The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

I am laughing alone in my room because my Google image search for “Lord of the Rings” is producing a truly horrifying combination of slash-fiction fansites and images of Frodo looking both constipated and homoerotically servile: example to the left. But like, we love it, don’t we? We love this tacky, ponderous, Zelda-meets-Renaissance-fair-meets-Medieval-Times trilogy so much that the only books that have sold more copies than the Lord of the Rings trilogy are (seriously) the Bible, the Koran, and the teachings of Chairman Mao.

So yeah, who’s read them? At least 200 million people, and that includes me. Multiple times. I’m smoking myself out of the nerd hole with this post right now and I hope that you’ll do the same! Now, clearly there’s something “great” about these books, something actually epic and lovely and whatever. And Tolkien invented his own languages and shit, so that’s awesome. But honestly, I think that LOTR (the abbreviation, when spoken aloud, is enough to send me into fits of giggles–I mean it’s just ridiculous) can best be appreciated by people with vast reserves of longing in their soul, people who really believe they’re on a quest for something. And although I accidentally threw The Two Towers in my suitcase when I went to France my sophomore year of high school, and thus ended up rereading it nonstop for two weeks, I think my days snuggled up with the Witch-King of Angmar are over forever.

Actually pretty much everything about Lord of the Rings is hilarious to me right now. The names: Deagol Smeagol Samwise Gamgee Boromir Faramir Shelob Denethor Theoden Eowyn. Places: Mount Moria and the Cracks of Doom. Races: elf, dwarf, orc, and the lowly, flawed human. Sure, this story is a monomythical giant but it’s very hard to read any of those words aloud with a straight face. But you know who really loves Lord of the Rings? Led Zeppelin and Rush. “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Rivendell.” I feel less bad about the life-size cardboard cutout I used to have of Orlando Bloom dressed as Legolas. Actually, no I don’t.

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, by Nancy Farmer

Let’s get it out on the table: this book fucking rocks. I reread it yesterday and all my memories were confirmed. It’s one of the only children’s books I’ve ever read where no one is cute or simple or even very book-character-like; there’s less sentimentality in this than there is in Holes or even The Westing Game, and it’s generally just this badass romp through the fascinating setting of crime-infested, spiritualist-cum-scifi Zimbabwe circa 2194.

In the story, the Chief of Security’s three children, who have thus far been raised by robots, sneak out of the house for the first time and instantly get kidnapped. They go to this apocalypse-pollution slum where all the old plastic (plastic is by this time a museum piece revered for its own wastefulness) is packed down into the desert sands; they nearly get sold to a gang, but escape to a land called Resthaven, which sometime in the twenty-first century became its own country that abides very strictly by the customs of ancient Africa. This whole time, they are being followed by the Ear, the Eye and the Arm, three men who were exposed to nuclear fallout and thus developed overly sensitive appendages which make them good for detective work. The kids escape from Resthaven, go into this settlement where the remains of the “British tribe” sit around with their names like Lady Muffy Horsenugget and make guava scones, and then are whisked to the top of a mile-high tower where they are almost made human sacrifices, but escape at the last minute.

But what’s really amazing is how gently rigorous the whole thing is. I mean, this is a children’s book, and like, the book cover looks like you could add a couple of boom boxes and Will Smith circa “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and no one would even notice. Still, within this framework, Nancy Farmer very casually and matter-of-factly addresses wealth disparity, colonialism, tradition, consumption, and morality in an immoral society without ever coming down hard on one side or the other. The powerful are not evil, nor are they the center of society or the saviors of the poor; everyone is what their circumstances have made them, and living a life that they in some way have chosen. Nancy Farmer, a Peace Corps alumna, is right up there with Maeby Funke as someone I consider a role model. And if you liked The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, definitely read The House of the Scorpion, which she wrote in 2004 or something–also amazing.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

So this is one of those required reading books that’s just straight-up good enough that somehow, some sense of its general brilliance usually manages to get through the minds of the millions of eighth-graders whose reading experience is cramped and ruined by the constant intrusion of the chapter-by-chapter study guide. It’s hard to read when you’re periodically turning away from the page to fill out those stupid packets; when you’re dutifully writing “Because he writes his name with his left hand” right below “How does Atticus insinuate that Mr. Ewell might have beaten up his own daughter?” it’s difficult to grasp that this is an incredible, A Few Good Men-volume courtroom moment and not just a question on a worksheet.

(I will say though, after visiting my dearest friend in New York City who had to teach this book in the Bronx under near-impossible circumstances, I’m grateful that I and most all the rest of us attended schools where there was enough paper to make these perfunctory packets, and our teachers did not have to struggle through each hour to produce character posters that say nothing other than “Mayella: she dirty.” Tory, how’s it going, love you girl.)

There’s Atticus Finch (the book was originally going to be called Atticus, which makes me want to watch Spartacus) as a pillar of sheer decency from which all saintly-lawyer types have degenerated (Sandy Cohen?). Scout Finch, the totally badass, precocious six-year-old whose life is saved because she’s dressed up like a big chunk of ham (I feel like every tomboy girl character in a kiddy sports movie is Scout reincarnate: Becky in Little Giants, Julie in D2). Boo Radley, who is the man in Home Alone. Tom Robinson the Saintly Negro, workable as a real character because so many other people in this tiny lil’ Alabama town are Saintly as well, including Calpurnia, the original code-switcher. I’m flipping through my old copy right now and I might reread it instead of doing lesson 7 on my Kyrgyz. Also, I made a flipbook of a stick figure kicking a soccer ball out of the bottom right-hand corner of each page. I’d like to think that was a Scout thing of me to do!

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

I usually only put up a picture of the book cover that I own, but I took a real liking to this guy; the pill looks super tasty and is also red-white-and-blue, a nice unsubtle reminder of how Brave New World does a real turkey slap on some crucial aspects of American culture. Plus there’s a foreword by Christopher Hitchens in this one? There’s also an edition with a Margaret Atwood foreword. What am I doing watching Bobby Bottleservice Talks to the Sexy Internet Ladies when there’s stuff like this to be read? (The real answer is, it’s two months exactly until I leave, so, no further explanation.)

Let’s talk about the parallels. In Brave New World, society is divided into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, in which the highest caste operates at total self-actualized, tall, Aryan capacity while the lowest caste has stunted growth from bad chemicals and spends all day operating machinery while wiping sweat from their dark-skinned brows. That sounds… realistic. Especially in context of that South Carolina chach (wait, which one?) who compared poor people to stray animals–actually, Andre Bauer sounds more ridiculous than Aldous Huxley does on this one, so let’s just leave it. Here’s another. One of BNW society’s mantras is “Ending is better than mending.” Yikes. Besides the obvious fact that we all like to throw everything away and circle-jerk around our new smartphones, the applicability of this statement to relationships–I can’t even think about that right now.

The Feelies–Avatar. Soma–I’d say that the standard university combination of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, Vicodin, Monster, Ambien, sex, and Dan Deacon videos on YouTube feels a lot more like “soma” than Huxley would have ever imagined anything could. In terms of after-hours merrymaking becoming so on-demand, every-nerve-ending-perfectly-stimulated, this idea of soma being chemically transcendent enough to replace the need for religion seems pretty biting. And, what else. This is again taken from Wikipedia: “In geographic areas nonconducive to easy living and consumption, the World State allows well controlled, securely contained groups of ’savages’ to live.” Hmm, that’s awkward.

But I must admit. I’m running my mouth about society as usual, but if this life is bringing me things like Bobby Bottleservice I honestly have no complaints at all.

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

I was talking to someone about this today: I am not smart in very many useful ways. Rather than reach for, you know, sophistication or accuracy, I am impatient and often process things on the level of “Ooh, if I were an alien trying to write a poem about this, what would be the first line” and then for the rest of my life when I think about Kant I will think not about actual philosophy but rather about how he thought masturbation violated moral law. I can never tell when my brain is going to feel like latching onto something, and once something has left a strong enough impression, there is no room for anything else.

For example, Middlesex. The book is phenomenal. Pulitzer Prize, a century in a family’s chronicle expanding and lurching across the page, insanity and incest and intersexuality, every section so complete that it’s like Thomas Hardy mixed with Don DeLillo in terms of the book’s world existing on its own and needing its readers not one bit. The story is essentially that a brother and sister leave Smyrna in the early 20th century, pretend to be husband and wife once they come to America, beget a son who seduces his cousin, and son-and-cousin (also like niece and great-uncle or however it becomes convoluted) beget an intersex child named Calliope, who has a very exciting life.

But I’m going to be honest with you. This is the only thing I really remember from this book, these three sentences from page 70. “Lefty took off his shoes and socks, as grit rained down. When he removed his underwear, the lifeboat filled with a mushroomy smell. He was ashamed momentarily, but Desdemona didn’t seem to mind.” The idea of a brother and sister having sex for the first time on a lifeboat, combined with the word “mushroomy”–seriously, mushroomy–I mean, if I had just read that sentence I don’t think I could take it off for James Franco, and that’s saying something. And then Calliope/Cal describes her/his genitalia as a “flowering crocus of sorts.” That ended my life. Both of those things ended my life. That’s what my brain latched onto, and just as Kant=masturbation, Middlesex=mushroom crocus genitals.

Wayside School is Falling Down, by Louis Sachar

Wayside School. The Brechtian funhouse that haunts my dreams, featuring the ever-patient groundskeeper Louis, the daft, loving Mrs. Jewls, cows on the roof, millions of dollars in paper bags, hoboes, mistaken identities, nascent sexual fascination with pigtails, and so much more. There are three books in the Sideways Stories from Wayside School series; this one is my favorite, but all three are magnificent, frank, blandly terrifying constructions of 30 loosely linked stories, in which the 19th chapter is about the 19th floor that doesn’t exist, and the 17th chapter runs backwards, and so on and so on.

There’s some fearful, opaque symmetry about the Wayside stories, and this strangely consistent illogic: I would bet that the kids who really liked these books grew up to be either LOST fans or, I don’t know, illiterate savants, like Charlie on It’s Always Sunny. Seriously, these books are legitimate theater. Everything happens under a kind of inevitable, non sequitur rule. Like, in one story in Wayside School is Falling Down, the kids are playing a prank on a substitute teacher named Mrs. Franklin by pretending that they’re all named Benjamin, and Mrs. Franklin complacently calls everyone Benjamin until the end of the story, when she says that they’re such good friends that they can call her by her first name: Benjamin. There’s another running story where this kid whose name is actually Benjamin (Nushmutt) ends up going by Mark Miller the entire year because Mrs. Jewls made a mistake the first day, and the one time he gets the courage to correct everyone, it’s during a music lesson. Mrs. Jewls keeps asking him to speak up louder, but all the kids hear is “Louder!” and they bang even harder on their tambourines and xylophones and no one ever hears his real name.

Here’s another example, cribbed directly from Wikipedia. Chapter 7, Freedom: Myron observes a bird outside the window, and thinks about how his desk is like a cage, and how the bird must see him in his desk and think that he is caged, and the bird is free. So one day, he walks down into the basement where he is discovered by bald men with attaché cases, asking him whether he would like freedom or safety. He chooses freedom, but ends up going back to class. During all this, he loses one of his shoes, which is then found by Mrs. Jewls in the Teachers Lounge refrigerator.

Seriously? That is crazy.

The Books on My Bottom Shelf

I used to have my bookshelf arranged by color and now it is unpleasantly random. The 27-hour drive back from college, from Virginia to Texas, boxes of books thudding in the back and me wanting to die of sadness and amphetamine dehydration–it led to a haphazard, nervous unpacking binge as soon as I got home, and a bookshelf arranged in such a way that this is my bottom shelf, left to right.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden: Cain/Abel, Charles/Adam, Cal/Aaron, clever/a lot more enjoyable than Grapes of Wrath

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra: Eden on Venus! New Adam and Eve! Plus the annoying devil! I have an extreme love for this book.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own: Women couldn’t write for forever because they didn’t have the space or the freedom, but now things are different! Like, I currently have a room of my own. In my parents’ house. I will soon have a room of my own in the sheep-centric bowels of Kyrgyzstan. Basically I have the functional, if not photogenic oven and it’s just waiting for my bun, a bun also known as “Jia’s Amazing First Novel,” which when it emerges will have to lose the words “amazing,” “first,” and “novel.”

S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders: Do you know how to pronounce Socs? Does Ponyboy sound like a hooker name?

George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man: Aha, this one is not my book. Josh, I will mail it to you if you feel the need to revisit your mustache.

Ian McEwan, Atonement: It sucks to be all of them in this book.

Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision: Obvious first post-MFA project, pretty miserable.

George Orwell, 1984: Syntactically, Newspeak=Esperanto? Without this book, would we have had Big Brother?

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: I love love love love this one. Mick Kelly, the tomboy protagonist, is like a Scout Finch type, except in this book she becomes friends with the Boo Radley character early: sad, grotesque awesomeness ensues.

Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring: I hate historical fiction because A) it is like watching a Lifetime documentary about the Renaissance Fair B) if that weren’t enough, those earnest, earthy descriptions of hooking up during pre-bathing eras are seriously gross.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things: My second year of college I had a floor-to-ceiling map of the world in my overly expensive loft apartment that was fun to stare at when under the influence. Easter weekend, we were doing just that, and some really moving song was playing, and one of my friends (with a legendarily commanding speaking voice) grabbed this book and started reading the last chapter aloud and like seriously we all cried. Stoners! But also the last chapter of this book (along with all of this book) is ridiculously good!

Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family: Oh, just a little light reading, guys. By that I mean this book was interesting but even while reading it I knew I was just a lil bit too stupid to retain the facts. All I’ve got is the feelings.

Edward P. Jones, The Known World: There’s one description of a slave being hobbled, like his Achilles tendon being cut, that made me feel like my stomach was going to crawl into my small intestine.

Michael Cunningham, The Hours: Gorgeous, amazing, wonderful. Plus, have people talked enough about the fact that half of Mrs. Dalloway’s common-man appeal comes from the fact that it starts with party preparations? And with this book you have it times three!

Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: I got this to see what all the fuss was about and 45 pages in I thought, “Oh my God, the reason why people are so inspired by this book is because it was written by a retarded person!” And then I looked it up, saw that that wasn’t the case, and vomited.

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: I saw a London production of this once in which the angel looked like Grace Jones and spat drool all over the stage and audience. Also, my one of my extremely bland and cat-like English professors at UVA once made two similarly bland, blond, cat-like girls read that masturbation-on-the-beach scene out loud together and I had to leave class because I was laughing too hard. Also, sometimes I get “Perestroika” stuck in my head to the tune of “Frere Jacques.”

The BFG, by Roald Dahl

I am a huge, huge, huge Roald Dahl fan. Lemony Snicket, Harry Potter, movies like UP–the children’s stuff that is filled with old-fashioned delight rather than of-the-moment brattiness, the stuff whose subtext is “The world is interesting and fantastic, if a bit uncontrollable” and not “The world is no larger than you/your princess fantasy/your vampire lover/your lunch-table grievance of the day”–all of that stuff is in debt to Roald Dahl. I think my favorite will always be Danny, the Champion of the World, but The BFG (big fucking grundle) runs a close second in terms of making a simple wish (justice in the former, freedom in the latter) into a delicate, real-life, completely un-precious fantasy.

A few things. The Big Friendly Giant, the way he talks: “‘Wales is whales,’ the Giant said. ‘Don’t gobblefunk around with words. I will now give you another example. Human beans from Jersey has a most disgustable woolly tickle on the tongue.’” While I marvel at the way Jersey Shore is retrofitting great books with hilarious associations, I also marvel at how the BFG speaks like Dobby the house-elf/Jar-Jar Binks/that huge yellow thing on Gullah Gullah Island (did he talk? what was that thing?) but still manages to be awesome and not annoying at all. He also says many delightful words like “hippodumplings” and “hipswitch.”

Another thing. As a writer I think about Roald Dahl whenever I think about perfect description. I don’t know if it’s a thing about kids’ books, where you’re so familiar with the descriptions that they begin to seem pre-established and real, but Roald Dahl’s words are so perfect. Pared-down and clear while still being lush and friendly, it’s like this: “Sophie, still peering out from the blanket, saw suddenly ahead of her a great craggy mountain. The mountain was dark blue and all around it the sky was gushing and glistening with light. Bits of pale gold were flying among delicate frosty-white flakes of cloud, and over to one side the rim of the morning sun was coming up red as blood.”

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

You know that part in “Just A Friend” where Biz Markie is like “Don’t gimme that–don’t even gimme that!” I get that line instantly stuck in my head whenever I think about Into the Wild. Because, well, there’s no other way to put it. Don’t even give me that, Jon Krakauer. Don’t even give me that, stupid Into the Wild movie starring yellow typeface, Jena Malone’s sad voice, and Sean Penn’s bloated, invisible chode. And really, really, really don’t give me that, Christopher McCandless. I am truly sorry that you couldn’t find purpose in your everyday life, and that your restlessness led you to embark on a series of events that ended up in your weighing 67 pounds when you died alone in the Alaskan wilderness.

But I am not sorry, because if ever there was a problem that someone brought on himself, this is it.

Here’s the thing. A lot of people like Into the Wild. It’s like a Knowles trip + Burning Man + whatever vague streak of misguided white bourgeois fuck-the-machine attitude that leads rich college students to wear TOMS and secretly think incense is sexy. And I mean, I’m doing the Peace Corps, so like, I’m down with the outdoors, and people doing weird things, and I like isolation and faux-Thoreau as much as the next guy and probably a good amount more. But Christopher McCandless, his story just makes me angry. “[Although he] possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not readily mesh with the realities of modern life, he was no psychopath. McCandless was in fact an honors graduate of Emory University, an accomplished athlete, and a veteran of several solo excursions into wild, inhospitable terrain.”

And so what does a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate with $25,000 of his parents’ money in the bank do to deal with his heartbreakingly strong idealism? He gave the money away and peaced out in his Datsun, “relieved to shed a life of abstraction and security, a life he felt was removed from the heat and throb of the real world. Chris McCandless intended to invent a new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience.” He renames himself Alexander Supertramp, gives away his food, and starves himself slowly in an abandoned bus. What a waste of resources. What a stupid tale to fascinate people. Couldn’t he just have done a bunch of acid and/or volunteered at a homeless shelter? Either of those experiences would have been pretty “unfiltered,” yeah?

Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild

Holla back at the 1983 Dell Yearling cover of Ballet Shoes! Do not holla back at the cover to your left, which is a big piece of shit! Honestly, publishers. Scholastic is reissuing the first two books of The Babysitter’s Club with oughties-appropriate alterations, like changing “cassette player” to “iPod” and all kinds of lunacy. And I want kids today to read The Babysitter’s Club, obviously, but if they change Claudia’s awesome 80’s outfits to skinny jeans and a tube top from the Miley Cyrus Wal-Mart collection, I’ll shoot myself in the face and/or get a hysterectomy. I am extra-grateful at the moment that, as a child, I had the foresight to save hundreds and hundreds of my children’s paperbacks for my future progeny. Because they sure as shit aren’t reading a version of Ballet Shoes that looks like Jane Green wrote it and should be titled Mackenna Goes to Charlotte Russe.

My posts have gotten meaner. I blame Vegas. Well, anyway, I love this book. It plays a vital role in You’ve Got Mail (do y’all remember that? I fucking hate that movie but it’s like when Meg Ryan is at the big bad bookstore and instructing the clueless employee about where to find Ballet Shoes and then she realizes she’s got to keep her little baby shop and then there’s a dream sequence and someone brings her daisies and that’s literally all I remember from the entire thing). Double anyways, Emma Watson was apparently in the movie version. Thus it’s pretty amazing to me that this book was written in 1936 and it’s still popping up in the zeitgeist.

In a nutshell, these three sisters, Pauline, Petrova, and Posy Fossil are all orphans who are discovered all around the world by an absent-minded explorer and sent home to his great-niece Sylvia. This being the 30’s, there’s not much money, and the girls are bright and pert and resourceful; they have separate, neatly described but complicated personalities; they all get identical outfits in different colors all the time; they spend all their time dancing and trying to help support the family, and in the end Pauline becomes a stage actress, Petrova gets to fly airplanes, and Posy becomes a dance prodigy. It’s simple and none of them are “sassy” and there’s no bad guy in the whole book, it’s just people trying to get by. I love this book. I am considering putting my copy in a safe-deposit box or something now.