pedestrian saga

Ah, there you are, baby boy.

New mama’s got a son in her eye
No clouds are in my changing sky
Each morning when I get up to rise
I’m livin’ in a dreamland

(Stills/Young)

Congratulations, Em and M!

Put the blame on meme: “Don’t take too long to think about it. [Yeah, right.] Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you, for whatever reasons. This isn’t your top 15 canon or even books you’d necessarily recommend, just books that have made their mark on you. First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. [Ha!] Tag some friends, including me.” All right, RFM.

Equipped with lousy reading recall, I might not handle an intelligent conversation on the content of these books. But most of them stick with me for secondary reasons, remembered for the context and environment in which they were read, or the intense emotional response they elicited. With the exception of Misery, I would drop everything to relive any of them. So, 15-ish, roughly in order read (titles linked to LibraryThing):

1. Hop on Pop and Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss: Ah, reading as a contact sport or dramatic recitation.
2. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien: Fell a little in love with Justin, was inconsolable for days after finishing it. Repeatedly.
3. Misery, by Stephen King: Cheap creeps relished around age 13 while the family van wound through the Colorado Rockies.
4. Black Boy, by Richard Wright: First half was assigned reading in junior English, but I couldn’t put it down, ignored my teacher during class to read ahead through the second half, and obsessed on RW a good while.
5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson: Funny, angry, and insane, it channeled lots o’ fantastical high school angst.
6. Mildred Pierce, by James M. Cain: First brush with L.A. lit, an affair to remember.
7. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor: Uh, wow.
8. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver): Earnest, naive undergraduate discovers metafiction on a hot summer night.
9. A Concise Introduction to Syntactic Theory: The Government-Binding Approach, by Elizabeth Cowper: Favorite textbook ever! Generous portions of technical whup-ass served with creamy saccharine vending machine coffee in the charmingly stale Ballantine Hall student lounge.
10. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests), by Italo Calvino: First novel I read from cover to cover, painstakingly, in the original Italian. By the window overlooking Via Dal Lino.


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11. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, and Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut: Beloved absurdist WWII satires of the hyphens and numbers! To crack either book is to risk hyperventilation.
12. Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities), by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver): The only academic paper I’ve really been proud of I wrote on this book. Spent a LOT of time with it. In grungy cafés along Bancroft Way.
13. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner: Wherein lieth the revelation that nonfiction about land development and water policy can be totally thrilling.
14. The Ticket Out, by Helen Knode: Perfect noir for a particular rut, living and loving and dying between Culver City and Los Feliz.
15. The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West: Cockfights, midgets, degenerates, Los Angeles aflame…dig that scene!

Your 15? And maybe I’ll pick on some FB peeps.