Book Lists: Read This!

Read This! is a nifty little volume, though it isn’t really the kind of book you’d pick up and read. It contains lists of favorite books you might like to pick up and read, compiled by bookstore owners, book buyers, and employees of independent bookstores around the country. It also has a few choice anecdotes and personal remarks from the contributors about individual choices.

Thumbing through the book, I was once again reminded how little I’ve read in recent years—and how many books I’ve started but failed to complete. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of quite a few of the titles listed. I also spotted a number of titles that I was meaning to read at some point in the past but had long since forgotten about—for example, The Leopard. And I also came upon a few titles that I did read and love…and then forgot about entirely. It’s like running into a long lost friend, very nice.

This happened to me, in fact, as I glanced at the first list in the book, compiled by editor Hans Weyandt of Micawbers Bookstore in St. Anthony Park. Number 6 on his list is Running After Antelope by Scott Carrier. Now there’s a brilliant, humorous, and very low-key collection. Thanks, Hans, for reminding me!

It occurred to me that I ought to return the favor by compiling a list of my own. I have never worked in a bookstore but perhaps warehouse work might qualify me. Categorical thinker that I am, I thought I might divide up my selections by type, so the reader (presuming there is one) would find it easier to apprise unfamiliar selections.

Literary Non-fiction (my favorite category)

Literature and the Gods: Roberto Calasso

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Larry McMurtry

Islands and Books in Indian Country: Louis Erdrich

Voices of the Old Sea: Norman Lewis

The Gameskeeper at Home: Richard Jefferies

Vertigo: W.S. Sebald

Son of the Morning Star: Evan S. Connell

Rameau’s Nephew: Denis Diderot

Six Memos for the Next Millennium: Italo Calvino

Running After Antelope: Scott Carrier

The Book of Disquiet: Fernando Pessoa

Keeping a Rendezvous: John Berger

London Journal: James Boswell

In Bluebeard’s Castle: George Steiner

Desert Solitaire: Edward Abbey

Essays: Montaigne (the motherload)

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Geoff Dyer

Thinking the Twentieth Century: Tony Judt

Prague Pictures: John Banville

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Julio Cortazar

Long Novels

Parade’s End: Ford Maddox Ford

Your Face Tomorrow: Javier Marias

The Makioka Sisters: Junichiro Tanazaki

Don Quixote: Cervantes

Vanity Fair: Thackerey

Novels

Repetition: Peter Handke

A Heart So White: Javier Marias

Out Stealing Horses: Per Petterson

Montauk: Max Frisch

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Milan Kundera

The Periodic Table: Primo Levi

Far Afield: Susanna Kaysen

Growth of the Soil: Knut Hamsun

Philosopher or Dog: Machado de Asis

Lord Grizzly: Frederick Manfred

Short Novels

Runaway Horse: Robert Walser

Solo Faces: James Salter

The Connoisseur: Evan S. Connell

Pan: Knut Hamsun

Wittgenstein’s Nephew: Thomas Bernhard

The Assault: Harry Mulisch

Farmer: Jim Harrison

A Thousand Cranes: Yasunari Kawabata

Short Stories

Sketches from a Hunter’s Album: Ivan Turgenev

The Interpreter of Maladies: Jhumpa Lahiri

Dance of the Happy Shades: Alice Munro

The Moccasin Telegraph: W.S. Kinsella

Collected Stories: Frank O’Connor

Five Tales of Ferrara: Giorgio Bassani

By Night Under a Stone Bridge: Leo Perutz

Once in Europa: John Berger

The list betrays an obvious bent toward postwar European literature. Well, what can I say? I’ve read quite a few of Willa Cather’s novels—My Antonia, A Lost Lady, Shadows on the Rock, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor’s House, Obscure Destinies—but I’m not sure which one I ought to include. The same goes for Conrad and Chekhov.

I’ve become a dabbler, dipping into Thoreau, Audubon’s Journals, books of poetry scattered around the house. Recent triumphs (meaning I got to the end) include Darwin’s Lost World (Martin Brasier), The Bullhead Queen (Sue Leaf), Falling Man (Don Delillo), The Round House (Louise Erdrich)  A New World (Amid Chaudhuri), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mohsin Hamid).

What next? Looking over at the bookshelf, I suddenly spot a book I forgot I had. It has a pale green binding, easily lost in the mix. Mavis Gallant: Across the Bridge.

But there are also plenty of half-read books sitting in a pile beside the bed…