Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White

There are frequent periods when I feel extremely embarrassed about the entire idea of reviewing books, because–there is no other way to put it–it’s just such a bullshitty thing to do. Just reading this sentence on Wikipedia in the Charlotte’s Web entry made me angry: “Seth Lerer, in his book Children’s Literature, finds that Charlotte represents female authorship and creativity, and compares her to other female characters in children’s literature such as Jo March in Little Women and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden.” Right. And it doesn’t stop. I laughed out loud reading this next sentence: “Nancy Larrick brings to attention the ‘startling note of realism’ in the opening line, ‘Where’s Papa going with that Ax?’”

 Yes, and it’s a secondary level of ridiculous that I’m writing on a blog about other critics and criticizing them for their over-criticism. But I mean, why ruin Charlotte’s Web by analyzing it like you’re in a freshman literature seminar called “On Bullshit”? The book takes place in a barnyard. Charlotte is a spider. Her “female authorship” consists of weaving messages in her web that the rat finds in the dump on ad copy for detergent (“With new radiant action!”). If there’s anything that can be left out of the endlessly reflexive and paranoid critical world, this book should qualify.

 The Web is good just for its own sake, simple and pure, with an illogical and off-kilter sweetness that never gets cloying. Sure, it’s way more sophisticated than I remembered (I just reread it–thanks, library donors) and Wilbur the pig, like all the characters, is delightfully human (“One day just like another,” he groaned)–but really, who cares? I can hear some douchebag voice in my head saying, “Charlotte’s Web is a treatise on the power of words as well as a defense of the sociological predetermination of contemporary American gender relations” and it would be legitimately defensible in the aforesaid freshman seminar, but it would most importantly be a massive waste of time in comparison to just reading the book like a child would… just enjoying it.

The Little Nugget, by P.G. Wodehouse

I wish P.G. Wodehouse, born in 1881, had been born a hundred years later so that we could be best friends and go out drinking all the time. This man, the irrepressible English aristocrat who invented the character Jeeves, whose characters are named things like Oofy Prosser and Pongo Twistleton, and who wrote an entire book just to make fun of A.A. Milne (the creator of Winnie the Pooh) sounds like a good time. I can just picture him destroying his fraternity formals and reading that Foggy Monocle website on his iPhone all the time. In one of his books, he details the six major types of hangovers: The Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie. The Gremlin Boogie! It’s so funny because you know exactly what he’s talking about. May we all spend our holidays free of this affliction.

More genius generated in the nineteenth century:

“Insidious things (mint juleps). They creep up on you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the Judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court $50.”

“The barman recommended a ‘lightning whizzer’, an invention of his own. He said it was what rabbits trained on when they were matched against grizzly bears and there was only one instance on record of the bear having lasted three rounds.”

This stuff is perfect Peace Corps reading and luckily there are a bunch of Wodehouse books lying around in the volunteer collection. I recently read a book of his called The Little Nugget, this prewar boarding school farce about several people’s attempt to kidnap the this Dudley Dursley-type American schoolboy millionaire, whose idiotic doting mother calls him “The Little Nugget”—hilarious—and it distracted me so much that I was barely irritated by my taxi crossing the mountains at 20 km/hour. And although Wodehouse’s plots are formulaic in that they nearly always involve the same elements (country houses, rich relatives, secret agreements, kidnappings, disguises, a smartass butler type, comic romances, etc), his stories are usually intricate and fairly unpredictable. It’s light reading without being mindless, funny without a point. At the very least he’s a really unique writer whose particular thing will never be done better, so he’s worth a try for sure.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

I’m not sure if I have shared the degree to which I reread books. It’s embarrassing. I think I’ve read all the Harry Potters about, I don’t know, two hundred times. I think I’ve read The Namesake even more times than that. This is mainly due to the fact that I read obscenely and incorrectly fast and thus have somewhat of a need to reread things as well as a desire to—there are always details I missed the first time. Naturally, the books that I have reread the most are the ones whose details I have loved the most.

And no book’s details can compare to those in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I devoured this book the first time I read it. Telling the story of a poor Irish family in turn-of-the-century New York, it is plainly and wonderfully rich; published in the forties and written earlier than that, it’s demure and totally frank in that Cheaper by the Dozen, All-of-a-Kind Family way. I missed this book so much that I got my mother to send it to me in Kyrgyzstan, and it’s weirdly been a comfort. The main character Francie is an oldest child who loves to read, tries to write, and has to grow up to meet the circumstances of her life, and I might not have realized until typing that last sentence how much I used to identify with her as a kid. There’s just a lot of straightforward strength in the characters in this book, and I guess it makes sense that I still love it; I wrote my college thesis on contemporary immigrant literature and this book is just a decades-old version of that, with that good old whitewash factor that draws me to watch The Christmas Story for half a day every Christmas when it comes on TBS.

“She walked back home down Graham Avenue, the Ghetto street. She was excited by the filled pushcarts—each a little store in itself—the bargaining, emotional Jews and the peculiar smells of the neighborhood; baked stuffed fish, sour rye bread fresh from the oven, and something that smelled like honey boiling. She stared at the bearded men in their alpaca skull caps and silkolene coats and wondered what made their eyes so small and fierce. She looked into tiny hole-in-the-wall shops and smelled the dress fabrics arranged in disorder on the tables. She noticed the feather beds bellying out of windows, clothes of Oriental-bright colors drying on the fire-escapes and the half-naked children playing in the gutters.”

It’s just so nice to read! I really am not into “wholesome” as a value, but I really can’t think of a book that’s so rich as well as so purely, honestly wholesome. If you have by chance never read this book, I’d do it.

Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding

I read Bridget Jones’s Diary for the first time in middle school, and I didn’t really get the point. It was one of the first chick lit books I ever read–which is appropriate, because I think Bridget Jones was anyway one of the first and best examples of self-consciously written, brand-namey, contemporary chick lit. Although, not being much older than the book itself, I could be completely wrong. And I don’t count Candace Bushnell because I think she’s horrible.

Anyway, at the time I was just happy to find an easy book that mentioned skirts and sex and dinner parties and also made me laugh. I dismissed it as a little bit silly, because Bridget does run on endlessly about personal neuroses that as a seventh grader I had already moved securely past. Or thought I had.

 A few things caught my eye this time around. One, Bridget Jones has severely disordered eating. She weighs herself to the ounce and berates herself for each calorie every goddamn day. Sure, she overeats more often than not (reading the entry when she drank 32 smoothies in a day, I started really craving smoothies and got horribly distracted thinking about soy milk), and it’s funny at times–”Have reached point where believe nutritional ideal is to eat nothing at all and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy that they cannot stop themselves from ruining their diets”–and Helen Fielding is remarking upon a very common female problem. But I kept thinking, even with Mr. Darcy in the bag, her life is going to suck until she stops doing this. I counted calories for two weeks my third year of college and started feeling guilty for eating fruit. Fuck that! And on a similar note, after being reminded four times per page that Bridget weighs 125 pounds, I started to wonder why they made such a point to make Renee Zellweger chubby in the movie.

But then I realized–okay, Bridget is in her mid-thirties and berated on a daily basis for being chronically single. And as much as I am repulsed by the idea of being a jobless housewife whose only currencies of her own are gossip and breast milk, I don’t ever want to hear anyone say anything along the lines of “Jia hasn’t had a boyfriend since she was thirty-three.” Jesus, maybe I’d weigh myself every day too. Who knows? What I could not have seen in seventh grade was how flatly intelligent Helen Fielding was about the facts of living in a world where, when women can have it all, they are also relentlessly judged, most of all by themselves, if they don’t.

 However, the best parts of the book this time were these few sentences, hands down. At an installation at the Saatchi Gallery, a young hipster says, “It’s, like, a sullied Utopia with these really really really good echoes of, like, lost national identities.” Then at a book launch, when Bridget talks about how she likes Blind Date, Mark Darcy tells her she’s a “top postmodernist,” and his girlfriend gets hilariously jackass-y about the “arrogant individualism which imagines that each generation can somehow create the world afresh,” and then says, “I’m not talking about a ventilating deconstructionalistic freshness of vision, I’m talking about the ultimate vandalization of the cultural framework.”

What–that’s the funniest thing I’ve read in months. I thought about all the papers I wrote in college that sounded exactly like that and then I realized why Bridget Jones is brilliant. Enrich the mind all you wish, unpack your social structure and analyze it as best you can. But at the end of the day if you’re hungover and feeling gross and unloved, those are the facts of your life, and what else can you do but write about it and hope to move on tomorrow.

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.”

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I am a fairly unemotional person, but I place an enormous amount of importance in certain emotions, and I trace that back to two specific incidents: a dream about a bicycle I had when I was six, and New Year’s Eve of 1999, when I read this book for the first time. Basically, without The Little Prince, I would be even more of a biatch, and whenever I find myself getting too snarky about other books-that-change-people’s-lives, like The Alchemist, I remind myself that I have no room to talk because I can still be quickly brought to tears by a twee-ass storybook about love starring a pre-gender prince and a bunch of line drawings. When the opera version of this came to Houston, I sat in the front row and cried the whole way through. (But maybe that’s separate, because I really just want everything awesome to be turned into an opera. Imagine Legends of the Hidden Temple as an opera. Epic!)

The one bit of this book that everyone knows is the “On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux” line, which means–”It is only with the heart that you can see. The essential is invisible to the eyes.” This, despite the frequency with which it appears on Facebook, is an undeniable truth–applicable not just to sappy shit but really to everything that’s good in life. It’s what turns sheet music into Radiohead, a good-looking piece of pizza into the best bite of your life, a glance between two people into a rollicking good time.

But the fox part is what really kills me. I should have said this earlier: the plot of this book is about a little prince who lands in the desert on Earth. A bit outlandish, yes, but okay–he meets a cute little fox in a sand dune and tries to get the fox to come to him. The fox will not, because he’s not tamed. He explains this, saying, “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we will need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world.”

What I love about that is that it acknowledges the fact that we don’t inherently need one thing or another. We create the needs that we fill. When you find yourself needing something or someone, it would be stupid to forget that it once was a choice, a bargain of needs that you entered into voluntarily. But that doesn’t make the process less magical, it makes it more.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

Whenever people start on that whole “Do one thing and do it well” advice-rampage, I always get annoyed but then think about David Sedaris. Anyone who reads David Sedaris does not need to be reminded of the importance of doing one thing (humorous biographical essays) and doing it well. Or maybe just the importance of being the funniest writer alive. If only it was just a matter of telling people “Develop an incredible wit and learn to articulate your thoughts in such a way that if a girl is driving home from college listening to your latest book on audiotape, she will laugh so hard that steaming hot coffee will come out of her nose and she will almost drive into the median.”

Basically, I can’t imagine anyone not liking David Sedaris, but this book in particular is just incredibly likable and accessible, and if you haven’t read it you are denying yourself a good laugh.

Here is the part where a classroom of people learning French try to talk about Easter:

“It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of god who call his self Jesus and… oh shit.” She faltered and her fellow countryman came to her aid. “He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two… morsels of… lumber.” The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.
“He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”
“He weared of himself the long hair and after he die. The first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”
“He nice the Jesus.”
“He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.”

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

Obviously, this is the greatest. I’m going to bet that you’ve read it. Maybe you’ve read it but you don’t remember specifics–you remember the spiky-lined illustrations and something about kingdoms–but you remember an overwhelming feeling of delight while reading it. That’s what I thought! So read it again. Because this book is amazing. If I could get high and live in a book, I would certainly pick The Phantom Tollbooth.

Particular delights: when the enormous orchestra has to play color into the world, and when Chroma the conductor speeds up, the world starts melting and bleeding color as if it weren’t sure what day or season it was. And the Soundkeeper, who has a vault where every sound ever made in the world is categorized and cross-listed– and the sounds are physical, which blew my mind when I was little and still synesthetic (I am not anymore, sadly): Milo claps his hands and the air is filled with crisp sheets of paper.

And really, this book about learning, which is patently adorable. It’s about the wonder of being able to understand and live deliberately within your world. When Milo stops paying attention to the road and ends up in the Doldrums, when he gets overconfident and winds up jumping to the island of Conclusions, when he faces the many Demons of Ignorance, including the Senses Taker (zing!): these are incredible allegories that I wish would go ahead and replace Pilgrim’s Progress already. I would follow the Phantom Tollbooth religion, know what I mean? I am just waiting for Michel Gondry to get his hands on the rights to a movie version. It would be Where the Wild Things Are times amazing.

Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

There’s a thingy in the New Yorker this week about Laura Ingalls Wilder and how it’s possible that Rose, her crazy toothless libertarian daughter, might have been “the Ghost in the Little House” and changed her manuscripts, as certain drafts suggest blah blah blah. I usually love that kind of thing but I am bored by it in this case. Pa could have taken seven Apache wives and shot every politician on the prairie and I wouldn’t have noticed as long as Laura kept describing exactly how she made butter and hemmed muslin handkerchiefs. The Little House books are about nothing other than their mesmerizing, orgiastically simple descriptions of pioneer life. (To me, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the same way: I was way more interested in how Francie and her mom were going to make five meals out of an egg and a potato than in Tammany Hall or whatever else was going on.)

And Farmer Boy is the best! Because while Laura is forced to trouble herself about braiding hair and writing neatly and trying not to be jealous of Nellie Oleson’s new slate, Almanzo gets to do awesome shit all day long. He gets up at four to do chores; he comes in from the cold to a homemade feast of doughnuts, pie, sausage, and pancakes every morning. He goes to school and watches tough older boys beat up on each other and on the teacher. He comes home and milks the cows and lights the fire and whittles figurines and eats more ridiculous food. His parents go out of town and he eats all the sugar. He goes to the state fair. Every day seems like Christmas, except for actual Christmas, which is even more awesome.

Don’t you want to be Almanzo, with his pet baby calves Star and Bright?

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

Okay, don’t even start thinking about the movie here, or at least let it go at this: the movie is great, but this book is even better, even with the absence of Wallace Shawn. I swear. But yes, you probably know the story–the basic story. What the book will tell you are the tremendous back stories: the history of the succession of the Most Beautiful Woman in Florin title, the childhood of Fezzik the giant, the reason why Vizzini is such a nut job, the construction of Count Rugen’s Most-Dangerous-Game lair and the reason why the albino came to work there, everything. It is as pleasurable as the guiltiest pleasure, except there’s no reason to feel guilty because this book rocks.

Also, William Goldman tells you all book long that he’s abridging a longer piece by “S. Morgenstern,” a version that was meant to be a satire of European royalty–and he tells you what he’s cutting, and why, and how he came to do it, and what his wife has to say about it. But S. Morgenstern doesn’t exist, and neither does the “original” text (despite the fact that Goldman actually published a book under the name S. Morgenstern later: keep that joke going). This trick–claiming your book had existed previously–is as old as the hills, used by Umberto Eco, C.S. Lewis, Italo Calvino, Michael Crichton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Cervantes, et al. Loves it!