X reads

As a kid, we had noses in books. I grew to liking it more and more. Often I’m drawn to what other people like based upon a common readership. So here are some of my selections.

JG Ballard The Crystal World, Fenimore Cooper The Pilot which is funny–you mightn’tt guess, Tournier The Ogre + Fetishist, F. Scott Fitzgerald for both this Side of Paradise and Gatsby and, partly, a Moveable Feast. Elliot Paul Hugger Mugger in the Louver, Will Self Liver, Sinclair Lewis Elmer Gantry but that’s it for him, and who was coincidentally, briefly a childhood neighbor of dad’s. von Arnim Enchanted April, Murakami Norwegian Wood and nothing else I’ve seen, Cocteau The Bad Kids or whatever, Samuel Delany Dhalgen, Herbert – Dune, Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, Nabokov (sp?)’s PNIN and Pale Fire and shorts, Trollope’s Ayalla’s Angel, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, WCW Patterson. Then, EE Smith’s Lensmen Series, All Enid Blyton, CS Lewis’s Narnia, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Stevenson’s Kidnapped & Treasure Island, William Trevour’s stories from Ireland, The Third Policeman and, as well, Dalkey Archive, Raymond Chandler, Trumpets and Grumpets, Swallows and the Amazons, History of Tom Jones, Jane Austin, Annie Ernaux Cleaned Out; I love pulp. Chester Himes as well as his If He Hollers, John Fowles Magus, The Russian Debutant’s Handbook, PG Woodhouse before he turned German. Dorothy Sayers I claim as a ‘original great-author’ or OMG, Robbe-Gillet, the Hobbit so excellent, Tom Sharpe mainly Riotous Assembly, David Eddings (also OMG), Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time, wow, I’m never going to forget, Rex Stout, Wilkie Collins, Tom Sawyer Huckelberry Finn obv., Evelyn Waugh for Men at Arms and those books, basically everything really, I include the Loved One, Brideshead the stories, Julio Cortazar best of all The Winners. I really liked Johnny Tremaine *does that make me wierd? old?*, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart, Ian Banks, Graham Green alone for Brighton Rock, Erskine Childers Riddle of the Sands, Charade John Mortimer, every Conrad from my dad, Elaine Dundy The Old Man and me, the Derrida Autobiography, Oscar Wile’s letters, Hunter Thompson’s letters, Dickens Bleak House & David Copperfield, Italian Folk Tales by Italo Calvino is my desert island book, Babar for the pictures, Orson Scott Card for reasons which you can probably guess, DH Lawrence See’n Sardinia.

NE America regional shout-outs (these are all winners): Mooncussers of Cape Cod, Vorse (my neighbor, RIP Heaton) Time and the Town, Kipling’s Captain Courageous, James B. Connolly The Trawler, Kuchta/Seckler Provincetown Painters, again J. Tremaine.

Major Technical & Academic props to: Python in a Nutshell, Fraleigh Abstact Algebra, Proofs That Really Count, Geza Schay Linear Algebra, Robert A. Young Determining the Economic Value of Water: Concepts and Methods.

Well. That’s all I can think of, for now.