A Reader's Reader

Day 295 of the "What are you reading, and why?' and today I met Ben, a reader's reader, and he has a big stack of books he'll now be reading, and he reads because he was born to read, raised to read, because he's a reader's reader, the way James Bond is a man's man.

Yes, Bond.  James Bond.

"Ben.  Born Ben."

Ben did not actually say that.  What he actually said, in response to my question, "Are you doing some kind of reading project?" was, "My life."  And I completely understood!

Ben was at that point, after quietly moving through the aisles of Babbitt's Books, making a fine stack of books on a convenient computer stand.  He had hung his coat on the back a chair, and every now and then he asked a question. One was about Graham Greene.  Our Man in Havana, I said.  He said, The End of the Affair. But we didn't have either of these. Or, evidently, The Quiet American.  So Ben's stack includes others, instead.

Here is Ben's stack of books:

Graham Greene:*  The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case 
Arthur Rimbaud: A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat (in one volume, paperback)
Richard Adams: Watership Down (which Ben read as a child, but needed now to own again)
Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Sinclair Lewis: Main Street
Neal Cassady: The First Third 

Ben said it was time to read a book by Neal Cassady, as Neal had been the hero of about 4 books he'd read. Ben's favorite writer is Jack Kerouac, and he made a Kerouac pilgrimage to San Francisco and found Kerouac's house on North Beach, a A-frame that "didn't fit," so it must have been his.

He read Catcher in the Rye at about age 12, and also The World According to Garp, by John Irving, at the urging of his mother.  My parents recommended Garp to me, too! And I recommended Franny and Zooey to Ben! And also White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which he bought, because we had a nice hardback for $4!

I didn't mean to put Ben on the spot by asking if he'd read any women. I was responding to his comment that he liked mainly the older stuff and the only contemporary writer he really liked was David Foster Wallace.* I recommended Zadie Smith as a contemporary writer who puts people together of different cultures and generations, the way Flannery O'Connor would stick people of different beliefs and attitudes into a paper bag and shake them up to see what would happen. Ben liked that, and also Salman Rushdie's blurb on the back.

*Wikipedia tells me Graham Greene had bipolar disorder. Ah. Erm, David Foster Wallace.

Ben is writing a novel himself!  And that's all I'm going to say about it.

Ben remembered that the first book he ever bought at Babbitt's, at the old location, was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, when he was 15. It hooked him, on Vonnegut, and on Babbitt's, and on used bookstores in general, because new bookstores, he says, have plenty of cookbooks and mysteries, but not this great stuff.

"Why Rimbaud?" I asked. Because Kerouac mentioned him. Lots of Ben's reading is of the one-book-leads-to-another sort, and, if you read my blog, you know the same thing happens to me. Why Main Street? Because we didn't have Babbitt, mentioned in the Nobel Prize citation, or Arrowsmith, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Ben asked us if Babbitt's Books is named for Babbitt. Yes, it was once a favorite book of the owner.  And there is a giant flat-Brian picture of the owner in the window holding Babbitt, one of those wonderful library Read posters. Sometimes it scares the baristas at the Coffeehouse across the street, because it looks like he is watching them. Telling them to read this book....

And I asked Ben if he knew the Pulitzer bloggers. He did not, but I told him they are in my blogroll, and they are here and here, too, Ben, if you are reading. Or if your mom is reading!

Throw it at the Wall

Day 94 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Jennifer, who is writing a novel of her own, has been reading Stephen King novels ever since she read On Writing in 2008 and liked his writing advice. I liked his writing advice, too, and I see an anniversary edition coming out in July.

Jennifer has read 20 novels during this King binge, but she did not like all of them. She threw Desperation at the wall. She made an actual dent in the wall where she threw it, so that is where she throws other books she doesn't like.

Like the last book in the Dark Tower series. She threw that. No spoilers, as I haven't read any of them, and she carefully refrained from saying why. But that other guy I talked to said you either love it or hate it. (I think he threw his copy, too!)

Jennifer has also been reading Jack Kerouac and likes him a lot, even though "he never met a comma."

And yesterday a young woman came in looking for The Catcher in the Rye. Perennials in the bookstore are coming back like perennials in the garden! Must be spring.

Hybrid Vine

Day 45 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

People keep telling me what they are reading in various places, and I keep trying to gather the slips of paper (literal and floating-in-my-brain slips) in one place, here, on this hybrid, ever-growing vine of a book blog.

On the street outside Babbitt's on Tuesday, a fellow told me he was reading The Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (aka The Possessed) and the stack he'd just bought included Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain, which a fellow had come in looking for (and found--we had 2 copies, shelved in different places, like the slips in my brain and in my giant purse....) the previous week. Why are people reading Letters from the Earth this March?! (It's a miscellany, like this blog entry and the hybrid vine in the picture!)

Street guy is the one who looked for but couldn't find Habit of Being, the letters of Flannery O'Connor, whose phrase "a habit of being" helped me understand myself and why I write, and whose birthday was yesterday!

In my inbox at Facebook, Tim told me he is reading Black Sabbatical, by Brett Eugene Ralph, a book of poems, in preparation for writing a review of it. Tim himself is the author of Fault Lines, a book of poems from Backwaters Press, which also published Even Now, by Susanna Lang, who is up next, with Virginia Bell, in the RHINO Reads poetry series at Brothers K coffeeshop in Evanston, Illinois. And Tim has written a book about Jack Kerouac, whose book On the Road we cannot keep in Babbitt's for more than half a day, as it walks right on out the door again.

Joy, who reported this at an online writing workshop, is reading Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich and The Humbling by Philip Roth (whom some of you will remember from the "dick lit" entries.) Joe is reading Rama II by Arthur C. Clarke, and Rebecca is reading Blackout by Connie Willis, both readers alerting me of this in Facebook comments. Likewise, Carolyn commented that she is reading The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood.

Bringing all these titles together on a hybrid vine, like an anthologist of unlikely blooms, I mention that Toni is reading The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker, and that Lorel created the vine, which you can view in more detail at flickr.

Baker's novel is about a poet who cannot write a promised introduction to an anthology of poems, and this, too, will now have to go into my Wish List at Amazon, along with several actual books of poetry, thanks to its plot and main character, a struggling free verse poet, and its discussion, within a fiction, of many other poets. Sigh.... (Or maybe I can find it at Babbitt's!)

And, now, before I disappear into the whirling slips of paper in my brain and the duties of the daily routine, I will say that Lizabeth is reading The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence and Connie is reading John Amen's book of poems, More of Me Disappears....