Fyodor Dostoevsky

What can I say about Dostoevsky that hasn’t been said better, in dissertations and studies and monuments? Only this: he lives up to the hype; he changed my life.

I started with The Brothers Karamazov, went on to The House of the Dead, and then Crime and Punishment, and Notes from the Underground.

The Brothers was recommended by an older cousin. He was in college, and I was 13, but he was my hero, so… I finished it 5 years later. The second reading, a few years after that, only took a month. It’s one of those great novels designed to last through nine months of television-less winter, so it has it all: philosophy, religion, sex, murder, poverty, mental disorders, and courtroom drama. If big Russian novels scare you, you’d be better off starting with Anna Karenina.

I haven’t re-read The House of the Dead. It’s not bad-in fact, it’s probably as good as it gets in the genre of prison memoirs, topped only by Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Illych. But how many times do you want to read a prison memoir?

If all of the monuments and dissertations were to somehow disappear, I can imagine scholars thousands of years from now arguing convincingly that Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground were written in the late 1900s instead of the mid-1800s. The word angst comes to mind, but it’s insufficient. We’re talking antiheroes with attitudes so bad they’d see the Fight Club guys as optimists.

Dostoevsky isn’t an author who will make you happy. His comedy scenes can bring a smile, but the smiles are tinged with tragedy. No, happiness isn’t his thing. Joy, on the other hand… maybe. As the ranting drunkard who pimps his daughter asks in Crime and Punishment, what if grace can reach even me?

Frank Peretti

I doubt that angels have inferiority complexes, but if they do, they should read Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, and Piercing the Darkness. Both books give the impression that God is to the universe what Professor X is to the comics. He has the most impressive powers, and he probably can’t be beaten, but he couldn’t do it without his blade-wielding sidekicks. In this corner, God and the Angels. In that corner, Demons and the Universal New Age Big Government Conspiracy. The match of the eternity! Whee!

As pulp fiction goes, they’re no bad. As theology goes, they’re slapstick.

Prophet is a little darker, choosing to take on the favorite conservative evangelical whipping boy—abortion. The characters are a little more complex than in the previous books, and the tension builds a little better since the threats are more realistic. Still, if you don’t already see the world as Peretti does, I doubt it will change your mind.

Mark Bowden

As I was in the process of reading Blackhawk Down, I gave a simple writing assignment to my immigrant students: “Describe the house you grew up in.”

            The next day, with Blackhawk sitting on my shelf, a bookmark only 50 pages into it, I picked up the first of the essays. The young man described the orange trees, and the tan wall, and the bright dresses of the women who walked in front of his house, across the street from the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu, before “all of it” happened.

            For those who have not read Blackhawk Down, “all of it” refers to the killing of hundreds of Somali men, women, and children, during an ill-conceived attempt to remove a warlord from the Olympic Hotel neighborhood of Mogadishu.

            There is no way I can describe how intensely that book moved me. Granted, I had a more personal link to the text than most of the readers, but most other readers I’ve met have liked it as well.

            Out of respect for my students, I didn’t see the film, which they described as an attempt to make the deaths of hundreds of their friends and family into the story of a few white Americans who made some bad choices. The book, though, does an exceptional job of presenting all of the people as real—and Bowden did excellent work in capturing the point of view of many of the Somalis involved.

            I’d love to read more of his books.

Denis Johnson

            It was totally unfair to the author, but I had a plane to catch. I read, Already Dead, The Name of the World, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man in less than two weeks. Then I left the country.

            I don’t know of any author of Denis Johnson’s generation who deals with history, truth, and life so seriously.

The Name of the World had the feel of one of those fictionalized memoirs novelists write when they get famous and bored, but the others … I’d love to read them again. His writing deserves far more time than I was able to give in the first round.

Arthur Miller

I’m so glad I read Death of a Salesman first!

            The Crucible is standard. It fits right in with the standard American English 10^th-grade curriculum that is pitifully trying to make 16-year-olds interested in things that happened before America had many good novelists. May it live long on the high-school bookshelves. I have nothing against it. But it didn’t move me.

            Death of a Salesman, though… The first time I read it, I told my high school teacher that I couldn’t read anything else for at least three days. She understood. I’ve read it half a dozen times, seen it performed live, and own the movie version that Arthur Miller consulted on. Every character is pitiful, but so alive! Every line rings true.

            I won’t be surprised if history shows that more people read The Crucible—but Death of a Salesman may change, and save, more lives.

Malcolm X and Alex Haley

Malcolm X loved talking, and he loved blaming, and he did both with eloquence.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X increased my respect for him as a man with integrity. And it greatly increased my respect for Alex Haley as a man with a tremendous amount of patience for posturing.

He had an exciting life, and nothing I can say will take that away. I’m glad I read it. The film version with Denzel Washington was even more complex and inspiring than the book.

I do, however, have a complaint with the way schools have exploited his life.

I’ve found dozens of English and ESL textbooks—all designed for lower-income students—that include Malcolm X’s chapter on learning to read in prison. Without fail, these textbooks, glorify him by asking questions like, “Describe a time in your life when you’ve shown similar perseverance?” or “How was initiative and self-motivation important for the development of this great leader?”

Come on.

Most children learn to read by working on it part-time for a few years before the age of seven. Most people get a college-level education while having friends and family and jobs, and it only takes them four years.

It’s not exactly a miracle if a college-aged adult can do the same thing if he works at it full-time, with no real-world responsibilities, for four years.

I admire the man, but not the myth.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie knows language. His sentences twist and drip with images and meanings so thick you can almost smell them. His plots ravel into balls and come apart like trick knots in a string.

I am very glad I read, The Moor’s Last Sigh.

But I can’t imagine wanting to read another book by him because, like many other unfortunate and brilliant writers, Mr. Rushdie is a genius, but somewhat of a smart-aleck. He reminded me of Bernard Shaw, and Sinclair Lewis—writers who amaze you with their wordplay but leave you with a sneer.

He’s funny, but always at someone’s expense. He’s witty, but only in a cutting way.

Maybe that’s it: he makes jokes and cuts down things of beauty, (Just because you don’t believe something doesn’t mean it has no beauty.) and I left feeling he didn’t even like his own characters very much. He takes on huge issues, but ends up simply laughing at the people who think the issues are huge.

Maybe his other books are different, but I don’t feel a strong desire to find out.

Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, left me in awe.

It had sat on my shelf for years, in a cheap paperback edition with a nondescript cover. Its title and the brief author bio on the back gave me the impression that it was some sort of early blaxploitation version of H.G. Wells.

It is by a black man.

It is about a black man.

And it reached me, a white man, more deeply than almost any book I’ve read. Dazzling language. Complex, intriguing characters. It was, in fact, the first book by a black author I’d ever read that I thought was trying to reach beyond themes of pigment and prejudice. It’s been too long since I re-read it.

Larry Brown

Larry Brown’s South is the type of place country singers don’t mention because it’s too depressing. The setting: grime. The tone: grim. Saying a Larry Brown character has a drinking problem is redundant—beer is almost a character—as is saying that his characters are poverty-stricken or unexpressive.

This probably doesn’t sound like a positive review, but it is. You just need to know what you’re getting into.

I didn’t know it when I picked up Father and Son, a gothic story of generational sins, justice, and redemption. It left me wiped out for several days.

And any author who affects me that strongly is worth another try.

Dirty Work, an anti-war tale based mostly on the conversation between two dying vets, didn’t affect me as strongly as Father and Son, but his masterful collection of short stories, Facing the Music hit me again and again.

“Hitting” is a decent metaphor for how it feels to read him. I don’t always agree with his theology, and I wouldn’t care to meet many of his characters, and I absolutely think there are better ways to live—but you don’t read Larry Brown to find someone who can wrap you in cozy phrases you think are true. You read him because he can beat you to the verge of despair.

I think it makes you stronger.

John LeCarre

John LeCarre was a gift.

Two months into my desert life, I found The Russia House and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in a box in a back room of the house where we were living. I judged from the cover, which showed Sean Connery kissing Michelle Pfeiffer, that is the type of book that I wouldn’t usually like but probably needed right then.

I was wrong: it was the type of book I would usually like, and it added a level of paranoia that I didn’t need right then.

Who would have guessed that a spy novel could be literature? That the author may actually imagine human antagonists during the Cold War? That the author could have imagined heroes with flaws other than the 007 cliches: “too smart”, “too focused”, “too good looking”. I picked up The Secret Pilgrim on a trip back to the U.S. and found that his first two weren’t flukes: Smiley and the other little grey people had gained a new admirer.

His books don’t run like the Bourne and Bond series. In fact, his books tend to trudge as slowly as their protagonists. But they do it with a human beauty that the super-spies lack. If Ian Fleming were a Greco-Roman sculptor, John LeCarre would be a Social Realist painter.

LeCarre’s political philosophy is never far from the surface, and, at times, his adherence to his doctrines blurs his art—as it did with the Social Realists. Absolute Friends is the last book I’ve read by him. I’d rate it as his most terrifying; one of his most depressing; definitely his most anti-American.

I’m looking forward to reading more.