Chandler Y13

If reading is a journey, it’s a weird one. You don’t remember where it started; you don’t know where it ends. No pandemic restrictions apply. There are the landmarks everybody knows and the used-to-be landmarks that English teachers know and the will-be landmarks that — unlike this metaphor — are going better places the longer they stand. You can appoint all sorts of people as your guides: librarians (trustworthy), friends (somewhat trustworthy), critics (somewhat less trustworthy), or, as long as you’re here, me. Reading is the thing that I do to make sense of the world; it’s also the thing I do even when I have other things to be doing, because I’m sure there are arguments in the world for why I shouldn’t be reading Mary Gaitskill when there are physics problems to be solved, but I can never quite seem to remember them.

So. In the hopes of encouraging you to ditch your responsible nature and hop on this journey with me — here are my five landmarks, the ground patted down a little for your viewing pleasure.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I would be a bad, bad person if, out of a clutch of novels containing both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I didn’t touch on at least one of them before I moved on to the others. E. M. Forster wrote that The Brothers Karamazov is a novel of vaults; I’m inclined to say you shouldn’t try and find the keys too soon. I think everybody who’s ever read Karamazov has their pet interpretation of it. A horrible father is murdered. One of his sons is said to have swung the paperweight. The eye of Russia is on the trial. What’s at stake here? Is it his honour? His family’s honour? His soul? Russia’s soul? 

Reading Karamazov is a bit like sitting in Bible Study with all of the vulgar, pious, snappish, randy, vengeful, and downright potty characters that Dostoevsky populates his novel with. It’s like making a mansion of new friends and then seeing them get sucked down a sudden drain that occurs in the floor — or up the kind of pipe used in Inside Out, if you like — on a journey of self-salvation, of damnation, of the kind of moral and intellectual racking that any good man living in a bad age would be a rat not to feel. I didn’t much like Karamazov the first time I read it. I think that was because it reminded me too much of all the life I wasn’t yet living. There are more famous works by Dostoevsky, and works that I think endear themselves more immediately to the reader. (Notes from a Dead House comes to mind.) But this is Dostoevsky at his best, and seeing as it’s a book that needs quite a bit of room on your nightstand to thrive, I suggest you make a start right away — the copy I used is available right here, if you like, and I’m fond of the illustration on the cover.

2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I’m not even going to advertise this one all that much. I can quote this passage to you verbatim, and I type it here now as it comes to me, in all the shivering, horrible magic it came to me then: “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

God, just God. Read it!

3. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

This is one of those strange tough gems that I am so illogically proud to have mined up on my own. I was just walking past shelves in this very library, browsing, and then this spine jumped out at me much like Brutus did concerning Julius Caesar on the 15th of March, –0044 — and the rest, as they say, is Roman history. I, Claudius is told from the perspective of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, the second-to-last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The story of his ascent is rife with mischief, intrigue, betrayal, passion, and straight-up delusions of immortality and wife-killing grandeur — but best of all, it’s completely hilarious. I’m not often drawn towards plotty books with several characters all named Claudius at once, but I, Claudius is, as the poet Catullus wrote, basia mille (a thousand kisses). I don’t want to say any more. If you don’t read anything else on this list, please read I, Claudius. Give it a chance for 50 pages. Paper has rarely been put to funnier use.

4. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

This essay — I feel a little gutted whenever I think about this essay. It’s that way Virginia Woolf has of talking to you, like she really is giving a lecture with angry professors hidden behind the curtains and waiting to jump out at the first mention of an offending word; it’s the people you meet along the way, the undergraduate oaring his boat through the reflections and Mary Seton fishing with her mind on its banks and Judith Shakespeare wilting into obscurity and Clarissa Dalloway, though she’s from another Woolf book entirely, walking down the street outside the window where the writer sets up a room of her own, past the omnibi and the royal car and thinking of cabbages and flowers and kissing girls and liking it. It’s also stunning, to run your eyes across the page and feel the spikes of Woolf’s wit and intellect and personality pressed up against you, to bleed a little on the beautiful flaws of it and feel by proxy what it is to be hysterically, unbearably alive. 

There are quite a few works by tortured women writers of fiction (which is the theme of Woolf’s lecture, incidentally) in this stash. I recommend this one as a starter.

5. The Glorious American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate

This book, if you do end up reading my copy, is a tad waterlogged. That’s because I was in the middle of reading David Foster Wallace’s “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” — him at his best, I think, never mind Infinite Jest, which I am shedding myself of also — when I put it on my nightstand, put my glass of water on top of it, and then fell asleep as the glass of water started slowly to cease being a glass of water and became more just a glass with the water all over the pages of the venerable book it had been set on top of. There are good essays here, though I don’t always think Lopate took the best: Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger” hasn’t been included, though another of hers has, and I’ve never been very fond of Henry James. Joan Didion, my personal Beatle, gets an entry; so does Jonathan Edwards, who’ll show you that they just don’t make sermons of fire and brimstone like they used to anymore. I’m not a big fan of essay collections — love you, Ed Yong, but just, no — but this one is one of the better ones I’ve read. Check out Cynthia Ozick. Check out Poe on furniture. Once you get past the starchy patriotism of the cover (decked out in red, blue, and white flags, of course), you’ll be in some glorious hands with this one.

And that’s it! Last words of advice as I punch your ticket, position you subtly away from the toilet at the end of the carriage? Give books some room to make their case, and if they fail to entice after that, ditch them — but don’t be afraid to return to something that didn’t make sense to you some years ago. Because books aren’t like people. They give you all of themselves from the very start. They’ve done their part in the relationship simply by virtue of existing, and daunting as it is, it’s up to us to bring the other half. Have fun with it — and please do write to tell me if you do!