Books you should be buying this Christmas

Oh, look, it's a drum and I'm banging the hell out of it. Go ahead and buy Infinite Jest for that special someone this Christmas.

Why? Because it's the best American book of the last eighty years or so. It's the most interesting thing written since Joyce and Woolf were messing around with modernism a billion years ago. Also, it's funny and sad. Life is funny and sad. Therefore, this book is about life.

People you should buy this book for: White males aged 18-35. Men don't read books anymore, but if they do, they're likely to read this one because it makes you feel smarter.

People you shouldn't buy this book for: Parents. This book is way too effing long for that. Don't do that to your parents, and the eye strain they'd get from flipping through the end notes is scary to even contemplate.

Aunts and uncles: Similar problem. Also, drug use. They'll probably assume you're addicted to drugs or alcohol if you give them this book even though it's mostly about people getting over various addictions, (this is really unfair the book is about a lot of stuff and to try and boil it down this way is foolish) and they'll assume that you're recovering as well.

Women-Okay, that's a pretty large generalization. I'm willing to take it back on the grounds that smart people like Zadie Smith love the guy. However, in my experience, women don't like intellectual white guys who write long books. Besides which, yeah, it's a bit more of a coming of age guy story.

Should you buy this book to impress a girl/guy: I'd go with no. That is, in less they're really into literature. It's probably more acceptable for a gal to buy this for her boyfriend to show how cool she is with him spending a month of his life consumed by this book.

Quote:

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

Yeah, I'll write about this book again.

Why? Because it's the best prose, sentence by sentence I've read of any living author. I know, prose, who gives a shi-. How is that going to help them make this into a movie that the mass public can enjoy. Trick. It was made into a movie.

People you should buy this book for: Women between the ages of 18-175. Even if they don't like the glittering prose they'll enjoy the complete lack of male characters. Who hasn't been waiting for a book about rural America that doesn't have men? Certainly not Toni Morrison fans, but for the rest of us, enjoy!

People you shouldn't buy this book for: Men. That is, in less they're really into prose. Otherwise the dearth of long car trips, descriptions of various good looking women they'd like to uh, get to know better, hallucinations from overdosing and lack of war or the Holocaust is going to make this book kind of boring for them.

People you can buy this book for: Mom, sister, aunt, friend.

Should you buy this book to impress a girl/guy: Probably not. It's too short to be impressive, and glittering prose just doesn't sell like it used to.

Quoting:

“There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

Or this:

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

We're talking about Tolstoy. Tolstoi?

Why? Because it's the best realist novel I've ever read, and I've read at least ten books. This book left me but the characters didn't. Did I really just write that hackneyed sentence? Yes, dammit, I did, but that's only because it's true. I still wonder about all the incredibly realistic that Tolstoy came up with in this book, far less than I wonder about Anna who struck me as way less complex than the rest of the lot in War and Peace.

People you should buy this book for: People over 25, who are capable of sitting for long periods of time reading a book. This is not for the faint of heart.

People to avoid: Those who don't enjoy a long history of why Napoleon failed in battle. No really, it's a gigantic section in the book, and it's only going to be interesting to everyone's uncle/father who reads books exclusively about Stonewall Jackson's tactics in the Civil War. It bogs the book way down. And guess what, the book is still amazing. (This is unlike Les Miserables, which goes off the rails so far that you immediately buy tickets to the musical, so you can avoid reading any further).

People this book is okay to buy for: Avid readers. Fathers. Some mothers. Some uncles, perhaps aunts. This one requires some judgement. It's long, but it pays off.

Possibility of buying this to impress someone: Not in less that person is also a huge book nerd.

Quotes:

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.”

I just wanted the opportunity to talk about sparkling prose again. I don't think we talk enough about sparking prose. Virginia Woolf has the sort of prose that wakes us up to ourselves, the selves that lie beneath the humdrum of the every day. It is every bit as relevant as it was eighty or so years ago. It is true now that a woman can sit in an office all day, without ever having anyone know what passed through her mind, or a man can ride a subway in obscurity while his whole world is rocked. She wakes us up to this.

People you should buy this book for: Women. Also, men who fancy themselves poets. Some people will try and convince you that the better work is "To the Lighthouse," but I'll take Mrs. Dalloway every day of the week.

People you should avoid: Men. She's really skimpy on the narratives involving how exactly George Washington survived that first winter at valley forge. In fact, it lacks a whole host of facts. What it contains is everything else.

Should you buy this book to impress a girl/guy: It's probably okay to buy this book for a girl to impress her with your amazing male sensitivity. Mention the sparkling prose and how we all keep our true selves hidden.


Quotes:


“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

“An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .”

Why? Because who, besides the NBA (National Book Award, he is not an erstwhile hoops star) of a few years ago has heard of this guy? Almost no one. And guess what? These stories are fun. They range from a doomed trip to discover an inland lake in Australia, to the Chernobyl meltdown, a woman in space with a cosmonaut lover. So yeah, varied, and fun, and sad. Theme achieved.

People you should buy this book for: Anyone over the age of 20 or so. You might have to talk them into actually reading a book of short stories first. It's okay to read short stories, they won't hurt you. In fact, you might even like them. You see, you begin, and then it ends, rather quickly. Yes, a short story is just a poor metaphor for life or sex.

People to avoid: People who do not enjoy short stories. Who say? You know, I just can't get into them. Feel free to hit them over the head with a good collection of short stories and then leave them dazed and perhaps bloody.

Romance: This book is probably not your best bet. It's better for the fathers, mothers, uncles, brothers, sisters, estranged cousins crowd. In short, no fear of sparkling prose here, just enjoyable and interesting stories.

Quotes:

“I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.”

“You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.”