Must Read Books or Books I Needed to Read, by Josh Stallings

 

Q: Any tips for summer reading?

A: I don’t know what summer reading is vs winter reading. Beach read? I sunburn in seconds, can’t imagine that would be fun. One of my favorite places to read is in the woods, foggy or even better soft rain falling through the trees. Add a bit of fire crackling and I’m in heaven. For a more nuanced look at what “summer reads” means, scroll down to Susan C. Shea’s post from Monday. 

Like most writers and readers I read all the time. I rarely read books at the time that they are being heavily promoted. This isn’t for some punk fuck-the-mainstream-I-only-read-indy-authors stance. I wish every writer myself included, got that billboard above Times Square, full page ad kind of push from their publishers. 

Back in the long ago we had what were called water-cooler conversations. People worked together in an office and instead of a personal water vessel in every hand, there was a common water cooler. Gathering around it co-workers would chat about that great new book. If you hadn’t read it you were left out of the conversation. I now work at home. I feel no need to be of the moment, culturally.  

I ready very slooowly, I will never get through all the books in my library. The how and why of what I read is partly because of my dyslexia. I didn’t thrive in scholastic settings. And I love learning thus I am an autodidactic learner, big ass word for “self-taught.” As it pertains to my reading choices, it means school is always in session. I chase odd ideas down, make connections, one book leads to the next. Sometimes I am chewing on a bigger problem and searching books to help me solve it.

Lately I’ve been swimming in the “I’m Getting Older Creek.” It is connected with my work in progress and my life at large. I wish I could pick up the phone and call my pops, ask him about growing older as an artist. I didn’t realize when he died that he would be gone so long. Then again Pops was always too busy living and creating to think much about growing older. Up until the end he had another life’s worth of projects fermenting. Maybe that is the trick, keep working and stay in the present. Life will do what it does regardless of my plans.  

Back to the question at hand. I started my search into growing old with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, naturally. Holy crap, what a different novel this is from the one I read in my youth. More accurately, I was a much different reader when I first read No Country For Old Men. Back then I was stunned by Chigurh the hit man, his insane but structured world view was scary as hell and oddly relatable.

I also loved Llewelyn Moss, the hapless blue collar thief by accident was my kind of anti hero. The novel’s inciting incident comes when Llewelyn goes back to a murder scene to bring a dying man some water. He’s doing all the wrong things for understandable if not morally correct reasons.

Reading it today I see the novel from Sheriff Bell’s perspective. Bell is getting ready to retire from a job and an increasingly brutal world he has out lived. While wrestling with the heroic myth folks see him as, he needs to discover who he actually is.

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it. It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is somethin I dont want to be wrong about.

           - Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

How did this lead me to read Dialogues of Plato I haven’t a clue. Plato is older than dirt, maybe that’s it.

To understand Plato and the context for his work, I went to Audible where I found The Great Courses, Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues. Sixteen lectures by Michael Sugrue covering time, place and each of Plato’s dialogues. I would listen to a lecture while driving down to see our older son, then I’d read the dialogue discussed. 

Things I discovered —

Plato is funny, “Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.”

Wise, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” 

A feminist,“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

He didn’t think that gender should hold a person back, but he did believe in a rigid class system. In The Republic Plato imagines a perfect society with four distinct classes. A special person could elevate one station, but not more than that. He believed the top class should never have more than four times the wealth than that of the lowest class. Any wealth above that four times would be given up to be spent on public works.

My take away, I see now how many of our thought structures come from Plato and Socrates. I also see how humans abandoned good knowledge in pursuit of amassing unbelievable wealth to the detriment of the planet and us folks living on it. 

This led me to a couple of streaming shows, one on MAX, “Fired on Mars” is a wonderful send up of what the likely outcome is of signing up for Musk’s or Bezos' Mars population plans. You think working in these billionaire’s non union factories sucks? Imagine doing it in a place where they actually control the air you breathe.

Second was “I’m a Virgo” streaming on Prime. Activist film maker and rapper Boots Riley takes on race, police, and economic disparity all while having fun with super hero mythology. It’s all the amusement of “The Boys” minus the nihilism.

Both of these projects cracked the code to dealing with hard social justice issues in a lighthearted non-medicine tasting way. These led me to…  

Titanium Noir, by Nick Harkaway. It came out this last May and might have slid under my radar if not for brother Lark who voraciously tears through books like a starving great white would dig into a surfing contest. My first reaction was, it’s more hard boiled than noir. Second, I was afraid it was a near future alternate reality Raymond Chandler pastiche. Three pages in I realized the judgey part of my brain was completely wrong, I told it to shut the hell up and enjoy the ride. This is the story of a private dick who works mostly for the cops on cases involving Titans. Titans are billionaires, the point zero-zero-zero-one percenters. They live like gods while the rest are left to grab what crumbs they can. The Titans are tech giants who have found a way to live forever, almost.

The cost of immortality is losing part of who you were, and perhaps that’s not a bad bargain anyway.

Harkaway does what masters of noir and hard boiled have always done, shine harsh light on the brutal realities of societal injustices. And he does it with this snarky humor and punishing violence of both the physical and emotional kind. 

Lastly is a book that if I’d heard the hype I might’ve never read it. 

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin is so damn good. It feeds me on every level. Emotionally tough and accurate. Structurally breathtaking. It is about creation in an artistic sense, the collaborations that it takes to do really fine work. Love both platonic and romantic. Friendship and the cost we pay and exact from those we love over unhealed wounds. Zevin also captures something I have been searching for, she plays with structure, knowing when to zip us years into the future, when to fall back to catch a childhood memory. She is in a class with Emily St. John Mandel and David Mitchell as far as story structure goes, she is also in class of her own. There are moments that had me wetting my pillow with tears, lost in the pages of Zevin’s creation. This writer deserves every ounce of success she has achieved.

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” may be the perfect “beach read.” As long as you don’t mind crying in public. But isn’t that why we wear sunglasses?