1. The Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
- It has a really good introduction that gives context to the text,
Lao-tzu, and to the translator's relationship to text. It's a
beautiful translation and has interesting notes at the end. This guy
apparently also translated a lot of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. The
text itself is as close to a guidebook to how I'd like to exist in
this world as anything I could imagine. I read this in one go just
over a week ago and afterwards just lied on some pillows on the floor
so blissed out all I could do was curl and uncurl my toes.
"We shape clay into a pot,
But it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want."
2. No One Belongs Here More Than You, Stories by Miranda July
- Well, online it says, "Fans of Lorrie Moore should rub this book all
over themselves." I've never read Lorrie Moore and I still want to
rub this book all over myself. And you. There's this one short story
(I just moved and can't find the book anywhere or I'd tell you the
title) about a young woman who starts working peep shows when her
girlfriend abandons her and it was just amazing. I would make
photocopies for all of you if I had money for my copy account. So go
read it standing in Chapters. Shouldn't take that long.
3. Two, by Marguerite Duras
- Two lovely short prose pieces that don't blur the line between fiction
and non-fiction because they don't even recognize the line to be there
in the first place. The pieces are The Slut of Normandy Coast and
Atlantic Man. Very compelling and strange and simple. Following the
stories is an interview with Duras where she talks about the writing
of The Lover- how she didn't plan anything, and that it was her
attempt to free herself from literature through literature.
4. Short Talks by Anne Carson
- Freaking amazing lyric poetry. I think that's what it's called- I
don't know anything about poetry- but this is just really powerful and
makes my mind hum and is full of all kinds of weird, synaesthetic
impressions and metaphors that are like a big punch in the face.
Apparently they were all written as accompanying texts for her
paintings, and then she brought them all together into this
collection.
5. a live journal under the name girlandagun, called transtextual transylvania
- the recent entry- a totally relentless narrative of a harrowing last
couple of years in a young American woman's life.
http://girlandagun.
and I'm sneaking in one more...a fascinating livejournal by a young
Canadian woman who has recently undergone a male to female sex change.
http://splinterjete.
Most influential :
1. Coming Through Slaughter, by Michael Ondaatje
- The book, chosen randomly for an alternative ed english program, that
made a fifteen-year-old-high-school-drop-out me decide I might go back
to school, if it meant reading books like this. I could say it's a
speculative fiction about New Orleans saxophone player Buddy Bolden
and the strange photographer Bellocq who would photograph prostitutes
then take the photographs and scratch out their faces, but it was the
writing, just the writing, that I loved. I barely even remember what
it was about.
2. The Tracey Fragments, by Maureen Medved.
- Reached right into my guts, pulled them out, and flung them over the stars.
3. The Lover, by Marguerite Duras
- Just incredibly beautiful...a true story that transcends memoir and
autobiography- about the search for desire, and the power dynamics in
a sexual relationship between a 15 year old french expat girl and a
Chinese millionaire in colonial Saigon. Fragments woven together with
a dream-like logic that reads like music.
4. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, by Ayi Kwei Armah
- A book I wish I could strap everyone down in a chair and force to
read, Clockwork Orange style. Written in the seventies by a young
Ghanaian man about post-colonial Ghana shortly after independence in
1956. One of the most powerful, telling, profound books not just
coming out of West Africa but about West Africa, period. It should be
on all high school curriculum. Everybody should read this book.
5. Okay...anything by Jeanette Winterson
(and Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes)
