Amy Winehouse 1983-2011

"Tears dry on their own."

Lucian Freud 1922-2011

It Can Be Done

"As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

"Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

"And so on.

"Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

"If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

"It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Summer

76 American Books

I set myself to this task as a way to celebrate my country on its 235th birthday--as traditionally observed to the exclusion of the histories of its earlier inhabitants. For conciseness, I have limited myself to just one work per author. I have also limited myself to the books I have actually read, not just read about or wish I'd read. I gave myself 76 minutes to complete the task, but it took almost two hours.

I have made no effort to make the list politically correct or canonical. I have welcomed and tolerated my idiosyncrasies in taste--and the limits of my memory. These are the works that shaped my concept of the United States of America, of American writing style, and of myself as an American. These are the American books I measure myself against.

1. A Death in the Family by James Agee
2. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
3. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
4. The Smallest People Alive by Keith Banner
5. Snow White by Donald Barthelme
6. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
7. Little Big Man by Thomas Berger
8. Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
9. The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs
10. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
11. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
12. Bullet Park by John Cheever
13. Closer by Dennis Cooper
14. A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
15. God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.
16. Apples and Pears and Other Stories by Guy Davenport
17. An Autobiography by Angela Davis
18. Underworld by Don DeLillo
19. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
20. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
21. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
22. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
23. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
24. Light in August by William Faulkner
25. The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney
26. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
28. Fat City by Leonard Gardner
29. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
30. Second Skin by John Hawkes
31. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
34. Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
35. Dear Mr. President by Gabe Hudson
36. The World According to Garp by John Irving
37. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
38. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
39. Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
40. The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
41. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
42. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
43. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
44. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
45. Edwin Mullhouse by Steven Millhauser
46. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
47. Becoming a Man by Paul Monette
48. The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody
49. Beloved by Toni Morrison
50. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
51. Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
52. Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara
53. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
54. The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy
55. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
56. True Grit by Charles Portis
57. Gain by Richard Powers
58. City of Night by John Rechy
59. Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
60. Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
61. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
62. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
63. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
64. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
65. After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson
66. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
67. Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal
68. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
69. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
70. All the Kings' Men by Robert Penn Warren
71. A Worn Path by Eudora Welty
72. Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
73. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
74. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
75. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
76. Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz