The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the 5th Gospel?
I don’t know why, but I read these books religiously in my early 20s. Over and over again. I even carried Miracle Man everywhere around with me like a Bible. I even wrote about it here.
The Bully, K.J. Kwon
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison -
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver -
Add to that Short Cuts, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Where I’m Calling From. Raymond Carver was my favorite writer in my early 20s, so much so I tried to emulate him in my own short stories (see post: “I Used to Write Fiction, Sorry”). Anyway, I couldn’t figure it out; there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the stories, the characters or their bizarre behavior, which sometimes bordered on the cruel, but I loved it.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman -
Red Company, Andy Monk
Junky, Rafi’s World, and anything by Charles Bukowski except the awful pulp fiction, is how I’ve always liked my fiction: hard and with teeth. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but most fiction like this tends to explore the darker side of masculinity (with Sentencing Silence, femininity). Bukowski was important to me in my 20s because of the misanthropy and general anger that I shared and didn’t want to hide and act like didn’t exist.
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay
I think I started with Mind is a Myth by Krishnamurti, but it doesn’t even matter. I found U.G. ironically while looking for the more popular Jiddu Krishnamurti (who U.G. called a phony baloney; interestingly both came from a Theosophical Society background (à la Madame Blavatsky)), a philosophy of complete and utter nonsense. Anyway, U.G. shook my foundation: he was the anti-guru, cantankerous and rude. People would come from miles around to visit him on his pillows in India and Switzerland just so that he could tell them to leave him the hell alone. Eckhart Tolle’s transformation, meanwhile, left him the complete opposite: almost dead at the microphone (in pure bliss). Both men transformed as a result of a singular question that swirled around and around and around until it ultimately exploded them. I was particularly struck by the clarity of A New Earth. The Alchemist is worthwhile allegorical fiction.
Black Girl in Paris, Shay Youngblood
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
The Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The War of the Roses, Warren Adler
Both of these novels are excellent. Roadman comes out of one of my favorite small independent presses: Fomite. Mary Waboss reminds me a lot of Ann Petry’s The Street, only The Street deals with the construct of blackness. But it’s the same nightmarish descent into the horrors of race and its constraints. Both Mary and Roadman deal with the topic of Native American identity and its dissolution amidst the encroachment of white society. Roadman is a sprawling, prosaic masterpiece.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
WE THE LIVING, THE FOUNTAINHEAD, ATLAS SHRUGGED, Ayn Rand -
I recommend Ayn Rand books and books like The Stranger, generally, because they are based on broader philosophies. (The Stranger: absurdism, and Ayn Rand: her own philosophy, objectivism) Rand particularly resonated with me during a time in my life when I was looking for something “other”, something beyond the status quo. Beyond that novelty, her fiction can get stale from the repetitiveness of the philosophy and so jamming characters into this narrow framework. Rand largely enjoyed a life with little freedom, so it’s understandable that she would develop a philosophy basically advocating total selfishness and man as God.
Seven Coins Drowning - Book 1: Uncle Willingston, Book 2: The Black Chili, Book 3: The Trove. And Screens, CHRISTOPHER LAINE -
Now, Screens is not, I don’t think, part of the Seven Coins Series, but I’d recommend reading it in chronology as a last book of the series, especially since it is connected, and a masterful spin-off of Frank Belknap Long’s 1929 story, “The Hounds of Tindalos”. I love this particular author because he has a very signature style, and I love this series for its blend of Sci fi, Legend and high Fantasy.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat -
ULTAN BANAN - The Book of God, Meat, Notes from a Cannibalist
Along with Angela Slatter, Graham Greene, Mark Hunter, James Baldwin, Barrie Darke, Chad Taylor, Zdravka Evtimova and Paul Jameson, Ultan Banan is one of my favorite (indie) authors. You can check out my interview with this author here.
The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett, R.M. Smith
Q. Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor by M.G. Haynes - Awesome historical fiction set in the Roman legion, and, perhaps, during the fall of the Roman Empire 😎
The Puppet’s Tattered Clothes, Alan Bray. See also: The Hour of Parade (available as a paperback on Amazon, but also here for free on the Internet Archive)
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque - from the laughable pandemonium of war in Catch-22, to the unreliable narrator of war in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien…All Quiet provided me with a perspective I never considered: the German one, the perspective of the supposed “enemy”. Indeed, war is hell for everyone.
Wicked by Gregory Maguire introduced me to the concept of building a story on an already untrue story (The Wizard of Oz). You can do that?! I thought. Piling a fiction on top of a fiction, then extracting from that original fiction an unsympathetic character (the wicked witch) and transforming them into a totally sympathetic character floored me. Biographical fiction for a character that never existed! And if you really want some spectacular biographical fiction, that’s actually more entertaining than the real person it’s based on, check out In Arthur’s Nature by JT Frederick.
Principles of Navigation by Lynn Sloan - this is a relationship book exquisitely written. It takes a desire, a want for something, and pushes it to the extreme of grotesqueness. When the desire for something is so intense it becomes a sort of third entity of destruction, of disgustingness. See also Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet.
Both of these novels—including Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt—are good examples of art vs my personal values. I am a Christian; I know homosexuality is wrong, but these are some of my favorite books that just so happen to have a theme of homosexuality. I’m not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg, but I realized a pattern of liking books with homosexual themes when homosexuality was placed in the context of wrongness or not being able to work for some reason. I read The Paying Guests some time ago before I came into God, but I remember liking it especially because the blurb at the back of the book didn’t mention homosexuality at all.
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser & The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
I’m not even sure I love either one of these books, but they both get fave points for shaving off about 7 years of my life, each, for being about a gazillion pages, each. Both are decidedly anti-hero. Tragedy reminds me a lot of Richard Wright’s Native Son, as car accidents you can’t quite look away from: the slow unraveling and almost painful to watch crash and burn of a protagonist who makes the wrong decision, and the noir aspect of moral ambiguity that makes the wrong decision seem almost sympathetic because of the harsh circumstances that rear the protagonist.
GRIND YOUR BONES TO DUST by Nicholas Day -
I don’t want to do this book injustice by calling it McCarthy-an because it’s A LOT more than that in many different respects; but the sprawling prosaic nature of it reminded me of Blood Meridian, as well as main character similarity to Meridian’s The Judge. There’s so much going on that even the flesh-eating donkeys seem to take a back seat. It seems like a collection of short stories but it’s really an interconnected novel. Religious and metaphysical to extremes of horror, and wholly genre elusive. And to dust man shall return! Get the paperback here!