In response to our Reading List post, an Anonymous reader asks...
Wouldn't it be interesting to go around and have everyone say what books made them want to do an MFA (or at least pursue writing in a serious way)?
So, to answer my own question:
"Evening," Susan Minot
"Motherless Brooklyn," Jonathan Lethem
"A Room With a View," E.M. Forster
"Dog of the Marriage," Amy Hempel
16 comments:
"dogwalker" by arthur bradford and "pastoralia" by george saunders.
definitely Wally Lamb's "I Know This Much Is True." Despite its being on Oprah's book list, it's an amazing novel. Those 800(ish) pages went by like a cool summer breeze! [hackneyed simile, but really, the book is awe-inspiring.]
"Despite its being on Oprah's book list, it's an amazing novel."
That's hilarious.
Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett!, obviously.
The Universal Baseball Association by Robert Coover
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
blood meridian. hands down. oddly, it made me homesick. and i took it as a challenge--a "Here's what I have. What've you got, amateur?"
"The Boys of my Youth" by Jo Ann Beard
Maybe the book that made me most want to be a writer was "Jesus' Son" by Denis Johnson.
Books that stand out from before I tried writing (so high school reading):
Hemingway stories
Carver stories
Kafka stories
Borges stories
Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut
The Stranger, Camus
Invisible Man, Ellison
Shakespeare's tragedies
Sun also rises, hemingway
stuff I read since I started writing that inspires me:
Saunders stories
Barthelme stories
David Foster Wallace stories
Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov
Lolita, Nabokov
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami
Baron in Trees, Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night - Calvino
Satan Says, by Sharon Olds
Trilogy, by HD
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni
Des Imagistes and...
The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
Raymond Carver, Mary Gaitskill and My teacher Ryan Harty's "Bring me You Saddest Arizona"
Where does Harty teach?
Harty will be the Zell Visiting Professor at Michigan starting this fall (I believe it's a three year appointment, but I'm not sure.)
My list:
Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender
Flying Leap, Judy Budnitz
These are all late model entries! My list:
EARLY YEARS:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!, Ian Fleming
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
Scarecrow of Oz, L. Frank Baum
GRADES 3-6:
The Stephen King ouevre
HIGH SCHOOL:
American Psycho, Ellis
Brightness Falls, McInerney
Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace
Rainbow Stories, William T. Vollmann
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
MORE RECENTLY:
The Future Eve, Villers De L'Isle-Adam
Flying Leap, Judy Budnitz
Maldoror, Lautreamont
The Robert Coover ouvre
Harty used to teach at Stanford. I studied with him as an undergrad.
- Carver short stories
- Hemingway short stories
- everything by Jim Harrison, but especially "The Road Home"
- William Gibson
The book that inspired me to write above all others is one that seems to polarize people: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Also:
Jesus' Son
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
Middlesex
House of Leaves
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