The Rumpus presents the second installment of an index to “The Last Book I Loved” Series.
Directions: 1) Admire these eloquent specimens. 2) Select the most provocative entries and read those articles in their entirety. 3) Discover great literature by reading the actual novels reviewed. 4) Write your own “The Last Book I Loved” entry, submit it to The Rumpus, and we will publish our favorites.
David Baldizon on Women: “I finished this book and one thought came to mind: this was one of the most romantic books I have ever read. A love story written in prose that is real to the love experience: revealing and sudden as a slap in the face, raw as hot pink sex, hungered for like a 2:00 am hot dog wrapped in bacon, and fast and fleeting as the next moment.”
John Leavitt on Berlin: “Yes, it’s graphic novel, and the stink of “good for a graphic novel” still hangs over recommending one, but just at the technical level, Berlin is a work of genius. This is a gorgeous book, the B&W style suggests a grown-up Tintin with a hint of Erté. You can’t say it lack ambition either, seeking to tell the entire story of the fall of Wiemar Republic from the point of view of everyone, from radical writers to businessmen to streetwalkers.”
Terese Svoboda on An African in Greenland: “It opens in Togo with Kpomassie attacked by a snake while throwing coconuts out of a tree. Not a bad set-up. Then to cure him of his concussion, his father makes him go to this weird python shaman, a doctor out of your worst nightmare. This is in the 1960s.”
Nine on A Complicated Kindness: “This book really kind of brings it home, because it’s not just ordinary teen angst, you know, my-life-is-so-hard-why-won’t-he-notice-me kind of teen angst. It captures the despair and the frustration of not having any control, especially when you’re in a place where American tourists come to gawp at how quaint you all are. It’s no wonder Nomi is so cynical.”
Stephen Sparks on The Feverhead: “Essentially, The Feverhead is mystery – several, actually. Why (and how) does a being (or beings) named ULF sign each letter? Is Heinz’s daughter Karin about to fall prey to an alpine serial killer who has evaded detection for several years? What is it that seems to be guiding Frank and Heinz both – independently of each other – to Brazil? Is the twist at the end of the novel brilliant or insane?”
Charlie Crespo on Infinite Jest: “Over time you realize that Infinite Jest reads like someone is talking to you. Yes, someone who is certainly smarter and more eloquent than you could ever hope to be, but also someone who is incredibly sincere, is insanely funny and is honestly trying to help you become a better person.”
Daniel Pearce on Mr. Bridge: “And while Mr. Bridge is certainly not uncritical, it accomplishes something much more subtle than outright critique: It teaches one (it taught me, at least) to love someone who is alien and remains alien, rather than someone who, previously alien, transgresses convention in order to become tragically familiar. Mr. Bridge’s tragedy is much quieter.”
Dave Doyle on Perve–A Love Story: “When I got to the last page, I wanted to climb inside the book and thank Mr. Bobby Stark for letting me forget myself for a day. That the self I was forgetting was my normal, non-perverted self, should be evident by now.”
Richard LeComte on The Assasin’s Song: “The novel is one of the best explorations of the dynamics between father and son and between brothers that I’ve encountered, in part because the novel resonates so deeply with my own experience as a son and a brother — that is, if you can compare my father’s tin-can factory to a shrine in India.”
Ken Krimstein on The Leopard: “It wasn’t like reading. It was like living, like being somebody else. I felt the total otherness, and it infected me, like a beautiful virus — moldy, tattering at the edges, accompanied by the plaintive sounds of a gut string viola pulling a melody that combined Italian street songs and Bach.”
Lisa Rae Cunningham on In The Land of Dreamy Dreams: “What else I will say about Ellen Gilchrist: she’s hilarious, and she’s not above the shittiness of human motivations. Quite often her characters–men, women, children–are despicable. But they’re terribly interesting, colorful, stylish and always more surprising than your average fatal wreck.”
Drew Toal on I Am Not Sidney Poitier: “There was not a page of this book that didn’t have me smirking my face off and wishing I was a funnier person, even as I recognized the sad realities of racial issues in our country that made this kind of satire possible.”
Victoria Marini on The Testament of Gideon Mack: “The devil is, as he is often depicted in books where men meet him, charming and hospitable. But more so than any other tale of Satan and man, he is human – or at least humanized: plain, tired, struggling for intimacy.”
Gabe Durham on I Remember: “A good personal essay lives and dies by those tactile, seemingly minor recollections that this book is nothing but. The shift from the very specific to the universal (from the skirt and sweater Susie Barnes always wore to “doing other things with straws besides drinking through them”) and the way we see ourselves in both.”
Zoe Ruiz on 8: All True: Unbelievable: “Okay. So maybe I didn’t know exactly what she was talking about. But I knew what she meant about just getting tired of talking. I knew what she meant about wanting someone to lay their hands on me in a healing way.”
Catherine Lacy on The Two Kinds of Decay: “The images are so clear and intimate that I encountered each sentence as if it was a part of my own memory; these hot coals of her story burned my hands as I tried to hold them.”
Michael McLaughlin on Carpenter’s Gothic: “Gaddis has captured the feverish way people talk to each other, especially those closest to us who don’t ever seem to require context.”
Katie Standefer on The Lake: “Daniel Villasenor deftly shows the passion and complication of two damaged people taking tentative steps toward one another.”
Hans Kulla-Mader on The Magicians: “What made me so giddy about the book was this feeling that Grossman was breaking the rules. The magicians were getting drunk and sleeping with each other and questioning what magic even was.”
Grant Munroe on The Queue: “Though at first discordant, from the innumerable lines of dialogue, from page after page of nameless chatter, patterns start arising: characters begin taking shape, social dynamics become apparent, the slow pace of daily life takes form.”
Aaron Gilbreath on Ray: “The whole book is a witty hot wire. It lashed and sparked from start to finish. It flipped itself over and over while spraying its searing contents before coming to an abrupt, fitful halt after spending one exciting night of life with me on my back porch under the moon. ”
Adam Robinson on Alaska: “It is about strength and radical faith prevailing over injustice and the limits of whatever truths we humans find “self-evident.” It’s not unlike the Grand Inquisitor section in The Brothers Karamazov, but I found it a hundred times more powerful.”
David Beisly-Guiotto on Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories: “Chekhov isn’t the type of reading you can grope after, I chided myself. You must be patient; you must reread; you must want very badly the thing without fumbling it away.”
Kevin Nolan on The Moviegoer: “Some of Percy’s later work is criticized for its preachy tone, but in The Moviegoer, and in these deft paragraphs in particular, he’s at top form. Paragraphs that remain relevant decades later are a legacy to envy.”
Jami Attenburg on Everything Matters!: “Everything Matters! is sharp and funny and, dare I say, an important book to read, if at the very least because it reminds you that we have a purpose on this planet, which maybe we don’t hear a lot of these days.”
Gretchen Schrafft on Stranger Things Happen: “The collection’s author, Kelly Link, understands as no writer has in years how to harness the power of the fantastic, and it is more than simply exciting to witness her breath new life into the form.”
David Reese on The Plague: “The stuff I remember best about reading The Plague in 1991 and the stuff I want to experience again is the stuff about this one bad-ass doctor who totally mans up and goes into full-on hero mode and works his ass off trying to help everybody and save them from this goddamn plague they can’t shake.”
Leni Zumas on Inner China: “Eva Sjödin’s poem-novel maps in swift, uncanny sentences the dark marvels of being little.”
Shane Jones on Jakob Von Gunten: “It’s a world that amazes me that a person, a human being, created such an imaginary place that is so odd, so funny, so heartbreaking, and hopeful, that it feels supernatural.”
Bob Sommer on You or Someone LIke You: “A wife and mother living the Beverly Hills good life, Anne leads book groups for directors, screenwriters, producers, and actors. It’s not that she planned to do this, it just happened because she’s so well read, so brilliant, so delightfully British.”
Bucky Sinister on Walking Dead Comics: “I’ll tell you something that’s total crack, is the Walking Dead Comics.”
Dave Eggers on Destiny Disrupted:A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes: “Especially when people are looking for a comprehensive-but-approachable way to look at world history through the lens of Islam, there’s no better book.”
Tom Treanor on Music for Torching: “Every dirty little detail is told as if it could happen to you, could happen everyday, could be happening to your friends and neighbors right now.”
Josh Nathan on Slapstick: “Vonnegut creates a bizarre, quasi-science fiction story then injects his brand of humor into this tale of a frustrating human existence. It’s a story only a young child (or Vonnegut) could think up.”
C. Max Magee on Paper Trails: “Dexter’s columns evince a keen eye for people wronged by the system, and in them he slays corrupt cops, sleazy lawyers, and crooked politicians deftly with his pen.”
Joseph Cervelin on The Informers: “Interconnected, these tales extract the beauty and spirit of depravity, not because of the same ol’ sex drugs rock n roll, but because of that drive, that urgency: to confront, escape, live, die, relax, shake things up.”
Tess Bryant on The Sea, The Sea: “Arrowby’s convoluted and downright bizarre attempts to break up the marriage of his childhood sweetheart become a mechanism for the reader to relate to and understand his character. And despite his stalker tendencies, Arrowby’s obvious delusions become somehow endearing, even as he holds the love of his life hostage.”
Shya Scanlon on Hunts in Dreams: “Hunts In Dreams exhibits a strong element of situational comedy. But Drury’s timing is perfect, and despite working on a large canvas, he’s at heart, like Lynch might be, a miniaturist. He knows just when to end a scene, and he does so often; the chapters are short, and each chapter is broken into even shorter sections, so there’s a constant, rhythmic lurching forward and backward in time, like a rolling oval.”
Julie Greicius on The Lost City of Z and All the Names: “Grann’s nonfiction and Saramago’s allegory depend deeply on their graveyards, where ghosts reign supreme. Grann’s fascination is for the lore of the dead (and those who seek it), while Saramago seems to worship death itself (and its indispensable value to the living).”
Kevin Hobson on Disgrace: “The more I read, the more I began to question my preconceptions about myself and about the world at large. I saw my ego—as both a human being and a writer—reduced to a quivering mass of uncertainty.”
Tao Lin on Honored Guest: “When I think about Honored Guest’s “tone” I think it is maybe something like drinking a lot of caffeine while mildly and “calmly” depressed, taking painkillers at night while happy, going outside into sunlight in the morning after not sleeping the night before due to a specific kind of crippling loneliness, or being financially stable while unemployed and living alone in a clean studio apartment with little or no social or familial obligations.”
Rebecca Steinitz on Cheerful Weather for The Wedding: “It gestures toward sentiment and revels in slapstick, capturing the complexities of real emotions in a satirical frame. And the weather! It’s a glaring-bright gale: cheerful to the nth degree, deemed delightful by Dolly’s mother, but quite horrendous for everyone else, which is to say the perfect weather for wedding and book.”
Chris Corrigan on The Little Prince: “This “kids’ story” is about love, the pragmatic and painful nature of life decisions and how simple truth is better than a complicated yarn. At 32 I was reading about life lessons small children the world over were already privy to.”
Tye Pemberton on Remainder: “Despite its emotional and linguistic remove, it is a profoundly human book, perhaps more human than we’ve seen from a novel in I don’t know how long. It represents my favorite collision, the collision of the novel of ideas and the character-based novel which—on the rare occasion that its author has the luck to find a believable synthesis—creates a novel about the nature of being, which is also truly rare.”
Binnie Kirshenbaum on A High Wind in Jamaica: “I will read A High Wind in Jamaica again and likely again after that, and not only because of the pirates, the distant parents, and the creepy children. I’ll read it again to study the prose, to try to figure out how the writer-as-magician sawed a woman in half without making a mess.”
Ben Stroud on First Love and Other Stories: “Common throughout these stories is patience. They’re allowed to progress without artifice and without hurry, steadily delivering us through vivid scenes—N. N. crossing and recrossing the Rhine in “Asya,” the scene with Vladimir’s father’s riding crop in “First Love,” Harlov tearing down his house board by board in “King Lear of the Steppes”—to the frustrations, difficulties, and mysteries of life.”
John Madera on Fog & Car: “It’s built from sentences like bark-stripped branches, like beached bleached shells.”
***
Original art by Ilyse Magy.
