May 11, 2004

Some books make even the hair on my legs stand on its end, others make my body convulse in quick bursts of pleasure, and once I cummed while reading random passages aloud. Because I have an intense relation with my books, I decided to write about my 100 favourite books. Every week or so I’ll add a few items to the list.

1. Raw, sexual, and poetic, Querelle is a book that transforms murderers into angels and vices into virtues. Every action in the book is drenched in homosexuality and longing as the characters move through a foggy city looking for clarity or just someone to fuck. The sexuality and sheer force of Genet’s writing is truly remarkable.
2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does such incredibly destructive and imaginative things with language that it’s impossible not to like it. Reading it in Physics class once, I laughed and laughed until I nearly got myself kicked out. Everything I read is on some level a veiled reference to trips down the rabbit hole.
3. Beautiful Losers is probably the most lovingly written book about utter failures, and it’s filled with such longing, desperation, and vulgarity that it becomes mystical, orgasmic.
4. Though I feared Women in Love would be sentimental and pornographic, it’s powered by such incredible tension and dynamics that it eventually blossoms into hatred and murder.
5. Mrs. Dalloway, more so than any other book, made me see that beauty is everywhere. Everything from love to parties to suicide is merged in one intense moment of consciousness.

6. Dr. J. was reading passages from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in class one day, which made me shivery in my seat. The book deals with the same tensions between art and faith that I’ve always struggled with, and some of the passages are so beautiful they still give me a hard-on.
7. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is so deeply Satanic, so enamored of the brilliance of Hell, that it transformed me into a Satanist. Blake’s writing forces open the doors of perception and by the time I finished reading it I wanted to embrace all opposites, all contradictions. And I did.
8. I read The Catcher in the Rye twice: once as I kid and once as a young man. The book changed between readings — it became simpler yet more profound, the writing became more honest and moving. Salinger should be read twice.
9. The Trial is the book that turned me on to the study of literature. The more I read the book (I must have read it five times in the course of a summer), the more complex and impenetrable it became until I found myself going through volumes of criticism to make sense of it. It still amazes me that something so clearly and precisely written can be so provocatively difficult to understand.
10. Point Counter Point is about ideas and humanity, a struggle to live a human and compassionate life and ultimately failing.