Playing it back

This week it’s blogger’s choice, so I’d like to revisit last week’s question:  Have there been recent novels which had you laughing, crying, clinging to the edge of your seat?

by Dietrich

Every once in a while there’s that perfect new book that comes along, characters with voices that resonate and stories that stay with me. 

These become books that I like to revisit from time to time, to hear those amazing voices once more.

Here are a few favorites I’ve reread and would like to recommend.

The Rum Diaries by Hunter S. Thompson is a novel that he wrote in the early 60s, but it wasn’t published until ’98. The story was influenced by the author’s own experiences in San Juan. Not a true account of events but a re-imagined work of fiction, based on the world around Thompson at that particular time. 

"I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything that was outside, and I knew I could never go back to the way I was.”

What’s interesting, as any Gonzo reader can tell, is how this early work starts to show Thompson’s trademark wit, mockery and righteousness. If you haven’t read it, put it on your list.

Another voice that I can’t ever get enough of belongs to J.D. Salinger. And although I’m a big fan of Catcher in the Rye, it’s Franny and Zooey that remains my favorite. The story, or rather, two short stories are deep, moving and powerful. Masterful dialogue in an irresistible book, and one I’ll keep revisiting.

"Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and —sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.”

The third one I’m including is Gunsights by Elmore Leonard, published in ’79, written decades after the popular westerns he wrote when he started out. This one’s about two Arizona legends on opposite sides of a land dispute the newspapers dubbed the Rincon Mountain War. It’s got all the sharp dialog and quirky characters typical of a Leonard novel. And certainly one worthy of that top shelf of favorites. 

“If you're going to spend your life standing on principle, you want to be sure everyone understands what the principle is.”

And I reread The Help by Kathryn Stockett, from 2009. The story takes place around the 60s civil rights movement and introduces a wonderful cast of well-drawn characters. The story deals with how blacks were treated in Jackson, Mississippi, as seen through the eyes of a group of black maids who dare to tell their side of things.

“I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.” 

The one I’m rereading now is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. First published in ’57, a tale of the Beat Generation, the pursuit of freedom and the search for meaning. It’s a rhythmic prose that Kerouac described as his kick-writing style, pounding a typewriter for three weeks straight, fueled on pea soup and benzedrine, churning out the first draft of a tale of the rise of a new generation in search of its own American Dream. To me, his words are pure magic.

”I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.”