Klaus Varley Brings Semi-Literary Back - A Book List (Sort-of)

Since Bringing Literary Back was so darn popular, and like an ambition teenager, one of our goals here at The Brothel is to become more and more popular, below are a number of lists* serving various purposes, including, but not limited to, your amusement, your procrastination, your something, and for you to scoff at.

List 1: Books On My Shelf I Have Not Read but Would Honestly Like to Read (as opposed to those books on my shelf that I have not read and would not like to read and am not sure why I bought them or maybe they were a present. A bad present)

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Cock and Bull - Will Self
Trouble is my Business - Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
You Just Don't Understand - Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.
Black Dahlia - James Ellroy
Burr - Gore Vidal
Operating Instructions - Anne Lamott
Dune - Frank Herbert
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant
South by No North - Charles Bukowski
Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

List 2: Books that I don't "pretend" to have read...let's just say "Books, that when brought up in a social setting elicit a, 'who wants another drink?' from yours truly." In fact, they're so famous I don't even feel the need to include the author's name. Just imagine each title followed by "you know who."

The Fountainhead
The Sound and the Fury
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Moby Dick (I may have read this as a kid, I can't remember. A good discussion this does not make. Who needs a drink?)
Crime and Punishment
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Road
The People's History of America
Any Book by Cormac McCarthy
Why do people keep bringing up Cormac McCarthy?! He's not that good...is he? Who needs a drink?

List 3: Books that after reading will make my life glorious. Or at least that's what I imagine they will do. At the VERY least after reading the books below, I could say at a party, "If you like Cormac McCarthy, you'll LOVE ____."

The Bible - God and his/her translators
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
The Complete Works of Lao Tzu - Lao Tzu
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

And...more? I'm never going to get to any of these by blogging about them.

"Who needs a drink?"

Much easier.

-KV


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*I will not know this number until I write the lists, at which time I might go back and change this introduction. However, if you are reading this, it must mean I have not deleted this section. Why not? So you know that every time someone starts a paragraph knowing too much about what will follow, they have actually already written what will follow and are pretending not to know. In other words, you will be reading the work of liars. But not here; not at The Brothel. Well, not here, on this piece. This piece just has long footnotes. Well, one long footnote. My bad.

Bringing Literary Back - A Book List

After reading my summer reading list, The Brothel's good friend C____ decided to weigh in with a list of books and authors we've never heard of, but according to her are worth your time. In other words, this list is not endorsed by The Literary Brothel - read at your own discretion! -KV

BRINGING LITERARY BACK

It was indicated that a certain someone involved with The Literary Brothel was looking for book recommendations. The following is what happens when it is intimated to a New York publishing person that their opinion on books might be welcome. (ed. note: good to know)

Books I’ve read recently and for which you should drop everything. Why aren’t you already at your local independent bookstore? Put down that milkshake! Go!

City of Thieves by David Benioff
Lush Life by Richard Price
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
Drop City by T.C. Boyle
The White Album by Joan Didion
Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking by Aoibheann Sweeney
The Journey Home by Edward Abbey

Books I haven’t read but that I’ve heard are good from reliable sources, like friends who read more literary fiction than I do because I’m lazy and prefer books under 1,000 pages with plots that move along trippingly and in a linear fashion.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Giraffe by J.M. Ledgard
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Books to treat as though they are dark figures lurking in an alley at night when you are walking by yourself. I.e. run away! (Why? Because they are sort of tripe that’s all too ballyhooed in Manhattan these days—atrocious first novels or memoirs written by young, privileged media darlings with entirely inflated senses of self-worth.)

All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen
Personal Days by Ed Park
I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
Beautiful Children by Charles Bock
The Mayor's Tongue by Nathaniel Rich
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Books you should already have read when you were younger and more impressionable because you’ll never like them as much if you read them now.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Books I haven’t read but pretend I have:

The Bible (ed note: God wrote this)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond

Books my boyfriend likes because he’s a geek for Classical history and drama:

The Histories by Herodotus
Xenophon’s The Expedition of Cyrus (a.k.a. Anabasis)
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
Anything by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus

Books you should read because they are among the best ones I worked on before I bailed out of book publishing:

The Last Beach Bungalow by Jennie Nash
Little Pink Slips by Sally Koslow
The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall
Midwife of the Blue Ridge by Christine Blevins
The Red Scarf by Kate Furnivall
Catching Genius by Kristy Kiernan
The Accomplice by Marcus Galloway
The Savage Trail by Jory Sherman
Rogue Lawman by Peter Brandvold
The Outcast by Luke Cypher

Books to try reading and then throw at your cat:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Book I’m reading next:

...

I don’t know. Suggestions?

-C_____

Recommended Summer Reading

I did a bit of reading in my early to late 20s. People used to ask me "which book should I read next?" Ah, those glorious 20s.

In recent years, I get that question less and less. This might have to do with my hurried responses of "How the hell should I know?" or "Whatever you feel like reading." These days I simply don't read as much as I used to.

However, all that reading was not all for...not. I was recently asked which books I might recommend for summer reading. Hey, I forgot about "summer reading." And now the summer is at least half-way over! Oh no!

Below is a brief list of books that I loved in my twenties, and that you might love if you are in your 20s, or slightly younger, or slightly older. And no need to hurry; they're good no matter what season it is.

(In order of greatness)

1. The Great Gatsby
2. Lolita
3. Post Office
4. On the Road
5. Ender's Game
6. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
7. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (This is cheating since I just read this, but I WOULD have read it in my 20s, had I known about it then)
8. The Missing Piece meets The Big O
9. Under the Banner of Heaven
10. Me Talk Pretty One Day

You can't go wrong with any/all of those books. "The Missing Piece" might be a bit short; you can read it in about five minutes. But that doesn't make it any less great.

-KV