When We Fell In Love – Greg Olear

Brady: Ha!

The PPP would have been a much longer list, and many canonized names would be on it. Dickens, Dostoyevski, Austen, Steinbeck, Willa Cather. We read “My Antonia” in high school. It was torture. Maybe I’d feel differently now.

I liked GG okay when I first read it, but it didn’t overwhelm me at the time. It grew on me slowly. Like cancer, but good.

Thanks for reading.

You find writers who are like brothers and sisters but we all assemble different families. I never could stand JJ and still feel guilty about it. But I adopted Thomas Mann like almost instantly. It seemed like I loved him before I read him. I loved that Eustacia Vye too. But to this day, I never figured out what “reddle” is. That substance is in Return of the Native, right?

Love Hawthorne. Austen has been killed by her friends and she doesn’t deserve it. Homer over the Hardy Boys any day. You have to grow up sometime. It’s worth it.

Cather? I’m pissed off by writers who are a little innovative but won’t go all the way. Not that it’s easy to know where all the way is.

Reddle is a red dye they use to mark the wool of sheep, I believe. An archaic practice, even at the time.

Have never read Mann…I should give him a try. Agree about Hawthorne…I have my own theory about Dimmsdale’s scarlet A — it was sunburn.

Homer is terrific, even if I first encountered the Odyssey via d’Aulaire’s (which I still refer to sometimes). The best thing I got from the Hardy Boys was how to do surveillance (across the street, not directly behind).

CHRONOGRAM magazine had a contest a few years ago…the idea was to cobble titles together and come up with a blurb. I had three, one of which was THE STORY OF O, PIONEERS. (My best one was THE PELICAN BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME: “A mad scientist threatens to explain the entire known universe…unless a Memphis DA can stop him.”)

I like this question. I am curious why you so readily dismiss those first childhood crushes. I still think about Barbie Frye every once in a while. And I continue to read Roald Dahl, though more his short stories these days.

Also, this made me dig up the old Imperium Master Booklist. When was the last time you updated your top 20 list?

I personally don’t think bonking Anais Nin is much to crow about, Greg. Now, LuAnne Henderson, Neal Cassady’s first wife who was bedded by Kerouac, is a whole other story.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29873672@N02/3606950363/

Matt – The childhood crushes I don’t remember very well, quite like actual childhood crushes. And I don’t know that I’ve ever had a Top 20 books list; just a movie list on YMDB.

Duke – You’re right, as usual. I suppose everyone and their grandmother did sleep with Nin — or, to be more accurate, everyone and her father. But it does make for a good one-liner, you must admit.

Curiously, I find your stuff to be Milleresque in many ways (as I’ve mentioned), although I know your heart is with JK.

Well, the very fact that we’re having this exchange is, on my part, due to JK. It was reading “On the Road” that opened me to the idea of becoming a writer, since, in JK’s case, being a writer was all mixed up with girls and adventure and intoxicants and youth. I was aware of Miller, without having read him, before I discovered JK, but Miller was already middle-aged when he published his first book, and, in the first images I saw of him, elderly. The image I had of JK was very different, images being very important to me as a teenager, to say nothing of girls and adventure and intoxicants.

Yes, your one-liner is a good one.

It matters most of all when we come to something, is what it amounts to. Graham Greene, for example, I didn’t discover until fairly recently, and I thought, “Wow, I really would have liked this when I was 23.” I doubt that a 50-year-old who had never read Salinger before would feel for CITR as much as a teenager would, nor would a teenager dig on Proust.

I also saw JK as wrapped up in intoxicants, which was, for me, a turn off. But then, I was quite a dork when I was young. (“When I was young” may me too much of a qualifier in that sentence).

In any event, I am grateful to JK for inspiring DRH…as well many other writers I like whom he inspired.

I was gratified to see Vonnegut make your list. But no CAT’S CRADLE???

I read CC in high school, but I’m not sure I understood it, or that it formed much of an impression on me. I know I was pleased that I understood the reference to Ice Nine on the Joe Satriani album. Although, now that you mention it, CC was the inspiration for my “song about nothing,” “Of Cats & Cradles,” featuring a young MP on lead guitar…

Thanks for reading.

I stand in awe of your list (I’m actually sitting down, but still…) ULYSSES? Milton? I read CANDIDE when I was around twelve, then reread it in college and realized I’d missed most of its meaning the first time around.

It’s odd how time does change one’s perception of books and writers.

I distinctly remember when I first fell in love with reading. I was watching a movie at the time, and in that movie, there was a song about a short story that had been written about books and reading, and such. That’s what sealed the deal for me. I can’t remember what that movie was, but I was surprised to not see it on your list, Greg.

Richard – CANDIDE…that’s the play about yeast allergies right? But seriously…time does change perceptions, and one never knows what might speak to you when you experience it. That’s true of all art, but most of all, novels.

Mike – I believe the movie was “Mike & Mike’s Excellent Adventure.” But it may have been the horror film “Four of Fish and Finger Pies.” Not sure.

Thanks for reading.

great post as usual!