Sticky Books

"Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends (& while it is easy to tag more, part of the challenge is to think about which 15 friends would have the weirdest or most interesting book list), including me. If you don't want to play, no sweat. Feel free to go about your business."

I went back and forth with this one for a bit. At first I had the somewhat pretentious idea of listing 15 books that had influenced my development as a writer. Then I decided to simply think about 15 books I'd read in the last few years that I did not want to put down. Here they are:

1. Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold:
Gold knows the difference between history and nostalgia. His novel doesn't pine for the long-ago days of the great stage magicians, their tricks, escapes and rivalries. It surrounds the reader with them, feeling as fresh and modern and exciting as anything I've read.

2. Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White:
I've never actually read this novel. I listened to it on a drive from Massachusetts to Ohio. While I liked the story — the low-key adventures of a plant pathologist in the kind of Southern town one is obligated to refer to as "eccentric" — it was the author's storytelling voice with which I fell in love. Since then, I've never been able to write fiction without thinking about what it would sound like when read aloud.

3. The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong:
I became interested in Karen Armstrong because I was interested in her memoirs about convent life, and her decisions both to become a Catholic nun and to leave her order. I came across this book by accident, and discovered within it a means to address and confront my fears — both of the Islamic fundamentalists in other countries and the Christian fundamentalists in this one.

4. The General Retires and Other Stories, by Nguyen Huy Thiep:
Published during a very brief period in the late 1980s when the Communist government allowed some freedom of expression, this collection of short stories — some lyrical, some stark — served as my first window into postwar Vietnam. The title story made my jaw drop the first time I read it, and just thinking about it now still gives me the shivers.

5. The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth:
I read this novel-in-sonnets to Nam a little bit each night over the course of about six months. The ending is still far too bleak for me, but the story, which chronicles a group of yuppies and artists in 1980s San Francisco, held up even better than I had expected.

6. The Chinatown Death-Cloud Peril, by Paul Malmont:
How to create the perfect book for Rob: Take two of his favorite pulp authors (Walter Gibson and Lester Dent, the creators of The Shadow and Doc Savage, respectively). Use both as characters in an action-packed mystery, drawing on their real-life experiences (Gibson was a noted magician, while Dent was a world-traveling adventurer). Stir in cameo appearances by other pulp writers like H.P. Lovecraft and L. Ron Hubbard. The result is something I can only describe as "literary pulp," a genre — and a book — I couldn't put down.

7. Last Night At The Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan:
This slice-of-life novel about the last shift before a Red Lobster restaurant closes forever — and the people who show up to work that night — is short enough to be read in one ride on the BART. But the characters are so well-drawn, and the situation so close to what I'm seeing all around me these days, that I'll likely be thinking about it for a long, long time.

8. The Splendid Table's How To Eat Supper, by Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift:
Brad gave me this cookbook for Christmas, and I'm now cooking out of it for three or four meals a week (including the Hoisin Four Flavor Noodles I had for lunch). Its recipes are simple enough for me to prepare and work well for two people, and the book is also packed with great stories and anecdotes, like the history of curry or "How to Behave in France."

9. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, by Peter Guralnick:
If I ever fulfill my dream of writing a history of Boston ska in the 1990s, my hope is that it will look a lot like this: detailed chapters packed with humor and information about Stax Records, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin and the political and social changes that created the Southern soul music of the 1960s.

10. What Narcissism Means To Me, Tony Hoagland:
Although the recommendations by Nick Hornby and Garrison Keillor helped, it was his poem about one man's struggle to justify the purchase of a country CD as a Christmas present for his brother that convinced me Tony Hoagland and I were kindred spirits.

11. The God of Animals, by Aryn Kyle:
I heard the opening lines of this novel on NPR, and knew that reading it would be an emotionally exhausting experience, and that I had to read it anyway. Here they are:
"Six months before Polly Cain drowned in the canal, my sister, Nona, ran off and
married a cowboy. My father said there was a time when he would have been able
to stop her, and I wasn't sure if he meant a time in our lives when she would have
listened to him, or a time in history when the Desert Valley Sheriff's Posse would
have been allowed to chase after her with torches and drag her back to our house by her yellow hair."

12. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis:
"Moneyball" is practically required reading for those who love watching the Oakland Athletics, or baseball in general. In fact, the principles it describes have become so universal that I've begun applying them in other areas (using a "Moneyball" strategy in Settlers of Catan, for example). However, I am most likely to remember this book for dubbing Kevin Youklis "the Greek god of walks."

13. Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman:
For whatever reason, literary fiction about super-heroes has been popular lately, from Jonathan Lethem's "The Fortress of Solitude" and Tom De Haven's "It's Superman!" to Mur Lafferty's "Playing for Keeps" and Matthew Wayne Selznick's "Brave Men Run." Yet none of them are as much fun as Grossman's story of a criminal mastermind working out his greatest scheme while suffering from "malign hypercognition syndrome." This is a book I unwrapped at Christmas and began reading right away, not stopping until I was finished.

14. My Date With Satan, Stacey Richter:
Short story collections are often hit or miss, but Richter's is an exception: almost every story in this book is terrific, if somewhat disturbing. My favorite might be the pseudo-application from a woman who wants to win an NEA grant by transforming herself into a crazy cat lady.

15. Dr. Fate: Countdown to Mystery, by Steve Gerber, Justiniano and Walden Wong:
By itself, this story about disgraced psychiatrist Kent V. Nelson — who might be the latest incarnation of the super-hero Dr. Fate, or might simply be drunk, delusional and desperate — would be a strange and wonderful head trip. The fact that comics legend Gerber wrote the first three issues on his deathbed, leaving colleagues Adam Beechen, Mark Evanier, Gail Simone and Mark Waid to each provide his or her own ending to the tale, helps make it something special.