- Tao Te Ching (Victor Mair translation) – Because the world is primarily intuitive and only logical after the fact; reason built the world but it will tear it down if we don’t learn to give way to intuition and peace and stillness. Victor Mair because the English he uses is straightforward while retaining the paradoxical mystery of the text. His translation is not overly flowery or overly interpretative, making it a perfect tool for meditation.
2. Walt Whitman – 1st Edition – Leaves of Grass – The Sleepers, To Think Of Time, Song of Myself in their original forms. Co-opting Emerson’s ideas and the rhythmic pattern of the King James Bible, Whitman gave us the first gospel of the American Religion. Comparable only to the Gettyburg Address and the major speeches of MLK, Whitman was an orator on the page (thus the long lines which the page cannot contain). Read this out loud, preferably out of doors, or at least moving around the room.
3. I and Thou, Martin Buber – A slim book, but dense. It’s poetry in prose and probably the most important book you will never read. Politics of Experience and Master and His Emissary are all that comes close in English, and this book is shorter than both, but you have to let it make sense. Buber explains the phenomena of It. It’s a square peg in a round hole – it’s the unity within the inexhaustible variety of life that is only discovered in the relationship between sovereign infinite individuals (me and you).
4. The Tempest – Shakespeare – Because Shakespeare was all about meta- and it’s a verse play about being stranded on a desert island. The stuff dreams are made on…
5. Stevens – Wallace Stevens – Everyman’s edition – It’s small enough to fit in your pocket. The depth of the meditations and the music of his language implies a depth of feeling that can only be recognized as spiritual. Blind belief is not faith, rather it’s an inverse of it. Stevens was perhaps a skeptic but he was no stranger to the ever-present moment which unites us all.
6. Albert Camus – Everyman’s Library Edition (The Plague, The Fall, Exile and The Kingdom, and The Myth of Sysiphus) – 1 perfect and essential novel, 1 perfect and essential novella, 5 perfect stories, 2 essential essays in a beautifully bound edition with durable pages. This is no review, but it’s one sexy book, just saying. They could have included The Stranger, true, but then you would probably never have to buy another book.
7. Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities – The most remarkable book I’ve read. At once, it is a novel, short stories, and a cycle of prose poems. At once, historical fiction and fantasy. If the height of artistry is original form than this is the height of artistry. The great thing about it is it doesn’t have to be read cover to cover but it can be without much effort. The italicized sections about Kublai Khan and Marco Polo provide the narrative. In my view, after you’ve read about the cities and gotten a sense of what is being arrived at, you can read the italicized portions through and then read the different cities at your leisure like a book of poems. Or open it to a page that seems interesting and begin. It’s literary choose your own adventure.
8. The Gospel of Mark, King James Version – pocket edition – The oldest story of Jesus does not include the immaculate conception and in its earliest versions ends with an empty tomb leaving the rest open to interpretation. In spite of the miracles, it offers a very human portrait of Jesus, giving it the feel of magical realism. Pairs nicely with One Hundred Years Of Solitude only it’s a couple hundred pages shorter which is why it made the list. My version has an introduction by Nick Cave.
9. The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist – Framed by a Nietzche parable of a wise master who is subverted by his most efficient and best emissary, McGilgchrist gives us not only the neuroscience behind what I just tried to tell you in my discussion of the Tao, but also traces the thread of the primacy of the right hemisphere of the brain throughout our political and cultural history. It is a dense, epic behemoth unlike most of my favorite books, it took me a year to read it cover to cover, but it unequivocally was worth the time spent.
10. RD Laing – The Politics of Experience – Lang’s prose is poetry. My edition has the prose poem Birds of Paradise attached just to offer up how lyrical this man was and the importance of language and image and metaphor in our understanding of the world. The book itself explains the psychotic experience. What does the psychotic experience have to do with the rest of us? Because it hinges on the same cycle as the religious experience. Compare to Joseph Campbell’s heroes journey, he outlines this himself in one of the lectures in Myths To Live By. But aren’t we past that religion junk (science, blah, blah)? No, it’s the same existential underpinnings which weigh on us all indiscriminately. Anyone can go insane, and living in a world that is arguably itself insane, what does that say about those we call sane?
11. Vonnegutt – Slaughterhouse Five – Because War Is A Racket. And, while we all pay for it, our sons and daughters called to fight pay the most, or as General Smedley Butler said it: Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end all wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.” Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month. All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill…and be killed. But wait! Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance – something the employer pays for in an enlightened state – and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left. Then, the most crowning insolence of all – he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back – when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work – at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
12. Vonnegutt – Cat’s Cradle – The urge to dominate through war was never enough for humanity because we only killed ourselves; we needed to add scientific arrogance to the mix. This, the story of Ice-9, brings to mind the Frost poem about whether the world ends in fire or in ice. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t matter, everything’s dead.
13. Claudia Rankine – Don’t Let Me Be Lonely/Citizen – These two books are really of a pair in my mind in that they’re themes are anxiety, isolation, marginalization, race, and America today (The US). Are they prose poems, essays, or biographical fictions? Claudia Rankine invented her own form to tell a singular yet importantly universal story about where we’re at as a country. In spite of the genius at work to make these books, they are incredibly approachable, very affecting, and quick to read. This is required reading.
14. CS Lewis – The Abolition of Man – Lewis supposedly makes the case for a universal morality, but it’s more than that, he realizes that it’s an ineffable prospect and what this really is is a warning that seeking morality through secular logical ideology leads to inhumanity and disaster. The Tao explained for those of us with right brain deficiencies.
15. General Smedley Butler – War Is A Racket – To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. We must take the profit out of war. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
16. Joseph Campbell – The Hero With A Thousand Faces – Not just one story, this is every story. This book and Shakespeare are enough to give you the foundation you need for a career in being human.
17. Jose Luis Borges – Collected Fictions – Because criticism is fiction is poetry is fiction is essay is fiction. Because he invented the Latin American novel without ever having to write a novel. Because his humility and grace and imagination are exemplary of what’s best in us.
18. Amy Hempel – Collected Stories – Freud can be fairly summed up by his quote: Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. Hempel’s narrators and character come through to the other side. Perhaps she can best be summarized by her story The Man in Bogota about a kidnapping which leaves a middle-aged man in the best physical health of his life: How do we know what happens isn’t good?
19. Toni Morrison – Jazz – Jazz music is about the seeking of intuitive form through rhythm, repetition, and improvisation. The tension between instinct and rule. For most of us, it seems like music is the highest art and no novel or work of prose ever as successfully co-opted the musical language in words.
20. Herman Melville – Moby Dick – If Emerson and Hawthorne are The Old Testament of The American Religion, Whitman and MLK the gospel, Moby Dick is what bridges us to the rapture of Faulkner and the apocalypse of Cormac McCarthy.
21. Ken Kesey – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Because authority always wins: FUCK AUTHORITY…
22. Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian/ The Road – The last novels that needed to be written, assuming it is in fact the end times. The beauty of McCarthy’s lyrical prose carries the fire through the pitch black to the final destination.