Author Photo And Bio
For me it’s almost impossible to compare books by writers whose lifetimes intersect mine with books by writers who died before I was born, so I’m sending you two separate lists [with Mona’s comments].
THE ALWAYS DEAD
1. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927). This is a portrait of love, in movement. Mrs. Ramsay becomes an ideal. This is a book I wish I could have written, because I wish I could have grown up in the life that could inspire it.
2. Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1901, 1902). I read Henry James’ work all the time and once spent a year reading no one but him, there’s not one Henry James novel on this list. I don’t prefer one novel over another. I just love being in the medium of his mind. But this is the only book by his brother that I’ve reread.
3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860–61) was the first great novel I ever read and I remember my shivering thrill at discovering it’s demanding pleasures as Pip, after meets his patron in the cemetery and slowly grows into his life.
4. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27). I was once in a class in Berkeley, with two beautiful graduate students who were complaining about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The boy next to me shrugged and said, “It got me out of Bakersfield.” A Remembrance of Things Past got me out of my twenties and the sorrow I was nursing. I’ve begun rereading it this time in French, infinitesimally slowly.
5. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869).conjures a complete world I want to live in.
6. Stories of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). I will be reading these stories on my deathbed, with a mug of Yogi Egyptian licorice tea.
7. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871–72). These characters remain so sharply defined, without even rereading the book. Unlike Jane Austen, whose sentences snap back at you with brisk pleasure. Eliot’s characters have indelible details. I remember Dorothea picking out her mother’s jewels. Mrs. Bulstrode lying down and taking off her jewelry. There’s so much about idealization in this book, about work, about bad marriages.
8. Lolita (1955) and Spring in Fialta (1936) by Vladimir Nabokov. How can anyone resist Nabokov’s sheer spanning intelligence, his games and linguistic guile? I love his profoundly sophisticated urbanity.
9. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847). I came to Jane Eyre later than I should have. I love the book, but can’t completely succumb to its romanticism. The world view of Vilette is closer to mine, but Jane Eyre is a perfect book.
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884). The exuberance and American twang of the language are so beguiling and thrilling that when one reaches the abrupt ending when Jim tells Huck that his father has already died, (meaning that Huck has already grown up before our eyes) it registers as a stunning sleight of hand.
Mona Simpson’s Wild Card: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615). I debated between Don Quixote and Moby-Dick, each representing one of the great, long reading experiences of my life, and chose Don Quixote only because it’s a warmer book.
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD OF OUR TIME
The thrilling thing about this second list is that each of these books, by writers who were alive in my lifetime, is that they’re as deep and pleasurable as those on the first list.
1. Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Reawakening (1963) by Primo Levi.
2. The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (1992).
3. The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata (1954).
4. The Practical Heart by Allan Gurganus (2001).
5. Jamesland by Michelle Huneven (2003).
6. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul (1961).
7. Stories of Alice Munro (hint, hint Alfred A. Knopf)
8. Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (1998).
9. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996).
10. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011).