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Good Books You Should Feel Under No Obligation to Read

2007-09-29

Do you ever get the feeling, when people talk about books, that there's a list of Major Obligatory Works who everyone who is anything have all read? Everyone, that is, except you? Something about the way a book is mentioned that says "I've read it, and I'll assume you have as well, and if not what are you waiting for"? Book reviews are exhausting to read because we treat them like the admission process of this Obligatory List. "This just in from book central: Book X is now required reading in our circles. I repeat, .." Great, another one? I'm already behind. Help!

Calm down, please. The List, if you believe everyone who is adding to it, is too large for any of us. If you read 50 books a year, that's far more than most, and still not enough. There's no shame in ignoring the List. We've all read different books - and imagine how sad it would be if it were otherwise. If you own just a hundred books, there's probably no other library like yours in the world. The List is just something to do with an eternity, if one were available. The voice of Literary Authority is a pose, laugh it off.

Please take the following book reviews in that spirit. These books are not obligatory, just something I enjoyed, and if you can't read about good books you don't have the time to read without getting sad or going on a guilty Amazon binge, please stop reading now.

Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination. I don't mean to contradict everything I just said by telling you that this is a Major Obligatory Work of science fiction, but I'm tempted to. The book's original title, Tiger! Tiger!, gives you a better idea of the tone of the book than the one it ended up with - the story follows a monomaniac anti-hero on his quest for revenge. The beauty is in the energy that drives him. Think Jack Bauer, with less intelligence and more brute force. Always running, always taking the initiative, never hesitating to raise the stakes. It's written punk rock - and correspondingly short.

Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream. Written by Adolf Hitler in an alternate reality where he moved to the US to become a science fiction writer, The Iron Dream is a spoof of heroic scifi and fantasy. It mixes familiar plot elements with nazi propaganda in a way that forces you to reconsider many of your favourite stories. What makes The Iron Dream so unsettling is that there is no element of the story that breaks any conventions of heroic sf&f storytelling, and no element that breaks any conventions of Nazi propaganda. There's no visible seam, nothing that makes it seem misplaced in either territory. Never mind Godwin's Law, screw Godwin. Godwin is for Usenet kids. Feric Jagger of The Iron Dream takes all your goddamn Godwin invocations and laughs them off in a manful and heroic manner, before fulfilling Destiny by slaughtering the evil Dominators of Zind with his mighty truncheon.

John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces. Speaking of Usenet kids, I've often wondered about a certain kind of intellectual you find on the internet. Well-read and smart, but prickly, self-important, and out of touch with reality, they spend their time fighting it out between their equally unique, dogmatic and irrelevant worldviews. What, I've asked myself, did these people do before there was an internet? Did they just sit at home, writing unpublished philosophical masterworks? Apparently, they did. Written in the 1960's, A Confederacy of Dunces portrays Ignatius J. Reilly, an internet character born several decades too soon, and you can almost see the empty hole in his life where a blog or newsgroup ought to be. At least that's my reading of it, (and only an utter imbecile would offend reason by suggesting otherwise!) The novel's legendary status has probably more to do with the circumstances around its publication (juicy suicide, unappreciated genius, etc.) than with the book itself, but it's a lot of fun all the same, and the moral of the story is my favourite commandment, mysteriously left out of the Bible: Don't be a dick.

Jeff Vandermeer - Veniss Underground. The tone of Veniss Underground is sad. Hopelessly sad, like a genocide documentary. A dystopic bioengineering tale, Veniss serves us a stream of tragic fates, mangled bodies, and unstoppable horror. Actually I don't think I enjoyed it. This is a brilliant book, but I didn't enjoy it. Forget I brought it up.

Jaroslav Hašek - The Good Soldier Svejk. Harry Harrison - Bill, the Galactic Hero. Vladimir Voinovich - The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. Every society in the 20th century seems to have produced its own great satire of military life. Svejk has become a byword for the slyly naive soldier who subverts authority through enthusiastic stupidity. A Czech soldier in World War I, Svejk never actually makes it to the front because the author, a drunkard anarchist, died after 700 pages or so. What Hašek left behind is a bit unfocused, but it defined a whole genre of satire. Ivan Chonkin illustrates the same genre at its finest. The story of Ivan's exploits in a Russian village in 1941 is a short and focused mockery of Soviet society, and is the best written of the three novels. And in Bill, the Galactic Hero, a farmboy signs up for battle against horrific aliens from outer space, in a parody of Starship Troopers, but the funniest part deals with his misfortunes on the bureaucratic city-planet of Helior. Actually all three novels parody a particular society more than war as such: Austria-Hungary, Soviet Russia, and the Western bureaucratic state.

Rick Veitch - Bratpack. Rick Veitch - Maximortal. There seems to be a 40 year lag between comic books and movies. While Hollywood is busy making bad movie adaptations of 60's superheroes, merging good vs evil + CGI + sitcom banter, a large minority of comic book writers moved on long ago, and have turned super heroes into vehicles for whatever they have to say about power, authority, and right and wrong. Chris Veitch is one of these writers. Did you ever find it disturbinging that these grown-up superheroes always had a best buddie who was a teenage kid? Me neither, but now that I think about it .. Bratpack doesn't have good guys, only villains and victims. The villains are caped fanatics and pedophiles who pretend to be heroes. Their victims are their own sweet, young sidekicks. There's not much of a point to it, (being a KKK superhero is wrong, I tell you, wrong!), but it's a good read. Maximortal, a prequel to Bratpack, is an attack on the Superman franchise. The names are different enough to avoid a lawsuit, but both its two storylines openly allude to Superman: the story of an alien child with superpowers, who grow up spoiled and evil, as any omnipotent kid probably would, and the story of True Man, the world's most successful comic book character, stolen from his creators by a powerful corporation. As the storylines merge, so do the amoral alien merge with the heroic comic book character, and by the end it all gets pretty weird. Apparently there are more books on the way, which might clear things up. (Btw, my favourite Veitch comic is Indigo Sunset, where he takes an Alan Moore character and improves it.)

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita. Why a fantasy novel about the adventures of a mischievous Satan in Stalinist Moscow is hidden away in the mainstream serious fiction section, I'll never know. I might have almost not read it! I love this novel. Unlike Ivan Chonkin, a pure satire of communism, The Master and Margarita goes deeper, into a celebration of the fantastic over the mundane. I think Bulgakov is trying to tell us that it's better to worship Satan than to be a communist, but I doubt that interpretation is supported by the mountain of literary analysis that comes with being included in the Serious Russian Canon.

Phil Foglio - Girl Genius. It's hard to be an original artist. It damn impressive to take a bunch of well-used concepts, throw them together casually, and still make it fresh. Reading Girl Genius, about steampunk magicians in an alternate Europe, is like watching someone run a 100m sprint, backwards, with a big grin on their face, without breaking a sweat - and win. It's just plain fun. (You can read it on the web as well.)

Wu Cheng'en - Journey to the West. This is one of the most famous novels in Chinese literature, but I heard about it last year only by accident. This was somewhat humbling. It's not that I thought I knew anything about Chinese literature, I just didn't consider there might be anything there worth knowing about. One camp of thought on cultural exchange holds that we should show respect for all foreign cultures, so you'd better read up on classic Latverian literature no matter how crappy it might be. (No offense, Latverian readers.) Another camp holds that only quality matters, and if genius happens to be found more in some (*cough*here*cough*) cultures than in others (*cough*there*cough*), then so be it. Both camps could have made a happy discovery of Journey to the West, if only they'd shut up a little and put their ideas into practice. As it happened, I found Journey to the West by following a reference in an accidental discovery in a second-hand book store, which is the sort of thing I enjoy, so I'm not angry. Oh, and the book: It's a 16th century satirical fantasy that takes place against a backdrop of buddhistic and taoistic mythology. A monk and his animal helpers go on a pilgrimage to India in search of holy texts, and have to fight strange monsters on the way. The most memorable character is the Monkey King, Sun Wu-k'ung, who gains the powers and ambitions of a god, but has the manners of a spoiled child. He's arrogant, mischievous, boastful and impulsive, and as an allegory for human intellect he's also the most recognizable and sympathetic of the main characters. It's all allegory here, but it doesn't get in the way of the fun. (If you follow the footnotes you will learn a lot of trivia about Chinese mythology. There's The Five This, and The Nine That, and endless gods and their bloody titles, and whole ranges of mystical concepts referencable in verse form as plant names, and .. uh, I just gave up on the footnotes after a couple of chapters.)

James Branch Cabell - Jurgen. James Branch Cabell - The Silver Stallion. Only a few of Cabell's books can be found today without effort, and the best known of them, Jurgen (1919), remains in print mostly because of an indecency trial. Reading Jurgen is a shaking experience, not because of frank sex talk, (unless you're turned on by harmless insinuations), but because of the depth of its melancholic satire. One comparison would be to some of the Sandman stories, and apparently Neil Gaiman was directly influenced by Cabell. Jurgen, a pawnbroaker looking for his lost wife, walks casually through a mythological world in which heaven and hell are just two of many regions, created for the benefit of believers, a world where you can run into a personified ideal, an old god or a myth by taking a wrong turn in the forest. Unimpressed, Jurgen bluffs his way upwards, until he finds and confronts the Ultimate Creator, the maker of "things as they are". Is Jurgen Cabell's best novel? It's hard to say, because nearly everything else of his is out of print, but one book I've found second hand, The Silver Stallion, is just as memorable. Taking place in the same universe as Jurgen, as most of Cabell's novels did, The Silver Stallion looks at how a rough and heroic warrior duke is turned into a saintly ideal after his death. And this is mainly a platform for telling strange tales about the duke's followers. One goes down a well in search of perfect knowledge, and finds it. Another is an unfaithful servant of the Devil who has grown fond of humans. A third is mistakenly taken up into Valhall, the Norse heaven, where he survives beyond the end of time, and becomes a god himself, playing with universes as if they were toys. One of the strangest scenes in The Silver Stallion is of this new god, still a devout Christian, mourning that he missed out on the Second Coming of Christ.

On the same list of unjustly forgotten, early 20th century fantasy classics as the books of James Branch Cabell, you'll find Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. Lud-in-the-Mist is a city near the border to Fairyland. If this now sounds like a magical adventure for children, you're thinking of the wrong fairies - these are the cruel pranksters of folklore. In Lud-in-the-Mist they represent all that is creative, chaotic, unsafe and insane. The solid citizens of Dorimare have rejected all things Fairy, and built a society of Reason and Law. Their country is now a dull and common place, ruled by dull and common people, but it is also safe. No longer will your ruler one day write a wonderful poem and bring gifts to the peasants, and the next day find it amusing to drive a servant to suicide, or set fire to a ship just to watch it burn. But Dorimare's walls of sanity are full of cracks, and Lud-in-the-Mist is about the people who walk through them.

And finally, some trash. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, I just mean books that go down quickly, hundreds of pages at a time. Writing good trash is an art. Reading should put you in an almost hypnotic or meditative state of consciousness, what some people call "in the zone" or flow, where you're so focused on what you're reading that everything else goes away. Time stops, the paragraphs and pages fly by, and you're totally immersed in the story. The self-consciousness of reading "good" literature sometimes gets in the way of that, and by maximizing reading pleasure trash helps to remind us of what reading is supposed to be about. I'm not saying that the books I've recommended above are hard to read, but they don't maximize reading pleasure at the expense of being original and insightful. If you want to tweak the variables a bit, and read something that's original and smart enough not to break the spell, but more than anything is just pure fun, you'll want to check out Stephen Hunter. His Point of Impact was made into a well enough movie this year, Shooter, but the book is better. A veteran sniper is tricked into an evil CIA plot, out of which he shoots his way in an enjoyable manner. What makes the book is Hunter's knowledge of gun culture, and the sniper profession in particular. Hunter is not out to make a political point here - he just has a deep respect for the skill that goes into firing a bullet into a target over a kilometer away. By the time you've finished Point of Impact, you'll share that respect. Hunter's next novel, Dirty White Boys, is about a trio of escaped convicts. Each of them is evil in their own unique way - one is a lion in human form, another a petty and weak-willed artist, and the third an innocent monster, an adult baby who kills without pleasure or understanding. It's a novel about wolves and rabbits .. and family values, of a sort. It's ugly and powerful in a Stephen King kind of way.

So, did you add any of these books to your list? That's great, but please take care of yourself, and don't get compulsive. If you're not having fun when you read, you're probably doing it wrong.