Our book group met on Friday to discuss Native Son by Richard Wright. I mentioned a few days ago that this novel is horrific, and it is, but it's also shockingly good. In fact, to my mind it's one of the best books we've read in the nine years we've been meeting.
Native Son tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man coming of age in Chicago during the late thirties. He's a violent, unsympathetic character and when, through a series of unfortunate events, he accidentally kills a young white woman — and then cuts her to pieces and burns her in a furnace — we, as readers, have little sympathy for his plight. Richard Wright, whose prose is unremarkable (and sometimes actually bad), uses one character, Bigger's lawyer, as a mouthpiece for his own views on the racial situation in the United States at the time. He argues, with passion and conviction, that Bigger is a product of his society and ought not be held responsible for his completely motiveless crime.
Though I don't wholly buy into this defense, a lot of the lawyer's hour-long speech (I listened to this book on CD) is filled with novel, thoughtful arguments, ideas I'd never heard before. For example, Wright seems to absolve the early settlers of this continent of blame for slaveholding. "Theirs was a difficult life," he says (though I am using my own words here). "Theirs was a difficult life, and they could not have done what they did without slaves." Although he absolves the early settlers of guilt, he refuses to forgive his contemporaries who, while not slaveowners, treat the black population like rats.
Kris complained that last month's book was ultimately forgettable, and it was. "I like a book that sticks with me," she said at the time. Native Son is a book that sticks with you.
"What book group books have stuck with you?" I asked Kris recently. She and I each made lists. These are the books that have most stuck with us. We think of them often. We compare other books to them. They're the cream of the crop. Note that our ten-book lists share six books in common.
| J.D.'s List Ishmael by Daniel Quinn Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Hunger by Knut Hamsun Mutiny on the Bounty by Nordhoff and Hall Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey Maus & Maus II by Art Spiegelman Swann's Way by Marcel Proust The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles My Antonia by Willa Cather Native Son by Richard Wright | Kris' List Ishmael by Daniel Quinn Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Hunger by Knut Hamsun Mutiny on the Bounty by Nordhoff and Hall Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey Maus & Maus II by Art Spiegelman Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Democracy in America by Alexes de Tocqueville |
There are five other books that have stuck with me to a lesser degree, though I didn't include them above because I arbitrarily restricted my list to ten books.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig
It's interesting to note how many of the books on our lists are classics, or are likely to enter the canon at some point in the future. Either the classics have more "stickiness"; or Kris and I are predisposed to like them; or some combination of the two.
Over the years, there have been few book group books I actually loathe. These seven, however, have earned my emnity. I consider them to have been complete wastes of my time. They're books that have stuck with me like a bad taste I can't get out of my mouth. (Maybe I could call these "books that stink".)
Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi
The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami, et. al.
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger
I look forward to at least nine more years of sticky books.
On this day at foldedspace.org
2003 — Prize-Winning Cat In which I toot my own horn: my hobby earns me $35 at the Clackamas County Fair.
2001 — Infrequent Update Nice to write again. Been a long time.
I remember pestering you about Hunger by Hamsun at Willamette. Reading it does make you hungry which was not always smart as a starving college student.
I did not like the Dispossessed though I really like Lathe of Heaven and Left Hand of Darkness by LeGuin.
Interestingly enough some of these books I read and enjoyed but have had no urge to reread (Stranger in a Strange Land, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hunger).
For books and for movies, they got to be repeat offenders to classify as "books that stick".
The Autobiography of Malcolm X may be more interesting than your current read.