A CONCERTO of LOVED BOOKS
Or:
BOOKS THAT I ADMIRE…
Or:
STORIES I WISH I’D THOUGHT UP…
Or:
DRAT! THESE WRITERS ARE REALLY GOOD…
Or:
TALES THAT HAVE LASTED IN MY MEMORY…

It sort of goes without saying, but…

No collection of essays or gathering of recollections or soliloquies of advice by any writer is complete if he or she ignores both the words they read in their pasts that got them started, or the words they read in the present that stir their creative juices. Or spur envy, always a strong motivator. Or just speak to the author’s unconscious in some difficult to define but deeply realized fashion that spurs them forward into their own story.

Before I get started on this, let me make an assumption – which is almost always a poor idea, especially at the start of any piece of writing. But the assumption is this:

Anyone who aspires to write, should read and absorb the words from the past. And not just Shakespeare. Leave aside, for an instant all the loud prejudices the modern world holds for the folks who created the footsteps we follow. For example – for lack of a better one – the distaste many current, highly skilled female writers have for Hemingway. His work is routinely derided and denigrated. Too male oriented is one of the printable criticisms. Sexist. Misogynist. It is almost as if the critiques should be followed by a whispered bit of heartlessness: I’m glad that shotgun went off while he was walking down that empty dirt road in Idaho. Had to be a suicide because his creativity had finally dried up and disappeared. As it should have. This, like so many current assessments, seems overly harsh. Now, I can understand this 21st century dismissal – I just don’t fully agree with it. Just as I wouldn’t ignore the depictions of racism in Mark Twain’s great Huck Finn – I don’t know how that seminal work of American literature can be taught in any classroom today given the language and the constant use of “the n-word” – what I see in Hemingway are explorations of heart and the difficult duties reflected from the world he lived in. Remember, he lived in a world of men. So, he wrote about the world of men. And I think it is unwise to shunt aside a writer who so influenced so many generations of authors because he is no longer au courant.

Here’s a modern rule, the best writers frequently break: Try to avoid landing smack dab in a writing controversy. This can be hard (see; Cummins, Jeanine and American Dirt). But, on the other hand don’t shy away from being edgy. You don’t necessarily have to be a Mexican immigrant to write about the Mexican immigrant experience, you just need to understand it. It’s the same thing as you don’t necessarily have to be a cannibalistic psychiatrist to invent Hannibal Lecter. You just need the right imagination in both situations.

With that modest contradiction, just consider me the awkward out-of-touch curmudgeon, and… In my considered opinion, Hemingway should be on everyone’s list. For all the reasons that draw me to his words, and for all the reasons some writers find those words offensive.

In addition to:

All the writers that were once taught in “Great Books” courses.
As my wife might sarcastically say: “Lots of Old White Guys…” To which I would plaintively reply, “But I’m sort of an old white guy…”
(It doesn’t help to point out that a few Old White Ladies are also regularly being ignored…).

Authors from different eras.

Proust, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal, The Bronte sisters, Cervantes, Dickens, Willa Cather, Melville, Hawthorne and many others, including…
… The slightly newer folks (like Hemingway) that get short shrift:
Faulkner, Orwell, Baldwin, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald…

I could go on with extensive lists of names. I wouldn’t imply, drifting into cliché, that these folks are heading towards the proverbial dustheap of literary history, but they don’t get (channeling my inner Rodney Dangerfield) much respect any longer. Or as much as they should. But then, I’m getting older, and writing, like any profession, sees antique generations pushed (sometimes not so gently) aside to make room for newer voices and newer approaches. This is the way of the world, and I don’t resent it. At least, not that much. Sort of. Or, perhaps I do, but I’m just not admitting it. Publicly. Privately, well, that just might be a wholly different matter. Privately, I might be steaming with rage, shouting like Lear at empty walls, angry voice unheard except by myself.
But…
Let’s be more positive.
Read all those folks. If you don’t think they have something to say that is as current today as it was in, say, 1780 or 1850 or 1929, well I’d personally be surprised. It’s always easy to criticize something that seems old, neglecting the idea that even in this electric car, Internet, space station and AI world we live in, some qualities of humanity remain universal.
It is always easy to be critical of something that seems ancient. Harder to find value in a world that seems hell-bent on embracing nastiness.
(Read the “comments” section beneath virtually any article, ranging from the sports pages to puff pieces about Hollywood stars, or anything involving politics, if you don’t believe it is simpler to attack than extol.)
This is particularly true in the writing community.

So, a quick aside about critics.
I stopped writing reviews decades ago, when I realized I was incredibly uncomfortable with finding fault with other writers – even the tritest destined solely for a bestseller list and designed to be read on a flight between New York and Chicago books. I hated the typical: this book is good… BUT… critical approach found in so many journals.

I was once asked about critics in an interview, and I replied, “Well… if you want to believe those critics who say you’re the best, the most exciting, the most creative writer out there… then you must lend the same credence to that probably equal number of critics that say that you have committed a crime against nature by writing your story. Best to ignore both the good and the bad and just blissfully carry on as well as you possibly can…”

In odd moments I sometimes wonder whether when those Neanderthal cavemen at the dawn of time scratched their stories onto a convenient nearby wall, there wasn’t some animal-skinned hairy critic standing around saying, “You know Ugg, while your overall telling of our adventure is fine, you haven’t got the dimensions of that Wooly Mammoth quite right, and your stick figures of the hunters don’t capture the intensity of the hunt, because both Arggg and Gagg were stomped into oblivion before we managed to bring the creature down for our most pleasant dinner…”

On the back of the “with the compliments of the author” card that I occasionally stick in books I send to friends, I quote the great Irish playwright and writer Brendan Behan: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; They know how it is done; they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves…”

Many years ago, in the magazine Vanity Fair (I think… it might have been Esquire) a writer was sent to profile the great John LeCarre’ — the pen name of David Cornwall. The interview took place in an isolated, windswept part of England near the channel – as best as I remember it. Anyway, the profiler and the author were walking across some desolate area with Cornwall’s two Whippet dogs, and he asked the profiler, “Would you like to see their only trick?”

This requires journalism 101. The answer is always yes.
So, Cornwall calls the hounds to attention and says, “Critics, whippets! Critics!”
… And both dogs start barking and racing wildly around, seemingly ready to attack and shred any unfortunate literary critic that might abruptly emerge from the heath.
I always loved this scene. If even the mighty LeCarre’ – author of the ground-breaking The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — was sensitive to criticism…

But enough with the negativity that surrounds even the best of writers. Here are some of the modern books that influenced me. It is not by any means a complete list. That would go on… and on…. And when I look at it, I see lots of white guys. Not sorry. I should have included Mary Lee Settle, my professor at Bard College and author of the great Beulah Quintet series of novels and the National Book Award winning Blood Ties. Or the psychological thriller writers Laura Lippman, Meg Gardiner and Gillian Flynn whose work I admire.

I’ve separated this list into two categories: Fiction and Non-fiction, primarily because the psychological impact these titles bring to any storyteller turned reader is noticeably different. Novels crawl into one’s imagination, Siren-like with their songs. Non-fiction seduces differently, relying on fascination, curiosity and dramatic writing to draw one into a tale. At least, that’s my altogether far too simplistic way of thinking about both categories.

FICTION

Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison.

When I first read this novella, it almost made me stop writing, because I thought to myself: I can’t do that with language… It remains exquisite storytelling. Pages of poetry masquerading as prose, or perhaps vice versa, and compelling in every paragraph. Not so sure about the movie version, though.

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.
The complexity of war, history and personality all expressed beautifully in sparse, elegant prose. If you want to know how the United States and democracy were saved by 300 hard men from Maine, you only need to read the chapter on Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s defense of Little Round Top.

The Magus by John Fowles.
I was a teenager and had already read The Collector when I opened this novel. I started reading at 8 p.m. and did not stop until the final albeit mysterious page. It is both human, and exciting, a master class in psychological writing.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
The devil and his retinue arrive in 1920’s Moscow. Pontius Pilate talking to a young prophet in Jerusalem centuries earlier. A woman in love. A writer in despair. A novel of extraordinary creativity. Funny. Moving. Exciting. Resonant.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone.
A book written with grace and sinew. Drugs. Southern California. Marines. Corruption of the law and the soul.

Grendel by John Gardner.
This was an assignment in a writing class he taught. Take a bad character from an old story and rewrite it from their pov. In this case, the legend Beowulf. He then demonstrated how to do it. Existentially wonderful. A tour de force of creative thinking.

Hardcastle by John Yount.
West Virginia mining. Poverty and hard work described elegantly through memorable characters. And the single greatest character name ever dreamed up: Regus Patoff Boone. You will have to read the book to see how it came about.

365 Days by Ronald Glasser, M.D.
Like Tim O’Brien’s celebrated The Things They Carried these are interlocked stories from the Vietnam War experience – but in this case, the Army hospital in Kishine, Japan, where dire cases were medevacked. Glasser’s prose is always direct, unadorned and deeply moving. It is hard to read The Burn Ward without feeling tears form.

Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien.
Seeing conflict in a unique way. I was in awe of O’Brien’s approach when I first read his fantasy/reality of a grunt deciding to exit the war zone and make his way to Paris and the platoon that chooses to go after him. There are many great novels that came out of that misbegotten war. Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes and Fields of Fire by James Webb spring instantly to mind. But O’Brien’s work remains vivid even today for the unique quality of the storytelling.

The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy.
For many years, this was the book I would send friends as gifts at Christmas. Conroy wrote many marvelous stories and was a gifted raconteur when at a dinner table, but this novel remains my favorite. Race. The military. School. Duty. And perhaps one of the greatest sports scenes – a basketball game – I’ve ever read. Like many of the authors listed above, the world could use his voice today.

Compulsion by Meyer Levin.
His thinly altered story of the infamous 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder trial in Chicago remains the template for a psychological thriller. His prose is dynamic and the story creepily unique.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub.
I’m not big on the supernatural… mostly. But this book is the exception that proves me mistaken. A well-rounded, always exciting, detailed, eerie, brilliantly plotted, wonderful novel that actually produces both the proverbial thrills and accordant chills.

The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
These books (and the films that they inspired) are justifiably famous. Red Dragon is one of the few books that truly scared me (alongside some of Ambrose Bierce’s stories). And Silence is one of the great inventions in the psychological thriller genre. Incredible story telling… Which leads me to mention a couple of other thrillers that are notable for both plot, character and delivery: Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow and True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne (his wife, Joan Didion’s body of work is pretty outstanding, too). Every book by Don Winslow especially Kings of Cool and Savages and the truly remarkable collection of interlaced short stories Broken. (A short aside: Thomas Harris and Don Winslow are longtime friends). Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Brilliant, especially the sequence where Smilla Jespersen slides across the harbor because she knows there is ice just beneath the water surface… astonishing. An international bestseller that fully deserved to be a bestseller. (Not sure I’d say the same for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo despite its provocative title). Which brings us to…

NON-FICTION

Another truly questionable assumption:

I don’t have to really go into In Cold Blood by Truman Capote or The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer or Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden (an exceptional book) or any of Erik Larson’s many bestsellers. Or The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (what a great story) or Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer or The Killer Beside Me by Ann Rule…
You get the idea. Lots of great works of non-fiction out there.
But the following few are the ones that impacted me and leap to the forefront of my memory.

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean.
He is justifiably more celebrated for the wonderful part memoir, part fiction, part family history A River Runs Through It. But his command of the 1949 tragedy of the Mann Gulch Fire in Montana and the 13 smokejumpers’ lives lost is a remarkable bit of writing. I have often considered the first page of the tale to be one of the finest examples of how to set up a story ever penned. Right up there with Conrad’s ‘He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet…’ or Dickens’ ‘It was the best of times, the worst of times…’ There is much slow-moving scientific detail in the book, about wind currents and the qualities they bring to a wildfire, but little compares with the lasting portrait of the elderly writer climbing the steep slope of Mann Gulch, desperately trying to understand the why of each death and to fully appreciate the doomed men’s last race against relentless nature.

My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan.
There are so many South African writers who have probed the terrible truths of apartheid – Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country and Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season come instantly to mind, but there are many others. J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer and the thriller author Wilbur Smith. But Malan’s book stands out, because it is non-fiction, written by the guilty offspring of an apartheid architect. His examination of both the psychology and emotion behind that evil system is moving and compelling. His chapters on the Hammerman are extraordinary.

The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan.
Here is an intriguing factoid: In the years after Ryan’s great retelling of June 6th, 1944 was published, he would from time to time get handwritten letters at his Connecticut home, many from veterans of that most difficult 24 hours, addressed only to “Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day Author.” No street address or state. But somehow, magically, the USPS knew where to deliver them. That is a level of success few writers can achieve. His book tells of the Normandy invasion from dozens of different and varied viewpoints, both the defenders and the attackers. It is constructed in crisp, sharp-edged prose, often in the soldiers’ own voices. Otto Preminger made the most expensive black and white movie ever filmed based on the book – and rarely deviated from Ryan’s accounts. Even today, decades later, the stories of sacrifice and devotion still resonate. Here’s one challenging aside: Read the words that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower penned to be released to the press if the invasion faltered and try to imagine any politician writing such an apology today.

Friendly Fire by C.D.B. Bryan
A tour-de-force of journalism, first serialized in The New Yorker, about the death of a soldier in Vietnam by an artillery round that landed short. It explores not merely the incident, but the cover-up and the parents’ anguish in simple, compelling prose. It, too, was made into an excellent film, this time on television. I may not have opened this book in years, but it never strays far from my primary bookshelf. I can still recall the late author’s description of the tiny, crescent shaped bit of shrapnel that killed the young man.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.
Ordinarily, I like to think of Stephen King as the sort of writer than can scare the daylights out of a reader – who closes the last pages and breathes a sigh of relief and thinks ‘well, at least that is fiction…’ This book achieves the same level of fright, and it is chillingly real. Accurate and thoughtful. In a way reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s ground-breaking The Jungle only modern. A testimonial to the probably forlorn hope nobody drops the vial of Ebola…

FINAL BONUS and OBVIOUS CATEGORY…

Wait! What about memoir? Poetry? Tell-all confessions? Potboilers? Why you should elect me ego-boosting autobiographies? History? Essays? What about Paul Fussell and Thank God for the Atomic Bomb? Or… or… other genres? And, speaking of novels, how could you leave out Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain? And don’t you read Ann Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates and… and… and…

Sorry. Can’t mention every book.

Let me add a final quick category: My friends. Some of whom I’ve already mentioned (Harris, Winslow, Didion… who put my wife and me into the acknowledgements of her Miami book, an honor greater than any award I’ve ever received). Here are names, some of whom (like Joan Didion, sadly) are no longer with us but whose printed words continue to resonate:

Philip Caputo. Known for his Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, but author of an extraordinary collection of novels (I recommend them all, but in particular the stories in Hunter’s Moon). I first met Phil when I went down to Key West to profile him for the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine when his second novel was coming out. Forty years? Our friendship was cemented by what I left out of the profile – Key West being, well, Key West. We’ve since been together on many occasions, not only gingerly crawling down a fast-flowing river, tromping across a sandy beach or perched on the front of a flats boat, fly rods in hand. Sometimes we genuinely catch a fish. More frequently, we have dinner and talk about writing and the world we live in.

David Maraniss. So many wonderful, detailed books, exhibiting both his skills as a reporter and control of words. Everyone knows Dave as a Washington Post multiple Pulitzer winner, but we go all the way back to our wet behind the ear’s newspaper introduction at The Trenton Times.

Buzz Bissinger. The year before he went to Texas to write the seminal Friday Night Lights, we would play squash at the Harvard Law School courts (where we probably didn’t belong). “Should I write that book?” he once asked me, between points (that I remember winning, but Buzz probably recalls differently). “Are you kidding?” I replied. “Yes. Go. It’s a fine idea.” I’m still waiting for my royalty check.

James Hall. A thriller writer without peer.

Les Standiford. Detective novels and curiously, a historian and as fine a teacher of the craft of writing that is around.

Michael and Beth Norman. More friends from the dawn of my writing career in Trenton. Their jointly written books are great, as are their independently penned ones.

Tracy Kidder. A journalist of renown. Among Schoolchildren is my favorite. Fortunately, a guy who has managed to overcome the drawbacks of going to the wrong prep school.

Elinor Lipman. An old friend and acclaimed comic stylist, known especially for The Inn at Lake Devine.

Joseph Ellis. Historian. It sometimes seems like he knew these guys personally: Jefferson. Adams. Washington. Joe is a man who could explain what the founders really had in mind with the 2nd Amendment and not what these fools who call themselves originalists think.

Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry. From my Miami days. Two of the funniest writers I’ve ever had the privilege to laugh with.

Michael Ponsor. Once a federal judge. Now a legal-thriller writer. The Hanging Judge. A topic he’s intimate with. He also can explain the 2nd Amendment. And the 14th. And any others that prick one’s interest.

Sven Birkirts. He’s the only critic I would not sic my whippets on with evil intentions.

Chris Benfey. His Kipling – one of those old white guys routinely snorted at today — biography is exceptional. If. Great title – if you know your poetry.

Mary Jo Salter – speaking of accomplished poets.

I’ve neglected some names. I apologize.

And the late and greatly missed…

Anita Shreve. An elegant, kind person whose vivid prose reflected her own delightful personality.

Mameve Medwed who was a wonderful storyteller.

Joe McGinniss who was famous for The Selling of the President and Fatal Vision and infamous as the target of Janet ‘I apparently can’t recognize a lying, psychopathic killer when I’m seated across from one’ Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer.

And she didn’t want to be mentioned in these lists, but all the (living) people above will immediately wonder why I left her out and take me to task rapidly. Probably the not living ones are asking the same questions from whatever celestial library where they all hang out drinking too much heavenly coffee spiked with ideas.

Madeleine Blais. Pulitzer winner. Professor of Journalism. (Who, from time-to-time, taught Hemingway to UMass undergrads). Mentor to many students who hold her in incredibly high esteem. Author of many books, including The Heart is an Instrument, the justifiably famous basketball book, In these Girls Hope is a Muscle and the acclaimed To the New Owners and Queen of the Court. Also occasionally tolerant, sometimes non-demanding wife to one long-winded thriller writer.