I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me.

And that’s why the last book I loved was The Cow, a book of poetry by Ariana Reines. I loved how strongly the poems seem to run in the opposite direction of what we’re told is “good writing,” and good being-an-adult, for that matter. In an article she wrote about her book, Reines said that she wanted to “write poems that an educated person would feel embarrassed to read, poems that sound like Goth girls with feelings.” I think that’s kind of an awesome idea. There’s this opposing idea right now (or maybe always), that the sorts of emotions felt by teenage girls are not real emotions. They don’t count. In fact, we discount many expressions of emotion, ones that seem too strong, or too messy, or too lurid and cliché. If somebody writes about emotions in that way, we say it is bad writing. We cringe, we are embarrassed, we turn away from it. But why should we?

What’s so great about The Cow is that it is full of shit. Literally. It is full of grotesque, messy physical descriptions of the slaughtering of cows. It is also full of grotesque, messy descriptions of human bodies, and of human emotions. And it’s also beautifully and lyrically written. There’s a line in the poem “Rendered” that says, “Where is a living thing not itself. Is her shit any less her?” And guess what: women shit, and they sweat, and they smell bad, and they have emotions that are messy and uncomfortable. I know that’s part of being me. It’s part of what living is.

And here’s the thing: it’s ok for men to be physically gross. They can fart and they can be fat and hairy and it’s okay. Right now it’s not okay for women to do and be those things, but I think it could become okay. That’s because almost anything that is typically seen as masculine can be accepted and thought of as the correct mode for all people. It’s not the same for feminine things. I think we’re still a long way from accepting the messy, gross emotions that people have. And that’s because emotions belong to teenage girls. They’re feminine. They’re weak. We distrust them.

This probably matters to me so much right now because I’m struggling to become a writer myself, and to understand what that means, and how I should do it. And at the same time, I’m in a new city struggling with making new friends and learning how to get close to people all over again. I feel a little bit like my experience is negated by the vast pantheon of serious male authors whose works I’m making my way through. I’ve read a lot of current literature, and I like a lot of it, too. There are just some parts of myself that I don’t see there.

But in The Cow Reines pulls all of these rejected things back into the picture. We have to wallow in shit and wallow in feelings. It’s a gorgeous, sensual experience, meaning that you feel the poems in your body. Your senses are engaged. But it’s not pretty, and it’s not delicate. It’s feminine in a different way, in a dirty, honest way. It makes me want to make a new best friend. Somebody who can talk shit with me. Somebody I can show my vulnerable underbelly to, and maybe they’ll show me theirs back.

Related Posts:

• Liz Axelrod: The Last Book (of Poems) I Loved, Coeur de Lion
• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It

Sacred moments like these deserve recognition. And since there is less time with every passing moment to fill the gaps in my reading, I’ve made it a point to choose with great care what to read. This selection process, increasing in importance since marriage, and still more necessary with a daughter due in a few months, has become an official holiday for me: New Book Day. (Superior, more clever title pending.)

With a stack of books in my arms, I search around the house for my wife: she is at the computer reading the news, or brushing her hair over the sink, or buttering a slice of toast in the kitchen. I ask her if she knows what day it is. At first, she would rack her brain, trying to figure out if she forgot a birthday or an event from our courtship marked for remembrance. But by now, she knows; she rolls her eyes and exclaims, “New Book Day!” with all the mock enthusiasm she can muster. She’s not as much of a reader as I am, but I don’t hold it against her. After all, reading is just one way to get your kicks, to live a full life, to suck the marrow of human experience.

The New Book Day ceremony takes place as soon after finishing the last book as possible, and proceeds as follows:

1. Pour a tall glass of wine (either white, very cold and very dry, or a mellow red) or water or hot tea or coffee and proceed to where your books are located.
2. Grab 5, 6, 10, 15, 27, however many (unread) titles off your shelves or off the pile of books in the corner of your living room as you feel you might want to devote yourself to.
3. Read a bit of each until you find the one you cannot put down.
4. Retreat to your reading spot and read, remembering at all times that the thing you hold in your hands is a great gift: you are Prometheus, and you are about to discover a beautiful fire that will make your heart more full (or less empty, depending on your perspective) than it already is, than you ever thought, hoped, dreamed it could be.

For step #2, I usually have some vague expectation of what I will get out of each book; usually, as in the cases of Ulysses and War and Peace, these expectations turn out to be, in retrospect, completely incorrect, naïve and even a bit arrogant. But it is a literary diet that I am constructing, and I try to find a book that I believe will give me what I need at that given moment of my life. (Wouldn’t it be nice to know, without a doubt, what one really needs, at least once?)

I keep track of the date on which I finish each book; or, as it were, the date of each New Book Day. Looking through the reading list for 2011, I try to spot the book whose Page 1 sparked the most excitement. On the 21^st of July, I finished Volume III of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That night (my wife and I were living as expats in Buenos Aires then) I started Ulysses.

I’d passed over James Joyce’s infamous masterpiece on many a New Book Day, intimidated no doubt by the book’s reputation. Many people read (the many) essays written about Ulysses before reading the actual book; I am certain that many people also never read it from beginning to end. Maybe it’s because Joyce veterans instruct newbies to start with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners. For a while I figured this would be the prudent course of action, but soon I got to thinking it was probably just procrastination, avoiding the inevitability of failing to understand this monster of 20^th century art. But that night, reading the first sentence (“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed” – just typing that quotation gets me giddy, tickles the laughing muscles of my face) for probably the fiftieth time, I knew I would never be prepared for my first reading of Ulysses.

I dove right in that night, stayed up way too late considering I had to wake up for work early the following morning, but I felt such a thrill speeding through that first chapter, and then I got to the second chapter, where Stephen Dedalus declares that God is “a shout in the street,” and I had to stop and digest what I’d read. Joyce, as master stylist, blew me away. I laughed at lines he might have meant for me to laugh at, I laughed in amazement at points, thinking, Wow, this is really good. All the while, things flew over my head, but I loved every word, known or unknown (my vocabulary probably expanded by a good 5% in those two weeks), because my heart understood then how lucky we are as sentient, soul-possessing creatures to be able to communicate in this profound manner with people we will never physically meet, the majority of them gone from the world, as I and everyone else will be some day.

I saved the final section, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, for a bus ride home from the office one night. Internally I prayed for traffic to be slow so I would have ample time to finish the chapter in one sitting, without interruption. Luckily, there is always traffic in Buenos Aires at six in the evening. I reached the “…yes I said yes I will Yes,” with a lump in my throat, heart throbbing, and her last “Yes” remains the only word that my mind can find to describe what Ulysses made me feel for three weeks, that still permeates tiny moments of my everyday life. In this sense, a great work of art is like a second soul that attaches itself to you as you engage mentally and spiritually with the work, and which, by the end, has detached a piece of itself to leave as a gift, especially for you.

I love books; I love literature; I love that stories are concomitantly made up and truer (when they are pulled off perfectly) than anything that has ever happened. And aside from the individual love between a reader and a certain book–which by psychic extension is love between a writer and each of his readers–I find, residing at the core of any “good” work of art, the larger, unconditional love of humanity for humanity, and for all that the universe entails. And it is love, because if there were no love to begin with, there’d be no art. And yet, look at all the books.

Shouldn’t we celebrate every occasion on which we decide to discover that again?

Related Posts:

• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It
• Matthew Specktor: The Last Book I Loved, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond

For an Irish person, that’s a weighty question to consider. I guess that in some other incarnation of myself I might have found the glistening cobblestones of Montmartre immeasurably romantic but with my fiancé away on tour and being (scarcely) self-employed, the dampness weighed down heavily on my mood, pushing me into a period of semi-hibernation.

I had left Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch languishing under my bed for months, put off by the pretentious mouthful of a title and with the vague plan of cracking one of the Tropics first. With little to do and no one to do it with, I finally picked up Henry Miller’s memoir in the hope of enjoying some climate porn and being transported to a better writer’s vision of Eden. Although there was plenty in there to satisfy my climate-related needs, the book was surprisingly, given Miller’s reputation, low on any other form of titillation. Big Sur, it seems, was a prelapsarian Eden, a place where Miller thrived on modest pleasures and the fruits of aestheticism.

The thing about Paris was that I never felt that it could be my city. I could reside there for long stretches, eke out a place for myself in some pocket community of misfit expatriates and Anglophile Parisians, but Paris would always belong to the movies, to Garance Doré, and well, to Parisians. The tricky little fact about home, I learned from Big Sur, is that it’s a psychological space. Miller didn’t occupy Big Sur so much as it occupied him, shaping his beliefs and shifting his priorities until he became as much a part of the place as the craggy cliffs and crashing waves. For Miller, making a home in Big Sur meant letting nature dictate his way of life, cultivating an interdependent relationship with the community and terrain, and fostering a profound sense of gratitude.

Like the untamed paradise he describes, Miller tends to be a rambling storyteller, skipping from one anecdote to the next, cross-referencing and diverging. And yet, the seemingly unconnected threads, woven together only by the writer’s determination to set them down on paper, are thoroughly deliberate and methodical according to their own particular logic. In the first pages, Miller lays down the topography and chronology of the memoir to dispense with these particulars early on. However, that doesn’t prevent him from leaping across the globe and back in time to his life in France or his childhood in Brooklyn.

The point is that he wants to tell us that he lived. The act of storytelling affirms his existence. And if time and experience can’t be examined linearly, then how could an account of them ever be linear? And so he whisks his captive reader through time and space and pins you down on his couch to listen to him ruminating for pages, divulging theories that only matter because he thought them and his thinking them make them forever a part of the history not only of Henry Miller, but of Big Sur, too.

Being alone in Paris last fall I would often think about how I might tell the story of my day if I ran into someone I knew or spoke to my fiancé on the phone. At intervals I would mentally recap what I had done, honing in on details that might seem interesting or important to someone else or myself at a later date. The worst days were those when I didn’t speak to anyone apart from the boulangère or supermarket clerk. I often wondered, did I live today if I have no one to tell it to?

I once read that the qualities that people find most attractive in their spouse are also the ones that eventually cause them to fall out of love. Henry Miller at his best is the kind of guy who loves the sound of his own voice, an armchair anthropologist who believes wholeheartedly in the greatness of his own opinions and thank goodness for that because I love to listen. Henry Miller at his worst will go off on a misguided exoticizing rant about the virtues of Mexican laborers or Japanese women. And then there’s his misogyny. There is something—a combination of schadenfreude and the self-loathing feminist in me, perhaps—that made these lapses almost relieving in an otherwise insightful and philosophical tome.

Although the titular oranges of Hieronymus Bosch don’t occupy much space in the book, Miller’s fascination with them is key to understanding the purpose of the memoir. It tells of the pleasure he takes in an aesthetic brimming with life and intricacy and yet so perfectly simple. Bosch’s oranges aren’t real; they’re representations that come to surpass the real thing. Not natural themselves but spiritual representations of natural artifacts. Similarly, Big Sur isn’t a spontaneous document of people and places; it’s a work of art that interprets the experience, and no doubt better than the real thing.

At the book’s very rose-tinted closure my lingering question was well, why would he ever leave? Miller did eventually leave Big Sur, as I did Paris, despite the romanticism of living as a starving artist halfway up the hill of Montmartre. Perhaps this paradise he sought to immortalize was lost by the time he knew enough to capture it. Maybe to eulogize an experience is to kill it. Or maybe the romance of a time and place can only exist in the aestheticized telling of it just as the better versions of ourselves are only ever fantasies.

Related Posts:

• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It
• Matthew Specktor: The Last Book I Loved, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond

Every aspect of the narrative, every description, serves a purpose further in the novel. Whether it is seeds or the color of the flowers or the dust that rises or “ancient mounds, perforated humps of hardened soil that water cannot melt,” which gives way to “the mud, dead, dried, red.” Vera connects the reader to the land and its people through these vivid descriptions, drawing them under the thatched roofs, into the smells and society of a land at war, yet teaming with the mundane and ordinary tasks of many.

Directly before and after the life changing events thrust upon the sisters, Vera connects the before and the after by using nature. At the end of Chapter 4, “a breeze stirs the air. The women love this shade as cool as water could be,” and at the beginning of Chapter 16, after the brutality has passed, we return to “the marula fruit…she inhales the tranquil and intoxicating smell of this tree…the shade of the mphafa tree where Nonceba sits is a refreshing island of cool air.” There are multiple examples of how the story folds back on itself, drawing the strings tighter, connecting the reader from one point to the next. Yet this time, she begins expanding the novel’s scope once more.

It is not as though time flows backwards, but it is as though the bus we took into Kezi is now returning to Bulawayo. The loving and carefree Thenjiwe is dead. Her anonymous lover has been named–Cephas Dube. The Thandabantu has been burned, its owner murdered, and we return with Nonceba and Cephas to the streets of Bulawayo, from the quiet, stony countryside to the din of the city, and the spiral widens.

Although lyrical, the writing is also abstract. It is not only about the two sisters, the two towns, the people, it also about the land, and how it remains, how the flowers still bloom, even following adversity, like the sister Nonceba. It is as though the sisters are Zimbabwe. On one hand, murdered, mutilated, the blood red of the hibiscus, like blood running in the streets. Yet, there is life, there is renewal, there is sunshine and daisies, and as the last word of the novel states–deliverance.

I believe in order to catch the full fragrance of this novel, it would have to be read again and again. It would have to be contemplated sentence by sentence. One would have to imagine the exact sweetness of the seed of the Mazhanje, the smell of the marula, the feel of the stones beneath our hands, a lover who claims, “When I am not touching you, I am nothing,” the sharp steel of the flashing razor cutting our lips from our faces, to “know every grasshopper and every blade of grass of Kezi…” To know all of these things, to integrate them into our senses without having traveled the dusty road from Bulawayo to Kezi, would be to understand that “time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity; an eternity can exist without human presence.” And so shall the land remain.

Related Posts:

• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It
• Matthew Specktor: The Last Book I Loved, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond

The All of It, by Jeannette Haien, does exactly this, which accounts for part of its beauty. The rest of its beauty lies in the incredibly authentic tone, descriptions, and most of all dialogue, which together paint a vivid picture of the bucolic, coastal Irish town of Roonatellin and some of its very ordinary residents.

This slim 145-page book starts off with the death of a major character, Kevin Dennehy. His wife, Enda Dennehy, has called upon the town’s priest and longtime acquaintance, Father Declan de Loughry, to deliver the last sacrament during Kevin’s final moments. The rest of the book focuses on the days that follow Kevin’s death where Enda draws Father into her telling of the true story behind herself and Kevin before their arrival in Roonatellin almost five decades ago. Early into the telling Enda reveals a very unsettling secret that bowls over the Father and the reader. The Father is pulled out of his comfort zone and put into a quandary of whether to fulfill his role as a priest, standing a step above complex human relationships, and his desire to be a friend, risking getting swept up in Enda’s circumstances and blurring the lines of priestly propriety.

The dialogue between Enda and Father is riveting, not because of the content so much as Haien’s ear for the conventions of Irish speech. Having never been to Ireland, I still felt like I had traveled there. But instead of visiting the typical tourist destinations, I had been given special access to Roonatellin, this small coastal town outside of the global glare, where time has not stood still but definitely moves more slowly. I was introduced to characters who remain committed to the old way of life. I felt like I had pulled up a stool by the fire and was listening in on Enda, who, after a lifetime, was finally revealing to another soul “the all of it,” her true life story. I would say that two-thirds of the book is exactly that, Enda telling Father her story, so this book is particularly enjoyable to those who love beautiful dialogue or love when a character plays the role of storyteller.

This book is so artful in its counterbalance. It offers up a jarring, hard-to-accept event but counterbalances this with poignant descriptions of affable, admirable, ordinary people. Similarly, while so much of the book is dedicated to Enda’s storytelling, which takes place in her cottage, much of the remainder of the book focuses on the natural beauty of Roonatellin, most of all its rivers, where Father and other town residents spend hours fly fishing.

I was gifted The All Of It by the writer, Simon Van Booy, whom I hold in high esteem. Having read both his short story collections, The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins In Winter, I think he is so masterful at crafting the most exquisite short stories, where the characters, settings, plots and the prose all vie constantly for your attention. I’m thankful to him for introducing me to this slice of a novel. Its faithful characters and dialogue manage to ground you in its story even as you are reeling from its most sensational element. I feel initiated into a literary club of sorts because in the new edition of the book, Ann Patchett writes the introduction. In it, Patchett reveals that she had never heard of The All Of It or its author, Jeannette Haien, but was given it as a gift by Maile Meloy, a fellow writer who thrust it into her hands in a secondhand bookstore. And she fell in love with it. I’m not surprised because Ann Patchett herself, in Bel Canto, wrote about the human-scale stories that lie behind shockingly epic events such as a paramilitary coup at an embassy in South America.

So, as a newly inducted member into this club, I feel compelled to let people know about this gem of a book. It transports you across oceans and time and into the lives of a few ordinary people living in a picturesque Irish town whose beauty belies the grim and extraordinary circumstances they’re trying to cope with. But I also feel the need to actually press my copy of the book into a fellow writer’s hands, exclaiming, “you must read this.” But I have to confess, I’m not quite ready to part with it yet—perhaps after one more reading.

Related Posts:

• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Matthew Specktor: The Last Book I Loved, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond

Nowhere fancy: I was in Asheville, North Carolina, facing nothing more uncomfortable than bugs and frogs and humidity, the steady chatter of fat people plunking themselves into the swimming pool outside. This luxe southern summer was a weird backdrop for Denis Johnson’s gnarly accounts of Africa and Idaho, but the book had fallen into my hand unwittingly, while I was scrambling out the door and looking for something to read on the plane. I lashed out at the shelf while the cab started honking, and Seek was what I came away with.

Seek. The title implies worlds of volition, but is there a less volitional writer alive than Denis Johnson? Windblown, drug-addled (whether actually so or more historically, within the provinces of his fiction, at least), prone to peopling his stories with coasting fuck-ups. Most of the people in Johnson’s work don’t seem to have much idea how they got there, whether “there” is a hospital or a Holiday Inn or a cell on death row. They don’t “seek” much. But boy do they ever find.

I love Johnson, sometimes. I love Angels, and about two-thirds of Jesus’ Son (the book as a totality, sure, but some of the individual stories are, in fact, weak), Resuscitation of A Hanged Man (because how could you not love a book that includes the sentence, “And on his ass the sad assassin sat”?) These are great books, but Johnson has certainly written some indifferent ones. Tree of Smoke seems to me pretty erratic, and The Name of The World strikes me as being outright bad. Then again, I like writers who are sometimes bad, and at the very least mistrust those who never are. It usually means they aren’t trying hard enough. Give me Philip Roth (intermittently quite lousy) over William Trevor any day of the week.

Seek is bookended with essays on Liberia. The first, “The Civil War in Hell,” describes Johnson’s presence in Monrovia in 1990, shortly after Prince Johnson’s forces had captured the president and sawn off his ears. The second, “The Small Boys Unit,” is some sort of minor masterpiece, a Heart of Darkness-like account of Johnson’s flailing attempts to profile Charles Taylor for the New Yorker in 1992. In between, there are accounts of visits to Christian biker rallies, Afghanistan, Somalia, Mormon compounds…in short, just about every place a sensible person (although, of course, Johnson is anything but “a sensible person”) would choose to avoid. If what you’re seeking is to be found in those places, it might be best to change your aims, anyway.

Except that’s the point. No one, I think, captures better certain kinds of ecstasy, a spastic transcendence, better than Johnson, and no one better describes the worlds we’d rather not be living in. Jesus’ Son has been talked to death, but I think Angels is arguably the better book. Beginning in a bus station and ending on death row, with a long stretch in the desert in between, Angels amounts to a guided tour of the most forsaken places on earth. (Where else does Johnson stage his fiction? ERs, abortion clinics…) Seek is the same. Conscientiously so, and with a more knowing—at least, more intentional—awareness of itself as such.

I found myself thinking, in my thoroughly stupid perambulations with the book (lugging a suitcase across a Ramada Inn parking lot, haggling with people at the Delta ticket counter), that just about everywhere is worth avoiding, that even the earth’s green places house more than their share of misery and boredom. Which is why Johnson’s book is thrilling. Not because it offers views of things us pampered first-worlders know not quite enough about (though it does, of course), but because, too, those views are so personal. Johnson’s haplessness, his strange—and most likely exaggerated—incompetence keeps clouding the frame. (Indeed, if he were this incompetent, he’d almost assuredly be dead, a fact of which he’s savvy enough to remind us.) “Friends who know me to be of weak character might be interested to learn I was once nearly saved from it,” a seemingly feather-light essay about Johnson’s childhood tenure in the Boy Scouts begins. That “weak character” is belied everywhere in the book, perhaps even by the things that also support it: by the steely hogging of psychedelics (“I said I’d split it, but I only gave him about a quarter. Less than a quarter. Yeah, I never quite became a hippie. And I’ll never stop being a junkie.”), in “Hippies,” and by Johnson’s fumbling-yet-persistent effort to bail out an arrested Nigerian student in “The Small Boys Unit.” His character gets in the way, but it’s the book’s real subject.

“My parents raised me to love all the earth’s peoples. Three days in this zone and I could only just manage to hold myself back from screaming N****rs! N****rs! N****rs! until one of these young men emptied a whole clip into me.”

I try to imagine what The New Yorker’s editors would’ve done with such a passage, had Johnson not opted instead to keep their expense money and never deliver his promised piece at all.

I’d describe Seek as “maddeningly erratic,” but it’s just this bifucation that kicks my ass: Johnson’s bravery and his cowardice, his clowning and, in something more slight like “The Lowest Bar in Montana,” his flat-footed efforts to please. His greatness comes from contradictions that can’t cancel one another out. He’s a hippie, sure, but there are right wing undertones all over. (Undertones? Heck, “The Militia in Me” and “Run, Rudolph, Run,” about abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, suggest more robust sympathies.) It’s the chaos of his character, which is just about the only place anything interesting ever gets found, that makes this book happen. And by the time we get to “The Small Boys Unit,” and Johnson—arrested at the Ivory Coast’s border—collides with a wayward American missionary whose kindness seems purely pro forma, we understand what it is to be lost.

Green lizards crawled all over our feet while he prayed. Red-headed lizards ran by on two legs like Martians excited to be landed on our world. I wept, I snuffled. I was right to call myself confused.

Johnson’s Africa, even exoticized beyond its usual terrestrial limits, seems closer to a Delta Airlines ticket counter than to anything we can’t understand. It also seems non-navigable, impossible, and frightening beyond belief, even as the human faces he encounters there (a host of preposterous-seeming guides: Winston Holder, Lincoln Smythe, the indelible Augustus Shaacks…but also the velour-clad Charles Taylor) shine benignly. Such is hell, though, and such is the human scene. Such are the things we go looking for. They’re those very ones we can never leave behind.

Related Posts:

• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It

“I’ve already read it,” I said.

I put it back on the shelf, and we left. My wife likes the novels of Ann Patchett and Joan Silber. According to her, I only like boring books, like the work of middle-aged white men like Jim Harrison or Frank O’Hara. Or Dostoyevsky. Part of marriage is trying to continually surprise your partner, so I tried to forget about the Dostoyevsky. Half an hour later, however, while my wife sat with a bowl of noodles, I ran back down the street and found The Brothers Karamazov where I’d hidden it behind a paperback of The Federalist Papers. I paid my 60 R.M.B. and I carried it against my chest, like a baby, back to the restaurant. “I love this book,” I said.

When I was twenty-three, I loved Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. That entire summer, I would open my copy after dinner and find a passage that related to an event that day. It was like my Bible. But now, at forty-three, I find that nothing is more true than the melodramatic, quasi-hysterical, murder mystery of The Brothers Karamazov.

For most of my life, I had avoided The Brothers Karamazov because I was afraid it would somehow encourage all my neuroses. It seemed obvious that reading Dostoyevsky hadn’t made Woody Allen any happier. Henry Miller and Anais Nin seemed to idolize Dostoyevsky while they were emotionally self-immolating. But then, at just the right moment–right before moving to China with my wife and little boy–I read The Brothers Karamazov. It was like making a basket at the buzzer. It was just what I needed, exactly when I needed it.

I’m half-Chinese, half-Hoosier. The summer I read On the Road I was living in Africa, exploring the world like I thought Kerouac would have. I was in the Peace Corps, but with a teacher’s strike and a long summer, it seemed like I was spending a lot of time riding on the back of trucks watching the rain forest snap past my head.

I was in love with an American girl who was back in the States living with a law student. I was in love with a Gabonese girl who washed her clothes in the river and covered her face with mud when her grandfather died. I had always been book-smart, not much for dirty hands, but that summer a friend and I got a grant and hand-built a six-sink concrete washhouse so a neighborhood could do their laundry without walking to the river. The mayor reneged on connecting it to the water supply and eventually someone stole all the pipe out of it, but I had many great afternoons working on it. A teenage boy who had worked beside me all summer was thrown from a truck and killed while I was riding a train in Mali. His father held my hand and showed me the grave in the rain. I exchanged long glances with a crippled girl, but when she finally came to my house, she admitted she was only fifteen and I felt how impossible everything was. I was friends with a Nigerian taxi driver who apparently had almost as many kids as I had students, but they were all back in his home country. My French friend started an affair with the Cameroonian mother of one of his students. Her French husband was not amused and later drove his Land Rover into the side of my friend’s jeep.

That year I was as much an Alyosha as I am ever going to be. That year I listened to everyone. I wanted to look every single person I met in the eyes and hear his or her story. I was incapable of judging people with any meaningful consequence. Intruders broke into a friend’s house, cutting his fence and pulling the bars off his windows. They piled everything in his house onto the center of his bed, then tied the sheets and stole it all. They stole the payroll for his woodshop by dragging the safe out to a truck and driving off. A couple weeks later, my friend and I were sitting in a neighborhood bar and a stranger walked in wearing one of my friend’s T-shirts. We jumped to our feet but, in the end, we let him walk away. Nothing seemed worth fighting over.

But then I got married and divorced. I stopped being so happy and curious. I spent a year in Paris staring at the sidewalk beneath my fifth floor window. I read Big Sur and Desolation Angels, but I wasn’t an alcoholic and my sadness was not quite the same. I wound up working for ten years in the American prison system. I met a lot of unhappy people. Kerouac was 35 when On the Road was published. I met a lot of people older than 35. I discovered that Dostoyevsky had himself spent four years in prison, that all his great books were written afterward. The year I left the prison system, I read The Brothers Karamazov.

I read it like the only child I was. No brothers. I saw myself on every page. I knew what it was like to talk earnestly with other people’s children the way Alyosha did. In Paris, I had wandered feverish like Ivan in the cold night. I, too, sweat with my forehead against the cold window of my room and hissed that I had no use for any God who did such terrible things. I loved Dmitri and the scenes of doomed pursuit when he loses money in the snow and all the spilled champagne turns into mud. I thought of the year in Paris I’d spent trying to win my first wife back. I hadn’t run away from women the way Kerouac had. I had chased them foolishly, stubbornly, madly, and ruined everything, like Dimitri. I felt that I had forfeited a happiness I had always expected to inherit. I didn’t believe in God and I found the Grand Inquisitor chapter completely unconvincing. And yet, like Alyosha, I felt it all seemed mysterious and wonderful and worth living.

My second wife had been hurt by her first husband and I swore to protect her, but then we were unable to have a child and I felt like a failure in every way. She retreated into unhappiness as I watched. I wanted desperately to be a father and this desire was without echoes in my Kerouac. I still loved the world, but it was no longer the love of a young man who had just left a monastery or a mill town–or, in my case, the cornfields of the Midwest. It was the love of a man who had spent years in a prison locked up with unhappy people and watching the open horizon from a distance–the love of Dostoyevsky, in fact.

The fact that the book ends with such life-affirming power–that the book makes me glad to be alive despite the fact that we are bound by “lacerations,” despite the fact that innocent children die, despite the fact that I find the eldest Karamazov (the father) completely believable. This book makes me happy to be a man full of crowded thoughts. I’m glad I didn’t discover this book when I was too young to accept that Father Zossima’s body would rot. Of course it would rot! I’m glad I didn’t read it at twenty when I would have innocently and timidly been confused in the lines of guilt that fall around Dmitri. Now it makes perfect sense to me that Dmitri is guilty and innocent at the same time. I understand now that the boy who throws rocks at Alyosha can become his friend. My wife and I adopted a little boy from Ethiopia. He has been a great joy for us, but all that joy begins with the tragedy of his birth parents. Everything in our lives is a mixture of bright and dark. I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a good father. Of course I love this book.

My wife and boy and I moved to China because we were starting everything again. What did I need from the old world? Nothing.

Nothing? That’s what I thought until we got here. And then I wanted to Skype with my mother and father. And buy a new copy of The Brothers Karamazov.

Related Posts:

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• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It

I love that Alice Munro doesn’t try to forget or ignore fashions: the “contemporary” Post and Beam house that Brendan is so proud of in “Post and Beam” or the purple eye shadow and Cleopatra eyeliner and bangle bracelets in “Queenie.” Through these outdated fashions, I’m reminded how people’s attempts to declare themselves by their style is frustrated, as their declaration inevitably takes the form of its era.

On a similar note, I’m grateful for the way Munro describes people’s flawed attempts to change their lives. I saw this most in “Nettles,” in which the unnamed narrator is recently divorced, and making a new life for herself in Toronto. This life is supposed to be one “freed from domesticity,” “lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame.” But the narrator is overly aware of the new outward forms her life takes (the morning rolls from the Italian deli, the afternoons drinking wine with women friends, the evenings with her lover), and seems to hope that her consciousness might match this show of independence.

The narrator leaves Toronto for the weekend to visit an old friend. In the car on the way to Sunny’s house, she is hurt that Sunny hasn’t yet asked about her new life. But then she admits: “I would have told her lies, anyway, or half-lies. It was hard to make the break but it had to be done. I miss the children terribly but there is always a price to be paid. I am learning to leave a man free and be free myself. I am learning to take sex lightly, which is hard for me because that’s not the way I started out and I’m not young but I’m learning.” It’s both heartbreaking and infuriating to see the ways that she is trapped by own aspirations. Her fuller understanding of herself at this time is available to her later in life, and through this vantage, the narrator tells her story. I love how Alice Munro explores this—the reasons why people, knowingly and unknowingly, distort their perception of themselves, and how we can be both bemusedly detached from and beholden to our contradictions.

Besides “Nettles,” there were two stories that I particularly loved in this collection. First was the title piece, “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” which, from various points of view, tells the story of how Sabitha and Edith’s schoolgirl prank (involving the fabrication of love letters) results in the marriage of the homely housekeeper Johanna to Sabitha’s ne’er-do-well father, Ken Boudreau. The story reminds me of a Greek tragedy, in which the intentions, feelings, and actions of the separately acting characters create a machination that is more powerful than the sum of these parts. The story brings to mind questions about fate, will, and the strange outcomes of our lives.

The other story I especially loved is “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” in which Fiona, who has dementia, forms a strong attachment to a man she meets in her nursing home. We learn about this through the perspective of her husband Grant, whom she doesn’t remember. Little is told of his jealousy or sadness. Rather, we’re given a revisiting of his own infidelities over the years of his marriage, and an account of a decision he makes in order to ensure Fiona’s happiness. Grant is able to perceive his utter powerlessness in regards to Fiona’s feeling about him, but with a ruthless assessment of his power over someone else, he saves Fiona. The moral ambiguity, the heartbreaking circumstances, the focus on decision and the mystery of emotion made it a story that I continued to think about for weeks.

There is a particular reason why I wanted to write about Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage rather than other Munro books I love. With every Munro collection I read before, I felt a bit disappointed at the end by the similarities between the stories and collections, that common complaint that an author is using the same bag of tricks. Each story involved some kind of movement or narrative, but the whole collections didn’t produce a feeling of a movement forward in time or understanding. I was frustrated with this repetition until I came across one paragraph in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage that had me reflect more carefully on my frustration.

The paragraph is in “Comfort,” which follows a widow in the days after her husband’s suicide. In one scene, we learn the town’s funeral director sleeps at the funeral home on busy nights.

“Last night had been on of those nights because of the accident north of town. A car full of teenagers had crashed into a bridge abutment. This sort of thing—a newly licensed driver or one not licensed at all, everybody wildly drunk—usually happened in the spring or around graduation time, or in the excitement of the first couple of weeks at school in September.”

When I read it, I felt a twinge of recognition, not with my own life, but with another Alice Munro story. Sure enough, in the story “Vandals” from Open Secrets I found what I remembered:

“By the time they moved, Kenny was dead—he had been killed when he was fifteen, in one of the big teenage car crashes that seemed to happen every spring, involving drunk, often unlicensed drivers, temporarily stolen cars, fresh gravel on the country roads, crazy speeds.”

This particular observation about the seasons of teenage car crashes doesn’t fit with my own experience. Its idiosyncrasy reminded me of the fact that Munro’s stories are products of one person and her singular experience and reflection of the world. Rather than be frustrated by Munro’s repetition of certain stories and themes, I became interested by her choice to return to them. For instance, again and again Munro tells the story of a woman who was raised in the country, wins a scholarship to college, there meets and marries a more metropolitan man, and eventually realizes that she will always be somewhat estranged from both her parents and her husband. With the repetition of the story throughout her books it might be that more than wanting to reach that story’s conclusion, Munro wants to increase its dimensionality. Munro’s stories remind me that just as brave as the effort to change is the willingness to reflect.

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• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It

Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will is a time machine that sends me hurtling back into the vivid heart of those childhood cartographic dreams. Straddling the line between real-world scientific representation and pure poetic license, this book uses islands to explore ideas, myths, and strangely enough—despite the sparse or non-existent populations of its subjects—people. Schalansky’s thoughtful intro makes clear her ambitious intentions: “It is high time for cartography to take its place among the arts, and for the atlas to be recognized as literature…” She’s laying her cards on the table here: each island’s backstory is going to come from her research, sure, but it’s also going to be a little fabulist, a little weird, a little factually murky (deliberately so, like say, certain works of “creative nonfiction,” or the exhibitions on display at the Museum of Jurassic Technology), a little Borges-inflected, a little Calvino’ed up.

Schalansky shows us a map of St. Kilda and then tells us that the island “doesn’t exist” but is instead “just a faint cry made by the birds that make their home on the high cliffs at the furthest edge of the United Kingdom.” On Pukapuka, there is no word for “virgin” and no such thing as jealousy. On Pingelap, colorblindness is so rampant that “even the pigs are black and white.” Atlasov, in the North Kuril Islands, is a “single lonely mountain” that “towered so high in the sky that it blocked the light from the neighboring mountains,” who then became envious, and forced the forlorn volcano out into the sea.

We get nuclear test islands, islands where the natives have been displaced for a golf course, “skeletons of ships in a sea of penguins,” Charles Darwin, Amelia Earhart and Robinson Crusoe. These islands are remote but beautiful as rendered in these small, enigmatic maps. The writing here has a similarly remote beauty, as it hovers between the clear and real and the otherworldly. If an atlas is to be literature, then it’s the geography itself, the landscapes, perhaps, that must bear the burden of character. And surprisingly enough, these obscure outposts as described by Schalansky quite often feel like well-formed characters, each with their own unique physicality, distinctive personalities, and complicated histories.

Most of the tiny outposts mapped and imagined here—often rocky and craggy, icy and uninhabitable (many sound like prison colonies and some, like Norfolk Island, actually were)—are not exactly the sort of places I would be ecstatic to win an all-expenses-paid trip to from Bob Barker during the “Showcase Showdown.” Nevertheless, they are places, as this Atlas reminds me, that make this planet more odd and more fascinating. They also make it seem less lonely, somehow. As the district chief of the tiny Indian Ocean research station of Amsterdam Island tells his fellow researchers, “There is no such thing as isolation. Even on Amsterdam Island, we are cogs in a huge wheel; here too, we receive signals that tell us who we are.”

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• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
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• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
• Kavita Das: The Last Book I Loved, The All of It

They are devastated by his death, and decide that they can’t keep the money because of the pain it represents. The book unfolds from Will’s perspective as the two friends impulsively embark on a globe-crossing adventure to give the money away to people they think deserve it.

I loved this book because it captured the complexity of loss and redemption in a wanderlust trip around the world. Will speaks with striking clarity about the vacillating uncertainty between wanting to do good and not knowing if his actions mean anything; if his time and energy are just drops in a huge vacuum-like bucket. He articulates the anxiety that comes from the juxtaposition of idealism and the injustices of the world that are reality.

Maybe it is the relevance the book had to my life at the time, trying to figure out what I should do to reconcile the difference between my desires and the fact that many notions that I have are unrealistic or romanticized. Will’s description of this divergence led me to feel more connected to him than I thought was possible to feel to a character in a book.  He explains the feeling of hopelessness in the face of drastic odds without being self-righteous or trite.  He speaks with the overload of emotion of trying to sort through the limits of his ability and his conscience. “I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools.”

I have often heard people say that you should first help the people closest to  you before you take off on a trip to a far-flung location.  I understand the idea behind this sentiment, but I have always felt the desire to travel. I am never content with being sedentary, and at times the most appealing thing to me is to take off and leave every responsibility behind me to see the other ways that people live.   From what I have seen, people who travel very far away aren’t completely content. They are restless. Maybe they are looking for something, or maybe they’re running away from something.

In this book, Will was running away.  He couldn’t get away from what was tormenting him, but on the way his unfaltering self-doubt and innate pain often paved the way for an ability to see the world without pretenses or expectations: “There is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.”  He empathized with the suffering of those around him because of what he was going through, and refused the notion that the idea of failure can drain the motivation to even try.

I think in life we are taught to think of grandiose plans and lofty ideals as naive.  We realize that there are often more difficulties than were originally anticipated and that the world can hurt you. His account reminded me that there is still promise in the open road, still a reason to talk to strangers, and to maintain our convictions in the face of crushing loss.  Dave Eggers speaks through Will, and the result is a candid testament to the fact that meaning can be found through loss, through accepting the world’s imperfections and your own.

Seeing the world as Will does, as imperfect, heartbreaking, and often unjust, but simultaneously with the shine of infinite potential, I remembered the allure of adventure. Despite the disappointment that he often faced on his travels, he didn’t forget that people are generally good.  He allowed himself to continue to be surprised by the beauty that he saw around him where most others see only hardship, from the dirty, winding streets of Senegal to frozen villages in Latvia.

My understanding of the book may be going in several different directions, but I think is fitting for the tone of Will’s conflicted account of his struggle to understand the meaning behind his experiences and his own limitations. I think that might be the point of the struggle, the questions and wonder that continue to surface- that they provide us with a reason to continue to explore, to try, and to hold on to what is important to you when the realities of life try to take it away.

Related Posts:

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• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
• Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins