A Writer's Reading List

Haemi Lee over at Dangerous Woman has been talking about what an English major should read…and that got me thinking about what aspiring writers ought to read. Not the how-to books, but just good fiction. So here, in no particular order, is a list of books that made a difference to my own education as a writer…

Early Works
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. An 18th-century hypertext novel, full of odd switches and eternal digressions.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It was never a kids’ book, and if you read it now you’ll be astonished at how good (and nasty-funny) it is.

Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. I can barely recall it from my college days, but its vision of medieval Japan was stranger and more beautiful than any bogus fantasy world.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Fiction in verse, full of good stories and vivid characters. He’s also entertainingly bawdy.

Anything and everything by Shakespeare. Aldous Huxley used to re-read Shakespeare, all of it, every year. If a mostly blind guy could do it, shame on us for not even trying. It’s like getting a 50-point IQ boost: You’re thinking the thoughts of the finest writer in our language. No one has written better dialogue.

Aristophanes. OK, another dramatist, but his big lesson is not that Socrates is a dope or that women can end war by going on a sex strike. Aristophanes teaches us that no one, not even Pericles, is exempt from criticism and even ridicule. We modern writers are pathetic chickens by comparison. Hell, even the Dixie Chicks have more guts.

The Icelandic sagas. Not all of them, just enough to see that the Vikings were good at something besides sacking monasteries. Nothing today is as hard-boiled as the sagas.

The Bible. Speaking as an atheist, I think it’s a heartbreak and an outrage that so few students know anything about the great source of western literature. Stick to the King James version and hope that those grand Jacobean cadences will improve the muscle tone of your own writing style. (And Ecclesiastes will teach you that the race is not to the verbose, nor the battle to the multisyllabic. An eight-year-old can understand it, and spend the next eighty years trying to really understand it.)

The Romans: Tacitus (“They make a desert and call it peace”) is as timely now as in Caesar’s day. Pliny the Younger wrote lovely letters revealing his truly sincere admiration for himself. Juvenal was a right-wing xenophobe who hated all the furriners being sucked into the Empire. They all influenced my writing; Pliny and Juvenal are characters in my novel Rogue Emperor.

The Moderns:
William Blake. He built a mythology greater than Tolkien’s and if he was insane, the rest of us should only be so nuts.

The Brontes. Well, any and all of them.

Dickens. Especially Bleak House, 150 years old and still an avant-garde novel. Plan to teach to support your writing? Better read Hard Times so you know that education is as pigheaded as ever.

Flaubert. Madame Bovary, of course.

The Russians. As an undergraduate, I found that reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov actually cheered me up. Managed Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina but not War & Peace. Nabokov introduced me to Gogol, who was great fun. Loved some of the early Soviet writers like Isaac Babel (Red Cavalry, the Benya Krik stories), Mikhail Sholokov, and especially Evgeny Zamiatin’s SF novel We, which was a huge influence on Huxley and Orwell. When the Russians got disenchanted with communism they were less interesting to read.

That reminds me of Karel Capek, the Czech author of R.U.R. (the SF play that gave us the word “robot”) and War with the Newts, a parable of decency confronting fascism and pretty much losing.

The Specials
We all have writers who exert some special influence on us, even though they may not enjoy widespread attention. These are my specials:

Stanley Ellin. A wonderful crime writer of the 1940s through 1980s. His first published story, “The Specialty of the House,” is still read—and shuddered over. His novels are numerous: The Eighth Circle, Very Old Money, The Valentine Estate. Probably hard to find now, but worth the effort. He was one of my mentors when I was a teenager, and I miss him a lot.

David Stacton. In the 1950s and 60s he was an amazingly prolific writer of historical novels, some published only in Britain—and he also wrote mysteries under a pen name. I don’t know them, but the historical novels are brilliant and unlike anything else in the genre. Segaki, A Signal Victory, People of the Book, Tom Fool, From a Balcony, The Judges of the Secret Court...just writing the titles brings back powerful memories. Stacton died young and suddenly, of a stroke, in 1967, and has been almost totally forgotten. But if you run across any of his books, grab them.

Dalton Trumbo. Another mentor. While he was best known as a screenwriter (Spartacus, Exodus, Papillon, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Lonely Are the Brave), Trumbo was also a remarkable novelist. His best-known novel, and the only one still in print, is Johnny Got His Gun. Look it up on Amazon.com and read some of the reviews. Over 60 years after he wrote it (in six blazing weeks), that novel still breaks hearts and changes lives. Trumbo was also a brilliant letter-writer, and his son Christopher has turned many of those letters into a two-man play, Trumbo, which has recently enjoyed a strong run on Broadway.

Well, those are some of the writers I've read, admired, and learned from. What are the novels that have influenced you?

Comments

[Haemi]

Just got your e-mail and stumbled, skipped, hopped, and broke a sweat to get to your blog! Have I been blogging about literature lately? My life's been so crazy, I can't even remember what I blogged about in my last post! So I hurried back to my own blog, and found nothing on literature! Nothing this week, nothing last week! Maybe it's like that ideal man blog post that somehow existed in memory and had to be recreated!

I'm honored for the mention. And the inspiration, too. I am going to blog about my latest reads, which has become my new favorite.

[Crawford Kilian]

Actually, Haemi, your mention of literature was weeks ago—and shortly thereafter I started this post. But I didn't complete it until today. Sorry for the confusion!

[Haemi]

You know, your post reminded me of something swell -- that I should blog about books more often! You know, during the last two weeks, I have actually had days when I didn't have anything to write about... I thought I was having a recurring nightmare of blank-page-phobia! I realized that I can always write about something I'm reading, and not as plan B or plan C... I'm an English major! Literature should always be a priority. And if I don't have any readings to blog about... well, that says something: I should be always be reading something!

[Haemi]

And I have to agree with you wholeheartedly about Shakespeare and The Bible (coming from an athiest myself). There's so many Shakespearean and Biblical allusions in other literature as well -- it is as if they are the foundations of all literature. Bible is a tome itself -- I'd recommend the New testament over the old (just a personal preference). And Shakespeare -- he wrote enough plays, that you can read two plays a month (if you can manage) and still have plays left to read!

[susan]

Wonderful, wonderful list of recommendations. How, however, will I ever find the time!!

[Teresa]

*gasp* No Austen? Surely not! :-)

[Matthew Bin]

I agree with the bible, as another atheist. Great list all round.

I would also add some late 19th/early 20th prose to the list. Hardy and Maugham spring to mind (though one is a little more _literary_ than the other, they are both masterly writers).

My own favourite is Arnold Bennett. He was in many ways the last great non-modern writer, and his career went from the late 1890s to the early 1930s. He did write plenty of mass-market, fluff fiction, but his half-dozen or so best novels -- the Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, and Riceyman Steps -- are my favourite books that aren't Russian. That's saying something.

The Brothers Karamazov is, for my money, the best book ever written. If you find the time for only one book in your life, make it this one.

[Davei]

Yours is a great list, and more than enough for a lifetime, but I can't resist suggesting a few more:

Isak Dinessen

Graham Greene

E.B. White

Raymond Chandler

E.M. Forster

Thanks for maintaining this site. I'm working on a novel and considering adding another Typepad site that would be password protected so that folks on writing boards could read.
David

[aline reed]

You make no mention of people like:
Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison or any other African-American writer. Curious. Very curious.
I think Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man stands alone as one of the best works of fiction ever written.

[Crawford Kilian]

Invisible Man is indeed a great work, and much of James Baldwin's work stirred discussion in my family. Yet I don't think of such writers as influencing me much--which was the criterion for my list.

John Oliver Killens's And Then We Heard the Thunder did influence me, however, and I should have included it. But the African-American writer who really influenced me was Mifflin Gibbs--a 19th-century adventurer, entrepreneur and politician who was the leader of the black community in Gold Rush British Columbia.

Gibbs in his old age wrote an autobiography, Shadow and Light, which I used extensively in my first nonfiction book: Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. After some exciting years in BC, Gibbs returned to the US after the Civil War and became an important person in the Reconstruction South. In his 70s, he was sent to Madagascar as US Consul, and returned to write his autobiography. He died in 1915 in Little Rock, Arkansas at a great age, and very wealthy.

Shadow and Light is fascinating for what it tells us about life on both sides of the Civil War, and maddening for how much he leaves out. I would love to find a full biography of him. A poster with his portrait hangs on my office wall.

[Irving]

An excellent list, but as I get older, the stuff I liked as a young man has lost its appeal for me. Shakespeare I still love, and Homer in the newest and best translation, Tolkein always, and Frank Herbert's Dune series stands out for SF. Most of them have been influenced by the Sufi writers and poets like Rumi, Hafez, etc. And of course my own book, Master of the Jinn: A Sufi Novel.

Peace and Blessings!