By Dave, the guy who writes our newsletter, PowellsBooks.news, among other things. Find him in the dark corner above the Annex if you need to borrow anything by Liz Phair or Van Morrison.

 

Books I read over and over again

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Magic green pills spill, accidentally, into the ground beneath a peach tree. A peach appears overnight, the only fruit the tree has ever produced; by morning, it's swollen to the size of a houseboat, and soon enough James Henry Trotter is climbing aboard for the ride of his life. If John Lennon had written a full-length children's story instead of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," this would be it. Even the ending is true: The English orphan boy finds happiness in a home near his magical friends in New York's Central Park. I love this book: the story, the drawings, the characters, and most of all the adventure.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Kundera has spent a long, fascinating career wrestling with the meaning of borders, both personal and political (often it's hard to tell the difference in his work) and the notion of self.The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, an earlier novel, is fantastic, but much more fragmentary. And The Joke, his first novel, contains what may be the most horrifying war scene I've read: soldiers gunning down innocent dogs, house pets, in front of their owners in a city park. In Unbearable Lightness, Kundera got everything right. The voice. The sex. And most of all, the story.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
I named my yellow Lab "Zooey" and believe me, I don't make those kinds of decisions lightly. It was either Zooey or Pooh, and, well, I wondered what kind of looks I might get from strangers, shouting "Pooh!" at my dog across the park. Would people know that Pooh was his name, not a command? So I settled on Zooey. About the book, though: I like to take trains merely to imagine Lane waiting for Franny, standing on the platform beside me.

A Real Doll, a short story by A.M. Homes
The last story in Homes' collection, The Safety of Objects, is a perfect introduction to her brilliant, twisted writing. Disturbing, graphically sexual, and entirely surreal, the first paragraph lies in wait. Touch it, and the whole story falls out of its shell – two lines and you're completely hooked. Homes' capacity to manipulate the reader both emotionally and intellectually is astounding.

Soumchi by Amos Oz
A few summers ago, I discovered Soumchi in a Colorado bookstore under the heading of "Literature in Translation." The story of a young boy in Jerusalem in the forties (before Israel gained its independence), Soumchi evoked my childhood – the unimaginable immensity of the world beyond my neighborhood; my first crush (girls!); parents arguing about political issues I only vaguely understood – better than any book I've ever read. And I grew up in the seventies and eighties in Massachusetts, so go figure. I carried the book with me in my backpack for months. Black and white illustrations introduce each chapter with as much wonder as Oz's dreamlike, yearning prose.

 

I'd rather be at Fenway, but in the meantime you might catch me re-reading one of these baseball books:

Wild and Outside by Stefan Fatsis
In Minneapolis, the Metrodome sits three-quarters empty, voices echoing between the plastic turf and the white, billowy roof; meanwhile across the river in St. Paul, fans fill Midway Stadium night after night to cheer for their beloved Saints. (In 1997, when I visited, shortly after Opening Day, the entire season had already sold out.) The Northern League is America's most successful independent league, and in Wild and Outside (which is also the Saints' marketing slogan), Fatsis documents its debut season, profiling the owners who believed in providing an affordable and fun alternative to the major league's affiliated minor league system and the players, many of whom extended or even revitalized their careers here.

Field of Schemes by Joanna Cagan and Neil DeMause
I've spent two summers driving around the U.S. visiting baseball parks, and they were the best summers of my life. My first trip was in 1991, pre-Camden Yards. The years since have brought fundamental changes to the economics of the game, changes that are immediately apparent in the architecture and demographics of the new ballparks. Who's paying for these palaces, anyway? Before you vote to fund a new stadium for your city, I highly recommend reading this book, a sobering reflection on the politics of pro sports in the nineties.

Pure Baseball by Keith Hernandez and Mike Bryan
Hernandez takes you pitch-by-pitch through two complete major league games, one in each league, using the action on the field to explain managerial strategies in detail. Reading this book is like taking a course in baseball with a friendly, experienced professor.

Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Goodwin grew up on Long Island during New York's golden age of baseball, rooting for Jackie Robinson and her father's favorites, the Brooklyn Dodgers, while more than a dozen Hall of Famers shared the city's spotlight: Snider, Campanella, Mantle, Martin, Thomson, and Mays, among others. Her history is a personal account, a memoir of a loving American family amid greater forces, offering a refreshing, female perspective on growing up with baseball.

A Great and Glorious Game by A. Bartlett Giamatti
Giamatti is best remembered for banning Pete Rose, but the late commissioner was not only a fan, he was a scholar and Ivy League President (Yale). This collection contains his invaluable, eloquent essays on the game.

 

Serious books are great.
Very funny serious books are better:

White Noise by Don DeLillo
Can a book about death be laugh-out-loud funny? Underworld, DeLillo's most recent novel, is bigger and more comprehensive in scope and purpose than White Noise, but I'm not sure it's better, and it's certainly nowhere near as funny. The best scenes in White Noise take place in supermarkets. And though some might say the book is about death and obsession and the fear of open spaces, mostly I remember the long, sociological explanations of produce.

The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim
I read an essay somewhere in which a critic compared Antrim to David Foster Wallace. A few days later, I found this book at Powell's and got hooked immediately. Antrim's control of language is astounding, the gorgeous shaping and manic pacing of his sentences. The whole story – a hundred brothers gather to discuss what to do with their father's ashes – takes place in one night, in one long uninterrupted narrative; there's not a single space break to be found in the 206 pages. I laughed so much I decided to photocopy the first five pages and mail them to friends, but it's Antrim's insight into these men's relationships that make the characters and the story come alive.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Are you a single male between the ages of 24 and 32? Have you been listening to the same classic rock albums since you were twelve? Do you find yourself compulsively compiling lists of all your favorite things: five favorite angry songs, five favorite bedtime albums, five favorite episodes of The Simpsons? Are you afraid of commitment? Nick Hornby has been reading your mind. And he's written a great story to prove it. "Keep this book away from your girlfriend," one critic wrote, "it contains too many of your secrets to let it fall into the wrong hands." Yes.

Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman
A great female counterpart to Hornby. Jane Goodall (not "the" Jane Goodall) enters a relationship with Ray, a man who at the time is living with another woman. Everything's going great, Jane's in love, she's apartment hunting with Ray – but instead of breaking things off with his fiancé, Ray all of a sudden hides from Jane and pretends nothing happened. At which point Jane, who's fed up with men entirely by now and is heartbroken to boot, turns to the anthropological sciences for answers. Who wouldn't, right? In school they taught us that we evolved from monkeys. Read this book, and you'll never be able to look a cow in the face again. (But how big a price is that?)

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
I was visiting a friend at college, killing time while she was at class, when I found her roommate's old copy of Cat's Cradle on the floor – my first Vonnegut experience. In the next year or so I must have read a dozen of his books, but this one's still my favorite. If you haven't read Vonnegut, this is the perfect place to start. Evil corporate empires, weapons of mass destruction, a religion openly based entirely on foma ("useful lies"). I read this again every few years – it's a companion to Salinger's Franny and Zooey on my shelves. Thanks, Allison, for the introduction.

 

 

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