Book Book .
Mark Latham's favourite book is Catch 22.
For some reason this makes my heart swell. Mark Latham likes to read . Do you even want to know what John Howard reads? Fucking history novels and biographies. Not that there's anything wrong with broadening one's knowledge in general (do you love that I just threw in 'one's' because this is a serious literary post? I'll keep you on your toes like that), but you just know that JWH has never thrillingly hugged a book to his chest before opening it, or looked up from its pages breathless from the dizzy rush of prose.
This is why I've always had a quiet admiration for Bob Carr - okay, maybe also because Bob Ellis is hot for his action but I have other reasons too - he's an ex-journalist who loves theatre and poetry and novels. History novels among them, but his interests are broad. And maybe I don't have to live under his public transport system so, you know. Whatever.
I heart readers.
So anyhow I have just finished reading Augusten Burroughs' 'Dry - A Memoir' and the blessed ABC have launched a show called My Favourite Book and I thought I'd do a book post. Hooray for me and my lonely childhood reading at the dinner table*.
Books that make me want to be an alcoholic:
- John Fante's 'Ask the Dust'.
- Anything by Charles Bukowski, but particularly 'Women'.
- Andrew McGahan's 'Praise' and '1988'.
- Peter Carey's 'Bliss'.
Books that make me feel smarter reading them:
- Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margherita'.
Books that make me breathless from their cleverness:
- Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections'.
- John Kennedy Toole's 'A Confederacy of Dunces'**
- Joseph Heller's 'Catch 22' (he never wrote anything even remotely as good, by the by).
Dork books that I consumed as a teenager:
- The entire Red Dwarf series, including the autobiography of the guy who played Kryten.
- Ben Elton's 'STARK'.
- Louise M Fitzhugh's 'Harriet the Spy'.
- Every single script of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
- 'Harpo Speaks!', the Harpo Marx story.
Books that make me want to be funnier:
- Anything - anything - by David Sedaris.
- Most early travel books by Bill Bryson (okay, so he's kind of square but his way with words leaves me hurting in the stomach. I don't do the 'history of words' shit with him, though).
- Any fucking bullshit 'chick-lit' written by some fucktard with an eating disorder who thinks they're remarkably clever and v., v. moderne.
Books that get me hot:
- Philip Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint'.
- JD Salinger's 'A Catcher in the Rye' (because I get off on teenage boys).
Books that make me cry from their incisive prose:
- Anything by Bob Ellis.
I know I crack wise times infinity about how I want to touch his business and all that, but Bob puts into words my feelings about the world so succinctly and passionately and insanely and wondrously that it's a wonder I can even breathe when turning the thick pages of his many novels.
There are a thousand more, but you may be getting bored and wanting me to go back to writing about cocks and upskirt underwear. I don't know. Let's go to the park and read together. Then I'll let you look up my dress.
*I still do this with people I am very comfortable with.
** This, I believe, is my favourite book of all time.
1042 days til the next election.
Comments
"A Fine Balance" - Rohinton Mistry.
It will break you.
Guess who? It's minty dick (I will wear the name as a bage of honour, just like I wore the name "faggot lover" as a badge of honour on election day after I was referred to as this by the Christian Democrats for criticising their policy to gays. Hey, it's sounds like one of those witty responses some of you would come up with).
Anyway, I must take issue with your statement Ms Fits that Joseph Heller never wrote anything even remotely as good. What about "Something Happened". It is almost as good as Catch 22 in most literary critics opinions, and in my opinion (which I know many of you out there respect) it is at least as good as Catch 22. I also note the lack of any literature from the greatest black (not in skin colour, but in tone) humorist (again in my opinion) of the 20th Century Kurt Vonnegut. Also, with the exception of Mikhail Bulgakov, you list is very Anglo centric. What about say Ivan Klima, Primo Levi, Gunter Grass or Czeslaw Milosz?
Given that this post is about reading and literature, and because I know how much those of you out there love my long winded posts, I will leave you with my favourite poem.
From The Lives of Things
The perfect skin of things is strectched across them
as snugly as a circus tent,
Evening nears,
Welcome, darkness.
Farewell, daylight.
We're like eyelids, assert things,
we touch eyes, hair, darkness,
light, India, Europe.
Suddenly I find myself asking: "Things
do you know suffering?
Have you cried? Do you know fear,
shame? Have you learned jealousy, envy,
small sins, not of commission,
but not cured by absolution either?
Have you loved, and died,
at night, wind opening the windows, absorbing
the cool heart? Have you tasted
age, time, bereavement?"
Silence.
On the wall, the needle of a barometer dances.
By Adam Zagajewski
There you go Fits, all your books were wrong.
- lolita - vladimir nabakov
- the catcher in the rye - j.d. salinger
- animal farm - george orwell
- the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay - michael chabon
- the good fairies of new york - martin millar
- to kill a mockingbird - harper lee
- 100 hundred years of solitude - gabriel garcia marquez
- the magic faraway tree - enid blyton
- the corrections - jonathon franzen
- you shall know our velocity - dave eggers
- in the skin of a lion - michael ondaatje
i could go on for hours. i won't. those came to mind immediately.
I notice that Johnny Panic by Sylvia Plath and Leviathan by Paul Auster aren't making an appearance in someone's list...
bookie baby, i told you how hard the grieving process has made it for me to make with the concentration and read whole books at. i am halfway through leviathan. so it only has 200 pages. so what? you wanna make something of it? do ya, punk?
Something Happened, by Joseph Heller, really, really isn't that good.
But Lolita rox sox.
And my fave book to get sublimely tragic with: gotta be Mme Bovary, Falubert. I get all princessey.
Two funniest books in the world are Pure Drivel, Steve Martin (I was as surprised as you) and Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, Mil Millington.
My Fave teen angst book was perfume. Who else?
Bring it on Nadstown.
I will crush you under the heel of my oily sneaker.
I think the funniest book book in the world is A SWIM AT TWO-BIRDS by Flan O'Brien. I read it on a midnight trip to Perth and arrived in mega fits of mirth.
http://www.necessaryprose.com/swimtwobirds.html
I've always been partial to At Home With The Marquis de Sade by Francine du Plessix Gray. That and Are You There God, It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume.
I note that you didn't include any books by authors from our newest democracies, Iraq and Afghanistan. How typical of Lefties like yourself to simply ignore the changing tides of history. Chic new radicals make me sick.
wow, we've reached new levels of geek chic today. its the blogger book club. its like the babysitters club on cocaine. at an orgy.
and book book: i'll bring it.
There are no bad books, just ones you read once only (how fucking profound is that which means i didn't think it up but can't remember where i read it)
all time favourites:
Catch 22 enough said
Puckoon religious bigotry gone feral
and all the rest.
what are people currently reading?
i am on the third last book of the Patrick O'Brian series about Aurbry and Maturin (the books that the film Master and commander were based on)
geeky i know but i love the language
Adam One Afternoon, by Italo Calvino. Oh. My. God. My trousers just received another happy stain from thinking about how unspeakably beautiful that man's writing was.
Let's go to the park and read together. Then I'll let you look up my dress.best. first date. ever.-g
I can't believe I forgot about Lolita! The first ever novel to make me feel fizzli in the pant area.
Not unlike the first song to do the same, which was of course that sexual classic 'Stimulation' by Wa Wa Nee.
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Blogger hates me... Let's try that again.
I know this is a book post, but the only thing funnier* than reading David Sedaris is hearing David Sedaris:
Jesus Shaves.You Can't Kill The Rooster.* I had intended to write this comment in Comic Sans - thus making it the funniest thing ever written - but Blogger doesn't like a smarty pants.
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Child abuse, food deprivation, cruel yet dashingly handsome men, many characters who were psychologically unstable - what more could an angsty little teen girl ask for?
I also read at the table my entire childhood until my long-suffering mum introduced a rule that forbade it. Other houses had a swear jar. We had a 'No reading or reciting film scripts at the dinner table' jar.
The Corrections yes,
anything by jon fante.
Vernon God Little, piss funny
The Great Gatsby - scott Fitz, possibly the best book of the twentieth century.
Midnights Children -Salman, magic realism at its best, where did it all go wrong Salman.
The Executioners Songs, Im seeing thru Gary Gilmores Eyes.
Anna Karenin oh my god.
You piking on us again on Saturday
Aieee Karate
Bill Bryson funnier than Clive James' "Flying Visits" ?! You're not partial to ol' Clive, Ms Fits ?
Yeah, ok.
Future Shock- Alvin Toffler, Catch 22- Joseph Heller, 1984- George Orwell, Brave New World- Aldous Huxley, and anything by Hunter S. Thompson, Nietzsche, Douglas Coupland, Plato, or Kathy Acker.
'Perfume' was pure, unadulterated, shit.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace. Particularly the essays on D. Lynch and professional tennis.
My Pet Goat. Nothing could tear me away from this book.
"Ben Elton's 'STARK'"
OMFG me TOO! Are you, like, me, and just not telling?
You have to read Jasper Fforde - he's the best!! Esp. if you are a book nerd.
http://www.jasperfforde.com/
INTERVIEWER: "Some people say you've never written anything as good as Catch 22."
JOSEPH HELLER: "Neither has anyone else."
***
In my late teens and early 20s I devoured everything I could find by Kurt Vonnegut. (Don't let Minty Dick put yuz off. He's one of the best).
Animal Farm (before this my political views were mostly influenced by Monty Python and Mad Magazine. I was 30.)
Lord of the Flies
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Wuthering Heights
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Portnoy's Complaint (but the way my Mum cooked liver was too good for even Young Portnoy to put me off it. Yum!)
A Catcher in the Rye (15th birthday present from an older brother. Read the phrase "colder than a witch's teat": hooked! Identified mightily: landed and gutted!)
Books that made me cry but I still let them touch me afterwards:
King Lear (do (read) plays count?)
The Tree of Man (Patrick White)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
I can't leave out a couple more plays that did it for me when I read them:
MacBeth
Oedipus Rex
Hedda Gabler
Books I was enjoying but still haven't finished yet:
Ulysses
Catch 22
Praise (not good when you're nauseous and tender and in hospital)
Lolita
On the Road
The Naked Lunch
The Corrections (getting there)
Kids books:
Suess.
Dahl.
For some reason the book I have the strongest memory of from before the age of ten is Little Black Sambo.
***
Isn't the bad/worst guy in Lolita a television writer?
as a kid -
Bears in the Night (Berenstein and Berenstein)
Just So Stories
The Hobbit
growing up -
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Catch-22
1984
Brave New World
now -
The Salmon of Doubt (Douglas Adams)
The Rumpole books (Mortimer)
The Three Musketeers
The Scarlet Pimpernel
The Mouse That Roared (Leonard Wibberly, and much better than the Peter Sellers film version)
Leif
I get Holden Caulfielded as often as I can. Sedaris has a great piece in the New Yorker here.
Am I the only person who thought "As good as gold" was better than "Catch 22"??
Anything by Jane Austen
Emma = funniest book of all time - I will broke no opostition, any arguments to the contrary will be ignored.
Perfume
Queer
All Margaret Atwood novels & poetry
Foucault's Pendulum + other Umberto Eco
Now reading: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime
& Wild Thorns
both good
When a critic commented to Joseph Heller that he hadn't written anything as good as "Catch -22" he replied, "Who has?" 1 nil to Heller.
Robert Caro's Biography of Lyndon Johnson, unfortunately in three volumes so far and it still hasn't reached the presidency, is one of the most amazing pieces of literature I've ever read. LBJ is George Bush's real daddy: the war, the Texas oil money, the folksy charm. It may change your mind about history and biography. Carr and Ellis would love it, Howard would hate it.
Concerning LBJ-
Lyndon B. Johnson orders pants:
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/prestapes/lbj_haggar.html
The audio is magnificent.
mcb, good as gold was awesome. i read it and wondered how it is that one book can be so entertaining, whilst managing to totally nail politics, academia and post-world war II jewish cultural life.
SNS Nutrition
http://americanlandrealty.com/
Mailla, Joseph-Anna-Marie de Moyria de
http://www.port-a-hut.com
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