Some of my favorite books
By Tim Cahill

I suppose any list of my favorite books would change significantly from year to year. As I read this one over, it seems pretty selfish. It's all about literary problems I encounter every day. It's about me, me, me.

[Editor's note: The hot-link titles will take you to Amazon.com, an online bookstore, but there are often other editions, including hardcovers, and audio tapes, that you can order. So browse before you buy.]

Desert Solitaire
By Edward Abbey

For me, me, me, this was a seminal book. Abbey wrote about the conservation and values of wilderness in a way that seemed to fill a void in my soul. I studied the essays in Desert Solitaire--an account a summer spent as a Park Ranger in the deserts of Utah--and realized that what I'd written up to that point was a glorified personal journal. Abbey's work operated in some higher dimension. His account of retrieving a body from the sands--"The Dead Man at Grandview Point"--is nothing less that a meditation on death, transfiguration, and the Eternal. All that and laugh out loud funny in the bargain.

Heart of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad

This dark novella seems to have come boiling up out of some twisted jungle in Conrad's subconscious. The writing is dense and lush; lovely and terrifying. It is perfectly suited to the physical and moral landscape. A modern editor would likely cross out every other adjective, and encourage Conrad to use a stripped down, leaner, more muscular style. That editor would be a moron.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
By Tom Wolfe

I read this book in college, when I thought I might write fiction for a living. I had never even considered journalism, which was sobersided and dull: mere reference material for the novelist. Wolfe set me straight on that one: he used the techniques of fiction--internal dialogue, scene setting, mood, humor, and various bombastic stylings all in the service of reportage. I thought: "Well, here's another career for a guy who's interested in the process of writing." These days I sometimes teach brief courses in the techniques of what Wolfe called "The New Journalism." The courses are usually called something like "Creative Non-Fiction." They might as well be called "Son of the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Baby."

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
By Hunter S. Thompson

The quintessential definition of Gonzo journalism. What does it all mean? No one knows. Just hang on tight and enjoy the ride. Las Vegas, Thompson opines, is "what the Nazis would be doing every night if they had won the war."

City Primeval
By Elmore Leonard

Or any Leonard novel written after 1980. Leonard has a knack for getting inside the minds of half-bright penny-ante sociopaths like Clement Mansell. His plots, completely character driven, move at 90 miles an hour (he's said that he doesn't write the parts readers skip over). Leonard is a dangerous addiction: his style is so infectious that I can't read one of his novels in the evening and expect to write anything the next morning but bad imitation Elmore Leonard.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain

Ernest Hemingway said that all American literature begins with Huckleberry Finn. I suspect he was thinking about the novel's peculiarly American conversational tone, about the use of humor to get at the truth, and about landscape (in this case the Mississippi River) employed as character. (I just wish Tom Sawyer didn't come in at the end with his silly convoluted scheme for freeing Jim, the runaway slave).

Anna Karenina
By Leo Tolstoy

Anyone who believes that the architecture of a novel is important should set aside a year or two to study this perfectly structured novel. The writing is so evocative that I think I'm going to learn Russian just to read Anna's death scene in the original.

The Pillars of Hercules
By Paul Theroux

Although his humor and eloquence are often praised, Theroux has taken a few critical left jabs of late. Some critics say he is insensitive and inclined to various harsh judgments. C'mon, that's the joy of it. I write travel books. I know a dozen other folks who make their livings in the same way. If you got us all together over a few drinks, you'd hear a lot of discordant talk about various countries, and certain individuals living in them. Theroux says these things in public. He's honest about his perceptions and feelings: that's what makes him dangerous, and commendable and compulsively readable.

Aristotle's Poetics
By Aristotle

Aristotle lays down a series of timeless rules regarding plot and structure. Some of what he says may seem self-evident--he defines, for instance, the beginning of a tragedy as that which does not necessarily follow anything else but which necessarily gives rise to further action. Well, duh. Even so, I think a yearly review of Poetics will sharpen anyone's writing. And, hey, if you're going to break the rules, you might as well know which ones you've violated. A writer who can explain the "why" of a transgression is forging a version of his or her own personal Poetics.

The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
By Ernest Hemingway

Sensitive New Age guys aren't supposed to like Hemingway. Too macho. Possibly anti-Semitic. Homophobic. Maybe, but find me a better, more evocative short story than "A Clean Well Lighted Place." It's all pain and trembling sub-text, written in that famous flat declarative style that has influenced every subsequent writer working in English. Every one.

Blood Meridian
By Cormac McCarthy

Denser, darker than The Crossing or All the Pretty Horses, this is Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A tale of cowboys and Indians set in the American Southwest and in Mexico, the book is sometimes sickeningly brutal but the language--which is both Biblical and Faulknerian--is stunning. When I finished the last page of this book, I started again on page one.