Heck Of A Guy

It Must Be Great Fun To Be Meme To Me

My Ozblogistani buddy, Helen of Blogger On The Cast Iron Balcony, has tagged me for a literary meme: Nine Categories; Nine Books.

1. One book that changed your life: Uncle Scrooge Comics

Learning to read the 200 or so comic books¹ I had accumulated by age five was my sole motivation for attending school. I’m told I was bitterly disappointed on arriving home from the first day of school only to find I was still unable to read my comics. But, I did learn, and reading became – and continues to be – a central and essential element of my life.

2. One book you have read more than once: Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies wrote rich prose dense with metaphors, myth, magic, and the mores of provincial Canada.

Reading his books, especially Fifth Business, the first time is an adventure well rewarded by its completion; re-reading them is a celebratory parade. (Handling Sin by Michael Malone (see #4) also fits in this category.)

3. One book you would want on a desert island: The Karma Sutra

Well, it depends. If I’m going to be on this desert island with other folks (e.g., Lost or those reality shows), I would take a lavishly illustrated edition of The Karma Sutra. Since I have zilch survival skills, I figure I could trade peeks at porn for food.

On the other hand, if I’m going to be alone on the desert island, … Oh, heck, I might as well take The Kama Sutra anyway. I’m gonna die soon in this wretched place; I might as well enjoy the time.

4. One book that made you laugh: Handling Sin by Michael Malone

Michael Malone, who has been called “America’s Dickens,”² has taught fiction and drama at Yale, Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania, written Edgar Award winning mysteries, and served as head writer for the ABC soap opera One Life to Live.

He has also written outstanding novels, including Handling Sin, the Quixotian tale of Raleigh Whittier Hayes, a latter day knight errant hailing from Thermopylae, North Carolina, who, abetted by Mingo Sheffield (his Sancho Panza), Gates (Raleigh’s semi-sociopathic half-brother), Weeper Berg (Gates’s prison buddy), and an ancient jazzman, Toutant Kingstree, wends his picaresque way through the South to fulfill a family quest. Along the way, he tangles with gangsters, the KKK, and Hell’s Angels, delivers a baby, impersonates an FBI agent, is rescued by an renegade order of nuns, and endures the obligatory wooing of beautiful women.

Handling Sin is the funniest book I’ve ever read.

5. One book that made you cry: Without: Poems, by Donald Hall

This volume of poetry was published on the third anniversary of the death of Jane Kenyon, Hall’s wife, and deals directly, unambiguously, and wonderfully with their relationship and his loss. Just writing this note brings on tears.

6. One book you wish you had written: Changing Places by David Lodge

Most of Lodge’s novels would fit in this category. Changing Places is a robustly risible novel about academic institutions in the US and Britain, the weird socio-political universes they spawn, and the comedy engendered when those universes clash. David Lodge is an exquisite literary artisan who not only understands how to manipulate words and plot a narrative (he teaches and writes about crafting fiction) but also delights in doing so. My choice for this category is prompted by the notion that this sort of skill seems attainable.

Of course, “seems attainable” in this context means at my very best, especially if I’ve enjoyed a well-constructed vodka & tonic or two, I sometimes think that, with a few more years of practice and concerted effort, I could write the occasional phrase that, with substantial editing and buffing, could be mistaken for something Lodge might have written.

7. One book you wish had never been written:The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

For so many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s poorly written.

8. One book you are currently reading: The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I always have six to ten books in he process of being read. I’ve just now become able to again tolerate literature and movies about death and dying. The Year Of Magical Thinking is Didion’s presentation of her attempts, not always successful and, according to the author, not always sane, to deal with the wrenching changes wrought by the losses of her husband, John Gregory Dunn, in 2003 and her daughter, who lapsed into a coma weeks before Dunn’s death, and died herself two years later. This book has proven, after only a few pages, to be especially powerful and reading it a challenging but already rewarding effort.

9. One book you have been meaning to read: Unless by Carol Shields

I’ve been an unabashed fan of Carol Shields since I read The Stone Diaries. Julie,³ my wife, attended a two week creative writing workshop in an especially inhospitable winter setting just to work with Carol Shields and the two of them maintained a correspondence until Julie died from breast cancer in 1999. While I’ve looked forward to reading Unless, which I’ve owned for at least two years, I have been unwilling, thus far, to actually begin it simply because it is the author’s last book. Carol Shields died, also of breast cancer, in 2003.

10. Now tag five people

Mindspinner, who reads with demonic fury and intensity. She also finds (and this strikes me as unfair), slotted between the printed lines, words and explications that are invisible to me.

Mrs. Linklater, of Mrs. Linklater’s Guide to the Universe, who explained to me only a few months ago how these meme thingies work and who has an opinion on everything that always proves interesting and, in an annoyingly high percentage of cases, turns out to be correct.

Mary, of View From A Farm House Window , who writes movingly but not nearly often enough, offering paltry excuses such as putting up 5 bushels of corn, sustaining home and hearth, rebuilding 12-ton Switcher Engines, laying track, … .

Jo(e), of Writing As Jo(e), who produces posts and, occasionally, poems that are both lyrical and accessible about stuff that doesn’t interest me whatsoever – until I read (and re-read) what she’s written.

Cal of McHenry County Blog who is a political animal with a blatantly, insistently open agenda and a sensibility befitting a former Libertarian Party candidate for Governor.

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1. I had batches of Superman, Batman, other assorted DC Comics heroes, Donald Duck, Looney Tunes, and even the occasional Archie, but Uncle Scrooge was my favorite [↩]
2. As a parochial American, of course, I prefer to think of Dickens as “England’s Michael Malone.” [↩]
3. Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance  as well as several of her short stories and other pieces.  For the location of the various content about or by Julie, see Julie FAQ. [↩]