War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Long books are hard to read. Who likes reading for two hours and then being like “Oh good, only 950 pages to go”? It seems to me that in truth there are very few people who actually read long books, and all of them end up in graduate English programs because the hobby is so time-consuming that it actually has to become your job at some point if you want to sustain it–and I’d consider myself one of those people, except for the fact that I can’t really read long books. I go through stages. Stage 1, I remember that I can’t remember more than ten names at a time and stop reading so closely. Stage 2, I get sick of details and want to watch TV. Stage 3, things start weaving together, I enter a reading blackout and emerge at Stage 4, the end, at which point I feel like I haven’t been reading the last half of the book but rather that it’s just happened in my head.

It’s always worth it. I was ready to shit all over Our Mutual Friend after I was forced to read it for a class (as in literally shit, like use it for toilet paper) but then halfway through it became my favorite Dickens book (an impression reinforced by the fact that Desmond in LOST likes it too). And then there’s the mama of big long virtuosic books: War and Peace, weighing in at about 1300 pages. For my major at UVA, it was like this thing that everyone had to read this book over Christmas break of third year (or obviously–”read” it) and so I slogged through the beginning scenes filled with fancy living room furniture and people named Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov, and all of a sudden I was in Stage 3 and totally forgot I was reading.

Really. Just like Wishbone. I was straight-up feeling like I was in the book. And I could not be less interested in historical novels, aristocracy, war stories, or epic romances, but masterpieces like War and Peace change the game. Some critic once said, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy,” and it’s absolutely true. In pace, scope, and style, this novel is a supernaturally perfect mix of minute and huge; it makes you feel like all other books are creative writing projects. It’s also perfect on history, letting you see that there are a dizzying number of stories, thousands of them, millions of moments, that exfoliate outward from every half-page description of a battle. I recommend it, especially if you are about to embark on a venture that will leave you with the isolation and time to read big scary books. Oh wait, that’s about to be me. Fuckz.

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!

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Imagine Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov and Ayn Rand. Mansion, apartment, shack, or house? Probably shack, because Raskolnikov is a dropout, and thus his wage-earning potential is unremarkable, especially in today’s job market. It would be a shack of misery, with our protagonist plotting murders while Ayn Rand beats him about the head with poker sticks and holds salons in the garret. But for all their differences, I’ll bet that this pair could make it work.

Because while Raskolnikov’s persona is questionably Rand-ish–he’s handsome (+2) and intelligent (+3), but also awkward (-2), poor (-5), and unsuccessful (-10)–his mind operates on wonderfully Objective principles. He believes that the world is divided into ordinary and extraordinary men; ordinary men have to follow the rules, while extraordinary men, like Napoleon, can make new rules according to what their special brains find correct. That’s why Raskolnikov, who finds himself extraordinary, tells himself that he should kill an old-lady pawnbroker with an axe–because he will use her money for good. But of course his head starts unraveling under the pressure of guilt, and the book is an absolutely perfect psychological study of him babblingly, slowly, back-and-forthly incriminating himself into sickness and exile. He comes to see that he is not extraordinary: Napoleon believed in his choices, where Raskolnikov’s convictions at best are like lightning bolts, blinding but ephemeral. Ayn Rand once wrote, “Who determines which theory is true? Any man who can prove it.” And maybe this is true–if “true” means “justifiable when one is obsessed with one’s self”–and regardless, it’s what Raskolnikov thinks, and he accurately determines that the difference between him and an “extraordinary” (principle-free) man is the presence of conscience.

But Dostoyevsky is not nearly as Rand-y as his main man. In my game of impossible literary MASH, D and Ayn would probably get a mansion, but girlfriend would be put in her place. As one philosopher put it, Dostoyevsky brings us to see that Raskolnikov’s “boundless self-confidence must disappear in the face of what is greater than himself, and his self-fabricated justification must humble itself before the higher justice of God.” It’s funny how putting humility at one pole puts nihilism and objectivism together at the other! Well, maybe not funny, but, you know. Funny like Palin.

It’s not often that I have this thought, but: thank God for ordinary people. All things considered, I’d still probably rather be Raskolnikov than Napoleon. Napoleon was too short, and this book is really fucking great.

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

Oh, you’ve never seen this cover before? That would make sense, because it’s actually a concert poster, courtesy of Christian metalcore band “As I Lay Dying.” From that one Wikipedia disambiguation, I think I can say that I’d pay like a hundred dollars not to have to meet them. And that’s saying something because right now I’m in London bleeding money out of my scroll-festooned skull.

I love this book, though. If you haven’t read it, you need to–it will change your idea of what a book can do, how miraculous it is that these artificialities like plot and setting and character and diction can combine seamlessly to make something so piercingly, grindingly direct–and if you are unaware of Southern gothic, don’t be anymore, because really it explains so much about our particular national brand of lunacy and wrongfulness and despair. As I Lay Dying is about a mother dying and her family trying to bring her to a resting place, and her children are, in turn, impaired/psychic/pregnant/delusional, and like, the body is just rotting away and everything is nuts. There are many, many lines that will remain in your head–Dewey Dell, horrifically young and sensual, feeling like “a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth”–Vardaman, the tiny little boy stating flatly, “My mother is a fish”–and Addie, the narrating corpse, saying, “Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.” Read it.

There was one time last year when my roommate and I were a bit under the influence and I yelled down the stairs, “Tory what are you doing” and she yells back “I’m ready to go out, I’m just reading As I Lay Dying again” and then we both simultaneously burst out laughing for like half an hour because of the thought of “As I Lay Dying Again,” the apocryphal sequel, and then the entire series’ worth of possibilities based on whatever you were doing while you were reading As I Lay Dying–like “Yeah, I picked up As I Lay Dying: At The Bookstore” or “Oh, hold on, I just want to finish As I Lay Dying: Before Gossip Girl Starts.”

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

I think The Road is the book that has affected me more strongly than any other. It is insane: it could truly make a person insane if you inhabited the place it comes from, and the language is so powerful that it almost forces you to. It’s about the most brutally bleak post-apocalypse scenario that could ever be envisioned, and within it, a father and son trying to stay alive from hour to hour, heading on a devastating and pointless journey to the sea (a fixation that seems vaguely potent to me, associated as it is with Coney Island and California dreams) where they hope they will meet people who aren’t trying to eat them. There’s no why: whatever catastrophe took place is essentially unexplained, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the ruin of the world is so complete that they often seem out of recognizable time and space altogether–one line calls it “some cold glaucoma dimming the whole world.”

In the book, Cormac McCarthy has broken pretty much all issues in life to their bare, terrible bones. Father and son, removed from all context of family or home, are like two dogs watching out for one another. Memories are everywhere but disgusting. Food is poisonous fuel, clothes are necessary dangers.

An example line: “Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years… He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

This is one of the few books I ever got for class that hadn’t interested me previously, and I don’t really know why: I think it was the bland cover or the name “Marilynne” or maybe just the title Gilead, but I felt sure that this book was like The Red Tent or something, a clunky book-club type of thing with a sterilized imagination. Appropriate for people who really like shabby chic and the ’90s.

But of course, you never judge a book blah blah blah. So thank you Chris Tilghman for assigning this. Gilead is a calm and measured meditation on life and history and love, narrated by an old pastor in Iowa who’s writing a letter to his young son–and to be fair, that still sounds incredibly terrible to me. It’s fortunate that reading the book feels like the polar opposite of what you’d imagine the story to be: it’s charged with urgency and it’s spiritually powerful in a way that has pretty much nothing to do with religion itself–more that there’s some vein of forcefulness running through it that makes all the moments seem raw and important, which is an incredible feat. I don’t know any book like this. There’s a line in it that I think about literally all the time, when the pastor describes grace as a sort of “purifying fire that takes things down to essentials.” That’s what Gilead is like: you can tell it’s been through the fire, and it comes out essential and perfect. Like if a wildflower mated with the iPhone.

If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino is a genius who writes as if he were ordinary, which is a fantastic quality in a person doing you the service of writing fiction. (His stuff is also literally fantastic: like this amazing story about the moon growing old and dimming and the rest of the world’s consequent obsession with shiny objects.) But yeah–on this book, Amazon’s little “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” thing suggests Midnight’s Children, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Tom Stoppard, Virginia Woolf, and several books on Las Vegas architecture)–and I think that that variety is telling, don’t you? It means that all kinds of people can love Italo Calvino: you could find one of his stories crumpled in a trash can and you would pick it up and read it and know within a few seconds that you were reading something luminous and brilliant, and best of all you would be able to understand it. Even when it’s constructed as a sort of puzzley mind-fuck.

This book is addressed to “you,” as if you were in the story, and the plot is about you trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler but not being able to. Every other chapter is a first chapter in a book you end up reading instead (you end up with ten different books that don’t make sense until the end), and the other chapters are about your pseudo-detective hunt. Simple, right? Like a more directed Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, or that part in The Neverending Story with the crazy book where everything gets written as it happens. Although this book could hit you over the head with its games about textuality and subjectivity and the death of the author and whatever, it doesn’t.

My favorite line is from the opening chapter, which starts, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler,” and then proceeds to give you tips about a comfortable reading experience. “Cigarettes within reach if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.”

Come on, Italo, I think you know best!

2666, by Roberto Bolano

2666 is indisputably the most brilliant thing I have ever read. (Also, math textbooks notwithstanding, the most difficult.)

I mean, it’s ridiculous. Like a symphony that goes on for three weeks and only gets better, played by an orchestra of the criminally insane. It is staggering to imagine that one person could compose this novel. The scope is massive. Nothing has ever taken me longer to read, and the two books that have come close (War and Peace and Gravity’s Rainbow) are what they are–similarly brilliant and difficult–but not as good as 2666. This book is forceful, terrifying, lopsided, uncontrollable, barely controlled. It’s about time and art as much as it is about the true story of thousands of unexplained murders in Ciudad Juarez. It has that roiling, rhythmic ambiguity that seems to be at the heart of truly amazing things. I know all of this sounds ridiculous, but it’s like this quote, which if you read carefully is totally nuts:

“…danger, the moment of revelation, unsolicited and afterward uncomprehended, the kind of revelation that flashes quickly past and leaves us with only the certainty of a void, a void that very quickly escapes even the word that contains it.” (p. 436)

So yeah. This book will seem intolerable if you’re just looking for entertainment. But if you can handle your shit (like James Franco, who recently asked my friend his assistant to purchase it for him: marry me James Franco)–then read it. And talk to me!

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg

I feel very strongly about this book. I think it draws on some serious Jungian archetypes or something because it seems to be a really pure, wonderful story form, and in the forty years since it was published I think this book has worked its way into the subconscious drives of most every person in America with an imagination. Quick recap: meticulous, anal-retentive 11-year-old Claudia enlists sweet, endlessly game brother Jamie in a plot to run away from home and begin a new life in the Metropolitan Museum, and the rest is a mystery/adventure plot involving Michaelangelo, anonymous letters, a train to Connecticut and a Rolls Royce to take them home in the end.

First of all, how very bougie. But that only reminds me of the good aspects of bougie-life, because this book is not snobby at all. In a way it’s socially conscious and kind of populist (the descriptions of the crowds at the Met, etc) in a way that you wouldn’t expect from a book essentially set on the Upper East Side, which I suppose was the entire point of the plot anyway. And there are so many moments that seem just beautiful and perfect: the clothes in the violin cases, the huge antique beds they sleep in; the part where they play in the fountain with the cold coins all around them; the way they have to learn to get around New York City by themselves, and every bus ride and snack seems like a divinely sent relief.

But maybe the best part about this book is the way it implies that there are amazing secrets to be discovered everywhere if only you were brave enough to look. This is not true, but I wish it were.

Welcome to the Monkey House, by Kurt Vonnegut

Everyone should read this book. Like everyone.

If you have never read Vonnegut then this is the perfect place to start, because this is a book of short stories and he can get a little heavily out of hand with his novels. If you have read Vonnegut and don’t like him, read this book and your mind will be changed at least 50%. If you love Vonnegut and haven’t read this, you will definitely fall in love. If you’ve read this book, reread it! I do, frequently. Since Welcome to the Monkey House is short stories, the satire and the irony and the humor and all that comes clearly and cleanly through the plots–rather than through the sassy epigrams that Kurt Vonnegut is better known for.

Stories in this book feature characters such as: an engineer and a supercomputer that commits suicide after generating 500 epic love poems; a professor who learns a sequence of numbers that allows him to control all objects with his mind, and is subsequently abused as a government weapon; a Cold War game of human chess; a radio that emits a static so blissful that people are stunned into place for entire days by the pleasure, etc. And the stories that are about things less obviously exciting than that are still just as exciting.