All-Time Favorite Books

These are just some books I love and frequently recommend, and some aren’t so well known.  I think my best life skill, truly, is recommending books that people will like.  My dream job is to be a human “If you liked ____, you will surely like _____” algorithm.  I would kick Amazon’s ass.

1.  The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wrobelewski
Do you think  you don’t like books about mute boys, family drama, Wisconsin woodlands, and supernatural-esque dogs?  Because you are wrong, my friend.  This book is both thoroughly engrossing and a real heartbreaker.  I cried harder reading it than perhaps any other book I’ve ever read, but it was so worth it. It’s a big, epic novel, one that would be great for a long plane ride or a lazy, empty weekend. (See comments about sobbing before you tackle it on the plane, though.  Related: Did you cry in an airport while reading The Kite Runner? For some reason I know like 15 people who did.)

2. Gob’s Grief by Chris Adrian
This is an oddball book I picked up at the library years ago and fell in love with completely. It does something I generally dislike–placing real historical characters in fictional situations–but somehow it works.  The setting for this book is the Civil War, so the characters who appear are Walt Whitman, Abe Lincoln, and feminist Victoria Woodhull.  The main character is all invention though–the quirky and grieving Gob, whose twin brother ran off to fight and was killed.  Gob becomes a doctor and treats the war wounded (in DC as I recall), but his passion is inventing a way to beat death.  The author, Chris Adrian, is a medical doctor cum theology Ph.D himself, and he keeps all the weird shit in this book in check, and writes with a mournful gravity that is somehow still…rollicking.

I also enjoyed Adrian’s second novel, The Children’s Hospital, but it is way too weird to recommend.  Another, much less weird and immensely enjoyable novel written by a physician is Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, about twins and Ethiopia and medicine…it could well make this top ten list on its own merits.

3.  Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
This is a brutally funny and dark family story about a circus family of sideshow freaks who intentionally try to have children with birth defects so that they can perform with the family.  The dad gives the mom various drugs and poisons each time she gets pregnant so that each child will have its own unique deformities.

I am not doing it justice, believe me.  The characters are truly unforgettable; multifaceted and real and mesmerizing.  Just read it.  It’s as though Like Water for Elephants were re-written by a depressive, sneering punk rocker and infused with soaring humanity, cruelty, and wit.

Related: This reminds me as well of the much gentler and equally beloved The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken, a gorgeous novel about a man with gigantism and his romance with a much older librarian and their quaint little Cape Cod town.  It’s a gorgeous book and you can lend it to your mom or that one aunt who reads when you’re done (Geek Love perhaps not so much.)

4.  Books about white people in Africa
I don’t know why I find this to be such a compelling sub-genre, but I do.  I also try to read books by native Africans, white and black, so don’t deluge me with your hatred of colonialist oppressors.  First up is the incomparable Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which I believe I called in sick to finish.  It’s about a family of Baptist missionaries from Georgia trying to cope with life in the remote Belgian Congo during a time of political upheaval, and all the bad crazy shit that happens to them and how it all falls apart.  Man, if only I had missionary parents who dragged me off to the jungle and exposed me to danger as a kid, I would write the BEST books about it.

Next, my college love, Norman Rush’s Mating.  This one has expatriates, rumored utopias, graduate students, and Peace Corps workers, all things I desperately, blindly adore in fiction and in life.  Amazon sums the plot up better than I can:

Had Jane Austen been in the Peace Corps in Africa in the 1980s, Mating is the book she might have written. Set in Botswana in the days before the end of apartheid, Norman Rush’s novel is, essentially, a comedy of manners played out in Austen’s approved milieu: a country village. Granted, the village in question, Tsau, is a utopian society created by the great American anthropologist Nelson Denoon, and run largely by and for disenfranchised and abused African women. Still, the issue that interests Rush (and the one that fueled Austen’s novels) is the age-old question of who mates with whom, and why? The unnamed narrator is a 32-year-old postgraduate student in anthropology whose dissertation has just gone south on her.

I mean.  Come on.  As I recall, however, this book was tremendously polarizing among my friends for some reason.

Finally–and I’m limiting myself to three here only because I feel like I have to–is Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd.  This is the story of an English academic who goes to a primate research facility in an unnamed African country to puzzle out her deteriorating marriage.  There is a lot of great stuff about social dynamics among primates, and if that sentence doesn’t excite you I don’t know why we’re friends.

Fine!  Also please read the (non-fiction) A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky because it is thoroughly engaging and also will make you much smarter, and Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a kind of real-life Poisonwood Bible (minus the missionaries, sadly) from back in the day when they called Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

5.  Southern Gothic
Being a midwestern, middling Catholic, kind of middle class white person doesn’t leave one much cultural tradition upon which to draw, save NASCAR and this horrible thing made in a crockpot called shredded chicken that people always bring to funerals, as if they aren’t depressing enough.  So, I borrow where I can, and I am totally fascinated by southern decrepitude.  It’s nearly as exotic to me as Africa.  Three quick recommendations:

• Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell is unequivocally the most beautifully written novel I’ve read for the last several years.  Ree Dolly is one of those characters who creeps into your soul and stays there.  Gorgeous, amazing book.
• All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg is a story of childhood in Alabama and success as a New York Times columnist.  I both read it and listened to it as an audiobook, read by Bragg himself, and simply adored both.
• Bastard Out Of Carolina by Dorothy Allison is another novel about a rough childhood, told beautifully.  Allison is fiercely smart and unflinching as the storyteller.

Whoa, I have a LOT more books to recommend, but I’ll stop here for now.  Have you read any of these, or anything else good lately?

(Next up: Boy books, Irish novels, literary mysteries, and young adult guilty pleasures.)