Just One Good Book, Maybe — STEVEN HARDESTY

I never wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a boutique chicken rancher. But that’s a post for a different sort of blog. My writing ambition is to write one good book. I’ve tried 34 times so far. Trying to come up to Mark Twain’s standard – “A good book,” he said, “is one you want to read again.” So what makes a book re-readable?

Good question. What novels have I read that I read again every year, and so should you?

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, for a start. Why? Well, it’s full of demented characters harrying you with pitchfork and rake through a wild tale of romantic gloom on a par with the greatest medieval epics. I weep at reaching the ending. Not because it’s so sad or so happy (it’s both) but because once again an American novelist fails to concoct a decent ending for his fabulous invention. Every re-read I snap it shut before The End so that Ignatius J. Reilly can run on with his story, and on and on, in Toole’s wild New Orleans, with me happy to catch up with him next re-read.

Richard Brautigan’s Troutfishing in America. Yes! This is the novel of American civics every voter should be required to read before any election day. So rich in humanity, antique common sense and hippie craziness that any reader will devour it like a-cheeseburger-and-a-beer.

How about Thomas Berger’s Neighbors? Oh, yes, I reread Little Big Man now and then. But Neighbors is True American Life. A suburban survival guide. As Berger says, a shotgun and a fist in the face makes for good neighbors.

William Faulkner’s collected short stories, especially “Turnabout,” which I took as a model for my first published short story. Every few years I attack The Sound and the Fury (best listened to than read to hear the rhythm of Faulkner’s language opening new avenues into the tale). But Faulkner wrote short stories as poetry and I like them better.

Now for Melville and his horrid whale. Moby-Dick. Yes, I re-read it every year and sometimes all the way through. Sometimes its adventure and horror are too overwhelming to continue. Sometimes I get bored with all that boiling down of blubber. But Melville and Huckleberry Finn are the bedrocks of American literature and too grand not to read often. Also Poe’s poetry, but poetry’s too scary to mention here, isn’t it?

Of the great Brit comic writers (Brits are natural comedians but don’t seem to know it), I re-read every year Pride and Prejudice by Jane Whosit for obvious reasons (even if it weren’t so funny, the writing’s just too good not to re-read). Pamela Hansford Johnson is as sardonically comic as only a post-Austen Brit can be, and I re-read her The Unspeakable Skipton or Night and Silence Who is Here? or Cork Street, Next to the Hatters in rotation every year or so. Same-same for Tom Sharpe’s Wilt and Blott on the Landscape.

Pardon if I mention Catch-22 (Heller), Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) and The Pistol (James Jones), but I was a soldier and these tell a soldier’s bitter story, which is why I read them bitterly.

Every now and then I re-read Ishmael Reed, of course (who wouldn’t hunger for a re-read after a first read?), Richard Wright, Shalako (where I learned the importance to a story of the feeling of grit in desert sand), Fitzgerald who wrote the most beautiful American English or Hemingway who only wrote about the Hemingway he wanted to be. Also the original Hornblower trilogy I first read as a boy, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Keith Laumer (I sort of knew him), The Big Sleep which I can never figure out, Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes, and Out of the Silent Planet (C. S. Lewis), the first sci-fi novel I ever read and still think best of breed.

Tonight I’m going to add to my re-reading list The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen (Herbert Tarr). Been on my shelf or in my soldier’s rucksack for these many decades, still un-re-read, but I keep hold of it because I know its worth. Just seeing it on my bookshelf reminds me how I discovered it, where and when, and that’s important because Chaplain Cohen helped me through my war.

So what are you re-reading tonight or are you wasting your brains on booze, wild sex and bingeing Scandinoir?