Books: Ten I Retain

Here my thoughts on 10 books that have stayed with me ever since I read them, in no particular order:

—   Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith. The canny creator of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” wrote a book that is equal parts inspirational, autobiographical and advisory. I read an Effingham library copy when I was in high school and it took me decades to track down a hardcover copy of my own.

—   Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The stoic emperor’s own advice to himself. He was perhaps the only real “philosopher-king” humanity ever saw. “Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts,” he wrote. The Buddhists would have agreed. He also said, “The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” And that may just about the best advice anybody ever gave anybody

—   The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber. Whenever you’d like to make people laugh, just start reading aloud from the great New Yorker writer and cartoonist’s short stories “The Night the Bed Fell,” “The Breaking Up of the Winships” or, my favorite, “A Couple of Hamburgers.”

—   The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I have escaped its Neptune-like gravitational pull, but I will never forget it. Rand’s philosophy offers useful hymns to individualism — particularly for the young, when they most need to hear them. But unfortunately, despite her self-congratulatory trumpeting of reason, Rand confused her own whims and passions with facts, much to the detriment of the political economy of the U.S., as it turned out.

—   Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming. The second of the James Bond novels remains the most vivid in my mind, with its evocation of New York circa 1953, with its tough heroic action, with its vulnerable, clairvoyant heroine, with its Freudian-daddy villain’s horrifying schemes of vengeance, with its lyric Silver Meteor train ride from Manhattan to St. Petersburg and those offhanded observations of Bond’s that seemed to express the height of sophistication when you were a teenage boy. The problem isn’t getting the caviar you want, you know. It’s getting the proper amount of buttered toast to spread it on. Ian Fleming took an eager sensual pleasure in life that ended his life early, but that can still sweep us along with its zest.

—   The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer. Back in 1965, the famed New Yorker cartoonist wrote the first hardcover book about the first comic-book superheroes, managing to be serious, light-hearted, witty and insightful, all at the same time. Look closely, and you can even see some problematic American cultural patterns laid bare there. “A sissy wanted girls who scorned him; a man scorned girls who wanted him,” wrote Feiffer, recalling the attitudes of the superheroes' first fanboys in the 1930s and 1940s. “Our cultural opposite of the man who didn’t make out with women has never been the man who did — but rather the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn't. The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, L'il Abner’s, or Superman's, was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to help them. And then get the hell out ... Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard.”

—   Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Early in the history of the novel, Austen performed at least three neat tricks at once. She created a credible romance between intelligent, charismatic characters. She perfected the practice of letting characters damn themselves out of their own mouths to great comic effect. And she explored proto-feminist territory by presenting the dilemma facing women who must make a match that will determine the course of their lives, taking into account both love and money yet taking care not to be overwhelmed by either, and all the while keeping up the “well-bred” pretense that they’re not interested in anything of the sort. A high-wire act would be a walk in the park by comparison.

—   Reason and Belief by Brand Blanshard. With careful and kindly analysis, giving religion every benefit of the doubt, the great Yale philosopher disposes of the supernatural claims of faith finally and, for a fair-minded reader, irrefutably, I’d say. An intellectual tour de force.

—   The Quiller Memorandum by Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor). My friend and mentor Elleston Trevor split the difference between the thrills of Ian Fleming and the verisimilitude of John Le Carre in his novels about the tense, terse British “shadow executive” code-named Quiller. Trevor convincingly portrayed the way a competent professional loner operates, and something in Quiller’s edgy, first-person, adrendaline-tinged self-control rang true psychologically with readers worldwide. “I’m frightened of pushing things to the point where they might blow up,” Quiller reflects. “So that’s what I go on doing, to prove I’m not frightened.’

—   Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. One of my top-three science fiction authors, Zelazny here posits a colony of humans from long-forgotten “Urath” who are so advanced that they have been able to effectively transform themselves into the Hindu pantheon of gods in order to dominate the population of a planet. Whic means that one of their number, fed up with their stultifying injustice, must effectively become the Buddha. But we only learn all that gradually, lyrically. “His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.”