PopcornJackTerry

My friend Chris put me up to the ten book challenge. It was just that. At first I thought I wouldn’t think of ten, and then I realized I was quickly running out of slots. These are the ten. Ask me next week and maybe there would be some changes. They really aren’t in any particular order, except I did save my number one choice for last.

Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. This novel covers two and a half generations living in, moving to and leaving, struggling and succeeding in Manhattan at the same time the city itself starts to take on the grand scale that we know it as today. It makes the list because it’s about New York, but it also a beautifully written book that contains multiple narratives with a wildly divergent cast of characters who influence each other to greater and lesser extents throughout the book. Dos Passos was one of the heralded ex-pat writers of the 20’s and 30’s and is most famous for his U.S.A. trilogy.

The Stand by Stephen King. I tried reading Cujo and hated it. I eventually had to read The Shining, just to make sense of the flash of a scene near the end of the movie involving Delbert Grady and a guy in a dog suit and loved it. A couple of years later my mom sends me a copy of The Stand, but all I can think of is how much I hated Cujo so it sits on my shelf. Finally when I am too bored to do anything else, too poor to buy another book and too dumb to go to the library half a block away, I start reading it. Absolutely love it. In fact, it was when I was rereading it for the 8th time that my friend Britt said “Maybe you should try some of his other stuff” and turned me onto The Dark Tower series. Now the irony is that I go to the library all the time, and yet I have at least a half dozen of Mr. King’s books on my shelves that I need to read.

The World According To Garp by John Irving. If I had to name my favorite author, by percentage of books that I’ve read, it would be John Irving. I have read everything this guy has written short of grocery lists and love letters. I hate to say that I have never been more disappointed or let down by a book than I was by his last novel, but I can take solace in knowing that nothing can take away the love I have for his four horsemen: The Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules and Garp. In his second and third novels, The Water Method Man and The 158 Lb Marriage, you can see the themes he works with still taking shape, themes that come magnificently to life in Hotel and Garp. I think these books are so good that his later work suffers in comparison as he continues to examine those themes. Owen and Cider House depart from this direction, both by addressing a more political issue-war mongering in Owen and abortion in Cider House-but both are brilliantly written and captivating. In the end I chose the one that was handed to me by a girl in a bathroom in college, the same one I have bought a dozen copies of with the sole purpose of giving them to people and saying “You HAVE to read this.”

Watership Down by Richard Adams. This was a book I inherited, passed down to me from my brother. I remember being fascinated by it when I saw the cover. It was a rabbit in front of a big compass that looked like a water wheel on a steamship, so I thought it was a book about a boat sinking. Imagine my surprise when it was a book about rabbits, but what a book! A story about society, about individualism and the need for a collective mind set and how they work together, with everyone offering their strengths. Plus, if that wasn’t enough, all of the stories about El-ahrairah that the rabbits tell each other, great little morality tales. It is a book that keeps offering more levels every time I read it. It only 20 years after I read it the first time that I noticed how perfectly cyclical the novel is, with the last line echoing the first.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written by one of the greats during the golden age of American literature? Check. About New York City? Check. During the Roaring 20’s? Check. An ending that is both hauntingly sad and powerfully inspirational? Check. You’d have to really fuck a book up with these elements for me not to like it, but instead he created a masterpiece. Perfectly drawn characters, all of them flawed and each of them at a various level of acceptance with who they are and the part they play in their farcical lives that are ultimately destroyed by the tragic reality: none of them really matter outside of their own lives.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Funny story about this novel. My friend Jordan and I recommend books to each other all the time and one point, many years ago, she asked for a suggestion. I told her about this book. Problem is I hadn’t read it, but I had heard good things about it and thought she would like it. She did eventually, but once she found out the truth she refused to speak to me until I finished it. There are about 40 characters in the book and they all have names that are so close to each other that I had to keep my finger tucked into the first page where he included a family tree. Magic realism is the term that is most often used to describe his work, and the story, as it unfolded, was certainly one that, if you could suspend just enough disbelief, engaged you and took you in. I liked it, but i wasn’t blown away, until I got to the last page. It is the best ending to any novel I have ever read. It didn’t just sum everything up but it brought it all together, it made everything make sense and i suddenly realized how much I loved the characters, how sorry I felt for them and how sad I was that my time with them was over.

The Stories Of Ray Bradbury. The writer in me wants to say Fahrenheit 451, because as a writer I think burning books is bad, but what makes me love Ray Bradbury is his pure talent as a writer. Not a science fiction writer, not a fantasy writer, not a science writer, not a fiction writer, not a non-fiction writer. He was all of those things and he was equally amazing at all of them. His longing for an idyllic childhood fueled much of his work, and many of my favorite stories by him had no science fiction in them at all. They were simple little elegies to life and the marching time of childhood. And then the next story would be about a team of astronauts dealing with an alien life form on a planet where they were the alien. Of course, sometimes he combined both elements, never so magically than in  “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms In Your Cellar!”

Little Popcorn by Sara Asheron. Ironically this book has nothing to do with my nickname, and I didn’t include simply because of the name. I included it because in a very real and direct sense, it is the most important book I ever read. It was the first book I read on my own. To this day I still remember the feeling that I had when I finished it, and I knew that a whole new world was now open to me. If it wasn’t this book it would have soon been another, but it was this one. I should have thought to look for it when I was visiting my friend Patrick last month. I gave it to his son Griffin for his first Christmas, and hopefully it helped spark a love for reading in him as well.

Yeager: An Autobiography by Chuck Yeager. My first love was flying. Long before I wanted to be an actor or even knew what a bartender (and rumologist) was, I wanted to fly planes. Not just any planes but F-15’s in the Air Force. Which mean that my first hero growing up was Chuck Yeager. I read this book until the pages fell out. Ironically I have an irrational fear that when I’m flying as soon as clouds roll in we’re going to immediately crash into a mountain, so I’m glad my glasses kept me from making a pant-wetting ass of myself, but I still watch the vapor trails of planes far overhead, I still wonder what it must have been like to first break the sound barrier, I still dream I can fly.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I’m supposed to like this guy more than I do. We both write, we both lived in Key West, we both drank, we both like rum, I get it. Thing is, in general? Not a huge fan. His short stories are amazing, but his other novels just never did anything for me. My friend Chris who put me up to this challenge listed The Old Man And The Sea as one of his top ten; I tried reading it last year and couldn’t finish it. it just didn’t hold me. To Have And Have Not was okay, until he wasted twenty pages meticulously describing the inside of a half dozen boats that had nothing to do with the story. Still I kept trying to read his novels, because as far as I’m concerned, The Sun Also Rises is the greatest American novel, period.

Like Gatsby, all of the main characters are flawed: mentally, emotionally even physically. For as much traveling that they do, the story is concise and even escapades that seem superfluous to the through line (the trout fishing comes to mind) they help to further distill the characters, make them more human, make their failings that much more tragic. His powers of description are never in better form than they are here, whether talking about the bullfighting or simply traveling on the bus. Everything about this book is as perfect as a book can get to me. To choose only ten books was hard; to choose only one is easy.

So there you have it. Many other books made the short list but these are the final ten. I would like to cite one book for honorable mention that you can buy by clicking this link (New edition and it’s on sale! But don’t buy the e-book. Still fixing that one.) And since it’s a blog, I had to include a soundtrack as well.