Published: December 27, 2008 10:40 am      

A reading list for the coming year

Over the years, I’ve often bowed to the closing of a calendar year by offering my alternative Top 10 books of the year.

The past year hasn’t been a great one for my reading list, however, so rather than look back, this time I thought we’d come up a knockout agenda for the coming year.

Symptomatic of 2008, perhaps, is the book I recently completed. I usually enjoy Dickens, but ``Hard Times’’ left an odd, uncomfortable feeling. It’s not that I was expecting a picture of an economic depression of 150 years ago. The environment and educational issues were most disturbing. Their impacts were indicted but not rehabilitated.

Let’s just say that the struggle through the dialogues of the circus ringmaster who pronounced an ``s’’ like a ``th’’ and the cockney of the mill worker who died after a fall down an old coke shaft, I’d had enough.

Time to move on. I’m planning the coming year’s contemporary selections to be ``The Lazarus Project,’’ by Aleksandar Hemon, and ``A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy,’’ by the English writer Charlotte Greig.

The former is about a writer’s obsession with an anarchist’s murder of the Chicago police chief in 1908. Who knows where that will lead. The latter, which will be published in May, is billed as a cross between Bridget Jones and the ideas of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Enough said.

The last time I mentioned Nietzsche, I got in a lot of trouble for my discussion of religion and atheism. This year, however, I plan to read ``Nietzsche,’’ by Lou Salome, the woman who spent time in the summer of 1882 in the mountains with Friedrich and his friend Paul Ree. A photo survives, showing the young woman with whip in a cart with Nietzsche and Rees attached to the reins.

She wrote the book in 1894, after Nietzsche lost his mind, and she later became a Freud disciple. (In fact, Nietzsche’s psychic collapse occurred 120 years ago next month in Turin.)

Moving ahead, I always like to plan a read from the 1920s, and for next year I was thinking, as another upper, perhaps ``The Enormous Room,’’ by e.e. cummings. Better known later as a poet, cummings was an ambulance driver for The Red Cross during World War I and he spent several months in a French prison in 1917. His 1922 autobiographical novel recounts his experiences there. What could be more exciting in the 1930s than riding the rails in a boxcar with Woody Guthrie, and maybe encountering the likes of Boxcar Bertha? Such adventures are recounted in Guthrie’s ``Bound for Glory,’’ a 1943 memoir of his travels from the Dust Bowl through the Great Depression.

Bertha, of course, wasn’t much of a writer, having been educated on the rails by Wobblies, prostitutes and socialists. But she told her story to Dr. Ben Reitman, who published ``Sister of the Road’’ in 1937. A later version was just called ``Boxcar Bertha,’’ which also was made into a Martin Scorcese movie in 1972.

I suspect the most interesting reading in ``Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969’’ will be of his correspondence from the late 1950s as his excitement builds with the publication of ``On the Road’’ and then ``Dharma Bums.’’ All the Beats are there: Cassady, Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs and more.

It will be interesting, too, to check in with Alan Watts’ ``Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen,’’ which in 1958 responded to the kind of Buddhism represented by Snyder and others as dharma bums. Watts was still straight at that time, so his conservative stance is kind of funny considering what was to happen to him over the following decade.

In deference to our new president, Gore Vidal’s ``Lincoln,’’ published in 1984, should be worth the time and effort, since Barack Obama seems to feel a connection to Abe’s controversial and short-lived presidency. Glancing at the beginning, I found the differences and the similarities surrounding their respective inaugurations and security issues striking and fascinating.

Finally, another contemporary selection making the list for next year is by the Englishman James Hawes, whose ``Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life’’ tries to dispel the popular mythologies that have sprouted over the decades about the Austrian writer.

Hawes had access to the Kafka archives at Oxford and also in Vienna and Berlin, and his research boasts to show that Kafka was not the lonely, submissive, minor bureaucrat we have been led to believe he was. Rather, he was a womanizing, wellknown writer in the German-speaking world who dabbled in pornography. We’ll see.

OK, that’s quite a collection of unusual choices, which should make the year an interesting one. If you want try any of them, let me know and we’ll compare notes at the end of next year.

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Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.