The King's English - Books We Love

Who We Were ▪► Submit ▪► Links ▪► E-Mail

BOOKS WE LOVE

Here's our annotated list of recommendations. It will always be incomplete, but we had a lot more we wanted to add before press time that will be added as soon as time permits. Pick out the ones you like -- and let us know you liked 'em. (Incidentally, the Amazon links below are supposed to be pictures of the actual dust jackets, but they sometimes morph into orange ads for Amazon. We don't like it, but can't stop it. Apologies ...)

	The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. This has nothing to do with Tom Cruise or the movie. This is the real thing: great literature written by someone who's a lot smarter than you. (And us too, of course.) The main character is a young boy-genius (take your finger out of your throat, DeWitt makes us believe it) who auditions seven men for a father-figure. Creaky premise when spelled out like that, but the book is witty, whip-smart, and funny as hell. If you don't love language, then skip this one and go read Bridges of Madison County again.			Mating, by Norman Rush. Another great book, sadly overlooked. Won the National Book Award while you were asleep. The main character's voice is vital, unique, and utterly riveting. One of the few female voices done credibly by a male author (or so say the women we know). She's a doctoral student in anthropology living in Botswana. Ends up pursuing Nelson Denoon, the mysterious star anthropologist who's vanished into the bush to create a utopia. The best-ever description of a relationship between intellectuals. Moving, too.

	Amazons, by Cleo Birdwell. Let us be the first to clue you in: Cleo Birdwell is the pen name of Don Delillo. And Amazons is his funniest book ever, not excluding White Noise. More a series of riffs and set pieces than a novel, Amazons is nonetheless meatier than most fiction published in the last five years. Buy it used at www.abebooks.com and save yourself some dough.			The Last of the Wine, by Mary Renault, 1956. Alexias, a young Greek, comes of age during the final phases of the Peloponnesian War; he's schooled by Socrates (Plato's a classmate), fights the Spartans, faces down the father who ordered him killed at birth (Mom had second thoughts), competes in the Olympics, and meets Lysis, his lifelong friend and lover. We make it sound melodramatic when it's anything but. An achingly real historical novel -- you'll learn a lot about ancient Greece -- it's also one of the most moving love stories we've ever read.

	The Waves, by Virginia Woolf. Reading Virginia Woolf is like being the student of a martial arts master: she makes the impossible look easy, and you never, grasshopper, no matter how hard you try, never grab that darn pebble before she closes her hand. But we're trivializing: The Waves is a peak literary experience, perhaps the peak. We've got lots more to say about it here. And if the existence of such a perfect work of literature makes you feel that you've wasted your life, just remember that you can't sue us.			*Kleinzeit,* by Russell Hoban, 1974. If Death came to you in the form of a dirty chimpanzee, would you offer it a banana? Never mind, it's not important. If you're a writer, you'll find no better (and no more absurd) fable than Kleinzeit about creating art and meaning in the shadow of death. Random pieces of this book: Thucydides, a glockenspiel, a highly symbolic talking hospital ... Hoban is unclassifiable -- read Kleinzeit back to back with Riddley Walker, and we dare you to disagree.
	A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell. You can't read a 12-volume book like this without wishing other books were longer. Here, Powell takes on one of the things that fascinated Proust (Powell's obvious model): how people change over time. You can read the first three books without realizing they're more than elegant, gossipy confections - but read four, and you begin to realize how expertly Powell is weaving old characters into the narrative, while whipping up interesting new ones all the while. The ever-shifting, pretentious Widmerpool is the most famous, but there are many more who are equally compelling. (By the way, the link here only takes you to the "first movement," a collection of the first four of the 12 novels you'll need to read in order to add this notch to your bedpost.)			Death of Che Guevara, by Jay Cantor. Cantor won a MacArthur grant back when they were still being given to geniuses. Why? Read the damn book. Narrated - ultimately - by one of Guevara's surviving buddies, it covers Guevara's early life and his struggles with asthma, as well as his failed attempt to incite a revolution in Bolivia. Narrative, journal entries, and metafiction make up the bulk of this sophisticated, passionate book, rounded out with a miniature, brutal history of the 20th-century (in which all revolutions are inevitably crushed). This is an ominous novel of fierce politics and fiercer characters that should never have been allowed to go out of print. Get it at www.abebooks.com.