I do not regularly read novels. Most of my reading is in the non-fiction
realm. However, in my four-plus decades
of looking at text on paper I have encountered many novels that informed me as
much as my non-fiction books do. Here
are my top 10. - RXTT
1.
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
(1969): I cannot remember what or who introduced me
to this book. I have no memory of
discovering it, or of someone suggesting it to me as reading material. I read it first as a teenager then re-read it
again several times over the next decade or so.
I had read many novels before this.
Most of them were either pulpy fare like Louis L’Amour westerns, or
science fiction stories that would nowadays be labeled as “Young Adult
Lit.” I had tried my hand at a few
classics, even attempting to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish when I
was 13 (I did not get very far!), as well as the mandatory reading in school.
(Charles Dickens was, and is, and forever will be, the dullest shit) Slaughterhouse-Five was the first novel I
read whose tone, ideas, and general mindset closely matched the way I thought
about things, even though at the time I was too young to be able to voice these
things as well as Vonnegut does. It was
an “anti-war book” that was FUNNY, and not in an oblivious way. It laughed directly in the face of the
overwhelming sadness and horror that is experienced by those of us that have to
go to war. It laughed because it was too
tragic not to laugh. I had found my
literary soul-mate, and would go on to read everything I could get my hands on
by Kurt Vonnegut. The fact that this
book has and is consistently banned from school libraries makes me think it is
even more valuable than I ever imagined.
If the powerful fear it because they see it as dangerous then it is
exactly what I want to read! “In 1972 it was banned from the public schools of
Oakland County, Michigan. The circuit judge described the book as
"depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian."- Morais, Betsy (12 August 2011). "The Neverending Campaign to Ban 'Slaughterhouse Five'". The Atlantic. This still happens today in the USA, 40+
years later.
2.
Moby Dick –
Herman Melville (1851): This is my second-favorite novel. It did not become that until I re-read the
entire thing, including the awesome chapters on cetology and the whale-oil
trade, when I was in my early 30’s. I
had tried to read it before, but never managed to get too far into it. I instead would read and re-read the Classics
Illustrated comic book version! When I
finally got sucked into Moby Dick, I found an amazing story that touches on the
biggest, most universal themes that a writer can attempt to explore. Death, obsession, liberty, pain, fear,
despair, and man’s place in the Universe itself are all explored in a manner
that slowly unfolds from what, on the surface, seems like purely an adventure
tale. Sometimes a book can affect me in
ways that only become evident in the weeks and months after reading it. Moby Dick contains nearly the totality of
existence within its pages. Even love
itself, while a minor player in the book, is explored. We are all Ishmael, victims and survivors,
surrounded by humanity, yet eternally alone, cursed with free will, but bound
by loyalty to others and their sometimes irrational desires. This is a book that during Melville’s
lifetime only sold around 3,200 copies, yet may very well be the single
greatest work of fiction in American Literature.
3.
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe (1719):
This was the first
“classic” novel that I read and enjoyed.
As with Moby Dick, I had repeatedly read my copy of the Robinson Crusoe
Illustrated Classics comic book before I managed to actually read the novel
itself. Luckily, Robinson Crusoe is not
a hard read, nor is it a deep exploration of complex issues. It is in fact a very simple story which,
despite the issues inherent in writing about how a white Englishman creates his
own society and teaches the “savage native” Friday how to properly live,
actually manages to tell a universal story of human endurance, willpower, and
gratitude. I must have read and re-read
this book 6 times before I was 20 years old.
Each time I read it I would understand more and more, and I would carry
with me the lessons of self-reliance, patience, and humility in the face of an
overwhelming Nature/God, much as Crusoe manages to do in surviving nearly 30
years marooned on a deserted island.
Since I also love raw data in any form, I also greatly appreciated the detailed
descriptions of the various means by which Robinson Crusoe managed to feed,
clothe, shelter, and protect himself and Friday, the native who Crusoe saved
from being eaten by cannibals. It is no
wonder that of all the works of English literature, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has
been translated into more languages and published in more countries that
anything except for the Bible.
4.
Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski (1982): At around 18 years old, a dorm-mate
who was studying writing shared this novel with me, which he had checked out
from the campus library. I do not
remember what exactly he said to make me want to read it but I went ahead and
devoured this book. It was the most
harrowing personal account of growing up a true outcast misfit in the cookie-cutter
world that was 1930’s and early 1940’s America.
Much like Slaughterhouse-Five, the story told in Ham on Rye is deeply
moving and depressing at times. It also
shares a similar vein of laughing/ridiculing the world around you and the
people that make living such a fucking chore sometimes. Whereas in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s
humor is apathetic and detached, Bukowski’s humor is raw and deeply
aggressive. This story, like many of his
novels, is essentially a disguised autobiography where Henry Chinaski is
Bukowski’s alter-ego, and it exposes the raw nerve that Bukowski carried with
him until his dying day. From his abuse
at home, to the torturous “treatments” to lance his unnaturally extreme boils
and acne, to the constant and punishing derision the world heaps upon him as he
moves from public schools to private ones, Bukowski seemingly exorcised his
demons with this novel. His previous
novels (Post Office, Factotum, Women) dealt with his adult existence. Writing Ham on Rye must have been like
uncovering the nearly-healed scabs of his inner wounds.
5.
Blood Music – Greg Bear (1985): This is my favorite science fiction
novel. Greg Bear is one of the few
writers that still write in what is called “hard” science fiction. This means that the thrust of the story is
not plot-driven, nor character-driven, but driven by the rigorous extrapolation
of current scientific knowledge and theory and showing where this technology
and science could lead the human race.
In that sense Greg Bear follows in the footsteps of the masters like
Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. I
love how this novel keeps going past the point where most writers, running out
of ideas, would stop. The idea of the
book is that a researcher has managed to create/grow single-celled biological
computers. To save his work he ends up
injecting them into himself, unwittingly creating cells that actually have
consciousness. Because, as quantum
theory tells us, the “reality” of the Universe is only “decided” once a
conscious being makes a measurement of some sort, this causes unprecedented
issues once the single-celled organisms grow at an exponential rate. Eventually, there are trillions and trillions
of these organisms, each one observing the world around them, and their collective
consciousness surpasses the collective consciousness of the 7 billion humans on
planet Earth. Eventually all humans are
“infected” by these cells. Greg Bear
extrapolates quite intelligently about the problems this would bring,
eventually leading to an existence wholly separate from the physical/material
world. It is a far-fetched outcome, but
he details it so well that it makes perfect sense. That is my favorite science fiction! I love books that present the reader with
deep topics to think about and ideas you could not find anywhere else.
6. House of
Leaves – Mark Danielewski (2000): One
of the best things about watching a great movie in a crowded theater is that
you lose yourself in the collective reactions.
The whole audience laughs, cries, screams, or jumps in unison, making
the experience of the film that much more immersive. One of the best things about reading a great
novel is that your whole self, conscious and unconscious, is lost among the
stream of words that the writer has chosen for you to ingest. Reading Moby Dick transports you completely
into the world of the Nantucket whaling ships.
Reading one of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories instantly drops you in a
cruel world where you live by your wits and your sword, a world not much
different from what humans had to live through in the dawn of civilizations. House of
Leaves so completely draws you in, so easily distorts the basic structure of a
novel, so readily turns unease into outright horror, that I have yet to
experience anything else like it. Mark
Danielewski has crafted a meta-novel, and instead of it becoming a pointless
exercise rejecting formalism and traditional narrative structure, everything he
does, from the typeface choices to the page layouts, to his consistent printing
of the word “house” in blue everywhere it appears in the novel, just focuses
more intently the part of your brain that screams and shouts, “This is
wrong! This is horrible! This SHOULD NOT BE!!!” until you are sucked
into a narrative world from which you may never truly “recover.” This is not horror of the
monster-under-the-stairs type. It is
horror of the unnerving sort that makes you question the very fabric of your
reality. I wish I could describe it more
without giving away the plot. As it
stands, the book is constructed as a story within a story within another story,
with seemingly endless footnotes, asides, and marginalia. Basically, a family move into a house and
find that parts of it are bigger inside than they appear from the outside,
leading them to discover bizarre spaces and slowly lose their minds. The story of the family is told by a news
crew that joined the family to explore what they found, and the story of the
news crew is told by a researcher whose papers exploring the events in the house are
found by a low-level druggie whose life is changed by reading the researcher’s account
of the original events. You see what I
mean? It is a tremendous work of
fiction, and the story of its creation is almost as bizarre as the book itself.
7. The Illuminatus Trilogy – Robert Anton Wilson
& Robert Shea (1975): Perhaps the seminal work of cognitive
dissonance, the Illuminatus Trilogy is the end result of its two authors
attempting to craft a narrative that included, and ridiculed, nearly every
single conspiracy theory, political idea, cult of personality, and outright
kooky shit that came across their desk when they both worked as editors for
Playboy magazine. It jumps from narrator
to narrator with no warning, changing frames of reference nearly as often as it
introduces new characters. It is also
extremely funny. At almost 1,000 pages
long, the “books” that make up the trilogy work as pure “guerilla ontology,” a
technique used by Robert Anton Wilson in all his books.
“Ontology is the study of being; the
guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must
decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?'"
– Robert Anton Wilson
Every conspiracy, counter-culture, and secret
organization you have ever heard of, and all the ones you have not heard of,
are implicated in a mass conspiracy which builds in intensity and chaos as the
book progresses. Historical figures pop
up only to be revealed as something else much greater than our normal history
tells us. When I first read it, I got
through 200 pages wondering, “What the fuck is going on here?” By the time I was halfway through I thought I
had a decent grasp of what was happening even though it was so dense. About 700 pages in I thought to myself, “How
in the hell are these two going to wrap this thing up? It is just too much!” By the end of the book I felt like a newborn
baby, as if my mind had been scrubbed clean of every preconceived idea that
society tries to implant into our minds.
It truly changed the way I think and send me on a path to read
everything Robert Anton Wilson ever wrote.
8. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut (1963): This was Kurt Vonnegut’s 4th novel,
written several years before Slaughterhouse-Five. I read it as I worked my way through all of
Vonnegut’s writing. The story itself
tells of a scientist who discovers Ice-9, a material that instantly freezes
water at room temperature, and the end result that occurs because humans are
stupid and mean. This may be the
bleakest Vonnegut novel, while also being the funniest. Vonnegut really lets humanity have it,
showing how little he thought of the organizations we create to run our world,
specifically religions, government, the military, and scientists more concerned
with new discoveries than the end results of those discoveries. He also creates a religion called Bokonism
that is focused on “foma,” or harmless untruths such as “Everything will be
alright,” or “Tomorrow will be better.”
It is essentially a religion built out of outright lies, but the lies,
if followed, will allow the believer to have peace of mind and possibly live a
good life. It promises nothing. This is Vonnegut being serious and absurdist
at the same time. I love reading his
work because it all has that same quality.
It asks you to accept the stupidity and futility of it all, but to
understand that we have the power to live purposeful, ethical, kind lives. It also introduces through Bokonism the idea
of a “karrass.” This is a group of
people that are cosmically linked, even though it is not evident
superficially. The opposite is a
“granfaloon.” This is a group of people
who imagine a proud connection that does not really exist. Vonnegut’s example is that of “Hoosiers,”
basically people who hail from Indiana but who actually have no real physical
or spiritual connection with each other.
People kill and die for their granfaloons and Vonnegut, like me, finds
that stupid as fuck.
9. It – Stephen King (1986): As
a young teenager I would see other kids reading Stephen King books but I never
would pick one up as they looked too scary.
I was not a big fan of horror.
Eventually I picked up what seemed to be the tamest King book,
Firestarter, and read it and loved it, even though it was not very tame. It was, like most King books, a propulsive
read. I then figured, if I am in I may
as well go for the whole enchilada, so I started in on what was then the
longest King book, It. At nearly 1,000 pages, it was like starting
to read an encyclopedia! The story I
found within, of a purely evil being that arises every 27 years to “feed” on
the terrorized souls of a small town in Maine, and how a group of friends faced
it and fought it as young kids, only to find themselves drawn back to Derry as
adults, after having forgotten the horrors they faced in their childhood, and
facing “It” once again, struck a deep chord with me. Stephen King is at his best when he describes
the lives of regular people faced with the unnatural, and It explores this from the viewpoint of children and then adults,
lending the book a depth that some of his other work does not have. I cannot remember how many times I kept
reading because I was too afraid to stop and turn off my nightlight. I have re-read It several times since then and I always find something new to
terrify me. Most of the horror in King’s
books comes from a sense that the world is continuing around the protagonists
without taking note of the evil just under the surface. This is allegorical and feeds on the terror
that people live with while it remains unknown to the world at large. There really are monsters out there,
disguised as human beings.
10. Kafka
on the Shore – Haruki Murakami (2002): Sometime around 1993 I was introduced to Haruki Murakami
and his novel A Wild Sheep Chase by my friend Elliott French. What a weird book! I proceeded to read every Murakami book I
could get, often as soon as the English translation was printed. They are all engrossing and mind-bending in
their own way, but Kafka on the Shore may be my favorite. The book tells two separate stories. The odd-numbered chapters tell of a teenager who
runs away from home and finds himself in a secluded seaside village where he
finds employment and loses himself in a small private library until the police
come around inquiring about a grisly murder.
The even-numbered chapters follow an older homeless man who earns money
through his uncanny ability to understand and find lost cats. He ends up hitchhiking and leaving his home
town for the first time in his life, befriending a truck driver. These descriptions do not seem to amount to
much but Murakami is not interested in plot-driven narrative. He instead constantly seeks answers to
questions of identity, self-sufficiency, dreams versus reality, fate versus
free will, and most of all the human connection to music and its power over
us. Part of the reason I love this book
so much is because one of the protagonists loves books and reading as much as I
do, and what he reads frames his life.
Sometimes I too daydream about getting “lost” in some small backwater
burg and finding a nice quiet library to work and read my days away. The way that both narratives resonate with
each other, and may be actually describing two parts of the same person, create
a kind of altered-state mindset. The old
man, Nakata, suffered a strange accident in his youth during wartime. This granted him the power to communicate
with cats but forced him into a mental seclusion from which he never
recovered. The young boy, whose name is
never given but who names himself “Kafka” after the author, seeks willful isolation
from the world that overwhelms him, and from a horrible crime which he may or
may not have committed. Murakami’s works
are the most quietly surreal novels I have read.
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