Forum / Since we all love books...

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    Kait Mauro
    Aug 19, 11:51pm

    If you could recommend one book (or a couple) that everyone should read, which would it be and why?

    :)

    I'd say Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott because I have read it 300 times and I still love it. She is so incredibly candid and honest, just amazing.

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    Sam Rasnake
    Aug 20, 05:56am

    Poetry - Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop (She never wrote a bad poem ... and this is her finest collection... a perfect book)

    "Non-fiction" - The Meadow, James Galvin (makes me into a believer the prose poem is a great form ... makes the landscape alive on the page)

    Novel - Written on the Body, Jeaneatte Winterson (a stunning approach to the novel)

    Short Story - Cathedral, Raymond Carver (amazing)

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    James Lloyd Davis
    Aug 20, 06:33am

    I have the two 'most favored' books on my home page here:

    "The things they carried" Tim O'Brien
    "Blood Meridian" Cormac McCarthy

    But if I were to offer a third, it would be "Nine Stories" by J.D. Salinger. In that book, there are a few of the most artfully intimate portraits of human emotion that I have read. They are indirect, often disconnected from the cause or the source, but represent something we can all recognize.

    Salinger's other works are fine as well, although my early love affair with "Catcher in the Rye" went sour after I looked honestly into a mirror one day and came to understand that I was just as grotesque and flawed as all the people Holden Caulfield didn't like.

    But there is something quite precise and painfully articulate in the "Nine Stories," something you can feel more readily than understand. If you haven't read them, you must.

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    Bill Yarrow
    Aug 20, 09:56am

    Poetry - The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld by Peter Handke; Sad Jazz by Tony Barnstone; Cyborgia by Susan Slaviero

    "Non-fiction" - Journey to the Alcarria by Camilo Jose Cela; A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht; Life of Johnson by James Boswell

    Novel - Mysteries by Knut Hamsun; The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass; Molloy by Samuel Beckett

    Short Story - the short story collections by Stephen-Paul Martin--Not Quite Fiction, The Gothic Twilight, Fear and Philosophy, The Possibility of Music, Changing the Subject...

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    Bill Yarrow
    Aug 20, 09:59am

    James,

    "But there is something quite precise and painfully articulate in the "Nine Stories," something you can feel more readily than understand. If you haven't read them, you must."
    Agree absolutely!

    I put Nine Stories in my online creative class every time I teach it. Students still go wild over this volume.

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    David Ackley
    Aug 20, 12:11pm

    THE HORSE'S MOUTH by Joyce Cary.
    DISPATCHES by Michael Herr.
    Collected Poems by W.B. Yeats

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    David Ackley
    Aug 20, 12:31pm

    re the above choices

    The Horse's Mouth is the best, and absolutely the funniest novel ever written about the painting life. It's also intense, profound, and hurts like hell.

    Michael Herr's reports from the shifting front of the Vietnam War, written for Esquire, republished as the book "Dispatches." Herr later co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick "Full Metal Jacket," a war film right up there With "Grand Illusion."

    Poetry? Well there's Chaucer, Shakespeare and Yeats, then everybody else.

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