion of his process of writing his poem "Cemetery Nights." Dobyns:

"Sometimes I think communication is all we have — a voice like a silver wire through the dark or one chunk of flesh pressing against another chunk of flesh. Sometimes I don't even think that."

Well, despite some occasional darkness, Dobyns has written a scholarly and loving book. If you want to write, or if you want to appreciate better the craft of writing, you will benefit from Dobyns's book.

Fiction:

Poems:

 

George MacDonald Fraser

Novels:

Flashman Novels:

Fraser is a natural storyteller and an exacting student of history. He is best known for his picaresque creation, Flashman, the lecher and coward who in the Flashman novels recounts his unwilling involvement in almost every significant military action conducted by England or the United States between 1839 and 1876. The novels contain firsthand accounts of the disastrous British retreat from Kabul, the political machinations of Otto von Bismarck, the aptitude and wit of Lola Montez, the slave trade between West Africa and the United States, the mass movement of the Forty Niners into the American west, the political machinations of Abraham Lincoln, the warring between white settlers and North American Indians, Colonel Custer's last stand, the horror of Queen Ranavalona's reign in Madagascar, the campaigns of James Brooke ("the White Raja") against the pirates of Sarawak and Borneo, the stand of the Thin Red Line against the Cossacks, the charge of the Light Brigade, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, the Sepoy Mutiny and the massacre at Cawnpore, the Taiping Rebellion, and other incidents recorded by historians. Through everything, Flashman's antics make for fine reading. In the main, Flashman is fun. I greedily gulped down all ten Flashman novels within a month of discovering them. Readers who read because they love a good story will enjoy Fraser's well-crafted novels.

 

John Gardner

Here is Gardner's lovely and ironical retelling of the Beowulf poem, from the perspective of the poem's antagonist — who remains the antagonist, since the monster does not want our sympathy. He is filled with the rage and hatred we expect, is the Grendel of nightmare to whom we are accustomed. Gardner's achievement is to make Grendel's murderousness fully plausible. His presentation of the poem's characters is revelatory and spirit-warming, like coming in to the hearth after a long absence. The familiar characters — Beowulf, Hrothgar, Wealhtheow, the dragon, the merewife, Unferth, the coast guard, and the rest — are moving and have a depth. They are the complex men and women of whom the scop and his audience must have been vividly aware. The conversations Grendel has with Unferth and with the dragon are hilarious and riveting.

 

Donald Hall

Poems:

Essays:

 

Kent Haruf

This is an engaging story about people in a small town facing different adversities and discovering they have a community. The well-meant antics of the McPheron brothers are worth the purchase price alone. It is very well done and thoroughly enjoyable.

 

Brooks Haxton

 

William A. Henry III

This book argues that some people are more competent than others and that some cultures are more valuable than others. Henry discusses the manner in which American institutions elevate egalitarianism, derogate elitism, and end up as incubators of mediocrity. He offers seven criteria by which one can identify a superior human culture. He offers the idea that people should be judged not on politicized identifiers like gender or race but on merit alone, and he defines, rather plausibly, what "merit" is. Even if you don't agree with Henry, or if you're annoyed with him for speaking up in this manner, you have to admire his precise and unafraid writing. He is someone you must consider.

 

Cormac McCarthy

Novels:

Stage Plays:

McCarthy's earlier fiction and plays are very powerful and I read them repeatedly when I was slogging through graduate school (rather than reading the assigned texts, which accounts partly for my shabby performance in the academe). His stories are lyrical and violent and moving. His craft is incomparable. I recommend that you skip his more popular "Border Trilogy," in which the remorseless beauty of his earlier work is diluted.

 

Jo Ann McNamara, John E. Halborg, E. Gordon Whatley (Editor)

This book comprises biographies of eighteen Frankish women who lived in the sixth and seventh centuries C.E. and who became saints. Translated from the Latin, the biographies were written near the time in which the women lived, by people who were associated with them or who remember them (including Gregory of Tours). The texts are consumed with the hagiographical praise typical of religious writing (Merovingian or otherwise), but after you sort through all that, you can get a useful idea of the meaning of sainthood, the functions of abbesses and nuns, and the everyday lives of women during those times. A useful, necessary (and very handsome) book.

 

Yukio Mishima

This is a brief and riveting story, set in a port town in postwar Japan, about a sailor, a woman, and her 13-year-old son, Noboru, who is one of a gang of violent, intellectual youngsters. Noboru discovers a peephole into his mother's bedroom and begins the habit of spying on her. One night she brings home the sailor Ryuji, a hardworking and contemplative man. Noboru watches them through the peephole, hears a ship's horn blow and watches Ryuji's reflexive turning toward the horn, and has a revelation, not simply about his mother and sex and adulthood, but about the ordering of reality.

Assembled there were the moon and a feverish wind, the incited, naked flesh of a man and a woman, sweat, perfume, the scars of a life at sea, the dim memory of ports around the world, a cramped breathless peephole, a young boy's iron heart — but these cards from a gypsy deck were scattered, prophesying nothing. The universal order at last achieved, thanks to the sudden, screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle of life — the cards had paired: Noboru and mother — mother and man — man and sea — sea and Noboru ….

The boys practice a philosophy of dispassionate objectivism. They number themselves one to six in a cold hierarchy. Noboru is number three. Goaded by their leader they scorn the morals and desires and goals of the rest of humanity, becoming themselves inhuman. As an exercise to demonstrate their objectivism they abduct a kitten and do something awful to it. The contrast between their normal adolescent reactions and their efforts at dispassion are striking. At one of their meetings Noboru describes Ryuji, and then this sailor, because he represents the dispassionate sea, becomes to the boys an ideal of objectivism.

However, Ryuji turns out to be a romantic and vulnerable person, and the boys feel betrayed. Meanwhile, Noboru's mother and the sailor solidify their relationship and get engaged. Noboru reports back to his gang, who decide to make of the sailor a lesson in objectivism. They lure him to a remote place and again do something awful.

 

Li Po

Poems from Li Po (701 – 762 C.E.), the poet who cheerfully wandered China for most of his youth, about friendship and nature and drinking wine. In his later years he was exiled and wandered China again, this time in a more desperate way. The later poems are very moving. All of his poems are brief, but successful, and beautiful.

 

Pierre Riché

A discussion of the details of life in the Carolingian Empire, 732 – 911 C.E. Includes chapters on geography; human relationships with nature; urban communities; monastic communities; the demographics of the population; aristocratic families and life at court; the ecclesiastical aristocracy; the peasants; farming methods and yields; travel; artisan technology including blacksmithing and goldsmithing; the building trades; food and diet; clothing; furniture; housing, lighting, heating, and hygiene; religious practices; the administration of justice.

 

J.M. Wallace-Hadrill

This is a discussion of Gaul in Merovingian and Carolingian times (c. 400 – 900 C.E.), and of the evolution of the Frankish rulers from Roman vassalage to governance over an agrarian state north of the Rhine. The book concerns itself mainly with the character and actions of the Frankish kings. There is a riveting view of Childeric; a view of the politics that influenced Gregory of Tours in his writing; a study of the Burgundian Fredegar's history of early France; and a discussion of the conditions that predicate and terminate kingships.

 

Irvine Welsh

This is an engaging and fast-moving story. The dialog and the first person narration are given entirely in Scots, and it takes us a wee bit ay head-scratching tae figure what it's aw aboot. There is a handy glossary in the back, that I discovered only after reading the book and puzzling out all the Gaelicisms for myself. The presence of a glossary is probably an ironical jab from Welsh. The book describes the lives of a group of Scots, in their twenties, some addicted to heroin, who are trying to get by in the modern world. The first protagonist is an articulate junkie who lifts Kierkegaard books from the bookstore and lives by defrauding the Scottish dole system. The book shifts perspectives. Other characters take over and give their own first-person accounts. All of them are entertaining, modern, and plausible. We sympathize with the plights they get into, since we have been in them too: troubles with family, love, friends, drugs.

 

T.H. (Terence Hanbury) White

Initially charming and fantastical, this book turns darker and bluntly real. The most famous of its parts, The Sword in the Stone, is a trove of natural and human history delivered through the story of the boy Arthur. Subsequent sections introduce us to all the characters in the Arthurian pantheon, whom most of us know mainly through their shabby renderings in popular culture. There is much to remember and to love here: the knights sitting round Sir Ector's table drinking port; Arthur and Merlyn having breakfast across a table of animated crockery; the boar hunt in the forest with Master Twyti and the singing in the wintry hall afterward; the hilarious joust between Pellinore and Grummore; the young Gaelic boys Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth telling their family story in the attic of their round tower while their enchanted mother Morgause boils a cat for a piseog in the room below; the Gaelic boys and the unicorn; Grummore and Palomides dressing as the Questing Beast to cheer up Pellinore (again, hilarious); the ugly boy Lancelot whirling his dumbbells in the Armoury; the charming romantic tension that builds between Lancelot and Queen Guenever; their long affectionate romance that saddens them since they know it will lead to their doom and Arthur's doom and the downfall of the Round Table, established in the first place to out-do brutality. This is a tale about our weaknesses, and its message is rather a depressing one (in typical English style) since it says that ultimately we are unable to do anything about our weaknesses unless we are singlemindedly pure — as are the wild creatures of nature, the pike in the moat and the ants in Merlyn's study; and the virginal unconquerable Sir Galahad.

 

George F. Will

Many of Will's view are sensible, while a few (e.g. his restrictive view of reproductive freedom for women) are not. But if you want to be recognized as a good writer then emulate the wit and pragmatism of George F. Will. Aside from the felicitous prose, this series of essays addresses the U.S. government's management of the common weal, clearly labeling its rational and its irrational practices. Will has a deep acquaintance with American and world history, with which he strengthens his observations. I learned more from reading Will than from two semesters of history classes. Particularly refreshing are Will's view of the racial "spoils system" and our society's stampede to identify and purge our cultural hegemonies. Whoever you are and whatever your political views, Will is useful to you. He is wise and smart, and he expresses a definite sensibility about the political world that helps you define your own sensibility.

 

Gene Wolfe

You will work a little to follow Wolfe's subtle storyline. He is never gratuitous, and every component of his story — The Book of the New Sun— has been carefully placed. Yes, this is science fiction, but the writing is beautiful and the thought is anything but puerile. In fact, if you are determined to spoil your fun or if you are an academic, you can read this tetralogy as a Christian allegory. ("New Sun" probably refers to the messiah, and you can go on from there.) Wolfe is steeped in history and mythology (and incidentally he has a degree in mechanical engineering). Every personal or place name in his tetralogy carries an historical or a mythological connotation, and if you know the history or the myth behind a given name you will find your reading experience is even more pleasurable. The Book of the New Suncomprises four novels: The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch. They were first published in the early 1980s, and immediately won all manner of Hugo and Nebula medals, which are the awards dispensed to writers of the best science fiction within a given year. The tetralogy has been reprinted by the Orb Press in two volumes: Shadow and Clawand Sword and Citadel. While Wolfe (I read somewhere) supposedly did not set out to write a science fiction tetralogy, he found that the sci-fi genre was the venue suited most to sell his work. Well, the sci-fi genre has not been the same since. Set in the future on an ancient earth circling a dying red sun, the book describes the adventures of Severian, a journeyman in the state-sponsored Guild of the Torturers. Banished from his Guild for the sin of mercy, Severian goes from homeless wanderer to leader of an empire, an entirely plausible outcome given Severian's competence, intelligence, and (Christian-like?) devotion to his cause. These books contain a beautiful and gripping story.

 

Marguerite Yourcenar

Yourcenar's book, Memoirs of Hadrian, gives a moving and plausible account of the Roman Emperor. Yourcenar has a scholar's acquaintance with the history surrounding (and caused by) Hadrian. The voice with which she instills Hadrian is mesmerizing. Though I have read the book once already, during the last couple of days I have forgone sleep and broken lunch appointments to continue reading it a second time and avoid cessation of this voice. The book begins with Hadrian at age 60, on his deathbed and composing a letter to his successor, the young Marcus Aurelius. The letter turns naturally and gently into a memoir. Hadrian's energy, reason, and self-confidence are a joy to experience. As Hadrian recounts his life, he offers a view of the different historical people with whom he has had contact, and insights into human character. Hadrian/Yourcenar:

I have often thought that men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself: they delight in fingers reddened with henna, in perfumes rubbed on the skin, and in the thousand devices which enhance their beauty and sometimes fabricate it entirely. These tender idols differed in every respect from the tall females of the barbarians, or from our grave and heavy peasant women; they were born from the golden volutes of great cities, from the vats of the dyers or the baths' damp vapor, like Venus from the foam of Greek seas. They seemed hardly inseparable from the feverish evenings of certain evenings in Antioch, from the excited stir of mornings in Rome, from the famous names which they bore, or from that luxury amid which their last secret was to show themselves nude, but never without ornament. I should have desired more: to see the human creature unadorned, alone with herself as she indeed must have been at least sometimes, in illness or after the death of a first-born child, or when a wrinkle began to show in her mirror. A man who reads, reflects, or plans belongs to his species rather than to his sex; in his best moments he rises even above the human. But my fair loves seemed to glory in thinking only as women: the mind, or perhaps the soul, that I searched for was never more than a perfume.

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