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I read regarding 150 books a year, or thereabouts. This is not a boast, I ought to add, just a mere side-note to what follows. If anything, such a grossly high figure highlights the amount of time I waste all around the year when I should, perhaps, be doing things of more importance: getting a job, for one. Or helping a withered old woman safely traverse throughout a busy street. Or writing a book of my own, as I keep promising myself. Instead, I’ve failed all frequent expected values one may became crippled underneath – I’m unemployed, my neighbour had to be scraped from the street using a spatula, and, as of yet, the furthest I’ve travelled in the literary world is a scattering of published poems and short-stories. It’s not one thing I would recommend. However, if, in your own life, you have a spare few hours of time to yourself, spending them engorged in the worlds of the following books is recommend, if you may take my word after all the above. Those that follow are not my personal favourite 13 books, I want to make clear: just a few that came to my head as I sat and typed. Others were cruelly left out: Bellow, Amis, Fante, Auster, Murakami, Palahniuk, Wolfe, Orwell, and many, numerous others are not discussed, for reasons unknown. The number could have been 50, or even 100. For now, it’s 14 – and I in truth don’t know why.
The Drowned Word – J.G. Ballard
Perhaps the most palpable, exclusively vivid, worlds of Ballard’s fiction. Set in a lagoon-submerged London, The Drowned World draws on the inherent attraction of the post-Apocalypse, and ventures, rather wonderfully, into the darker chasms of the humane psyche. Kerans, a doctor of Biology, and our protagonist, rather than seeking a get-out, rather chooses, bleakly, the more chaotic world of solitude in the form of the ever dissolving world around him. Ballard’s imagination is darkly unrestrained, and the writing – a cruel, vividly surreal, poetry – helps to formulate the confinements of claustrophobia other writers have attempted but to failed to portray. As London falls into further calamity, Kerans is entangled in the profoundest of predicaments – to seek refuge, or to conform to the heart’s darker impulses by boring further into the seemingly catastrophic unknown. A deeply unsettling, challenging novel. Remarkable.
The Vanishing – Tim Krabbe
A compact novella, detailing, in minimalist ways, the turbulent recesses of humane terror. A road-tripping couple pull over at a service-station for a toilet stop. Moments later, the woman has vanished and is never seen again. What follows is years of searching, a bizarre coming together, confession and an clear or deep perception into the bothered world of psychopath’s mental-field. Obsession, and love’s force, collide, with Krabbe’s blunt, closely uninterested tone, expertly depicting the loneliness of death and the cruel fate borne out of longed-for love. I’ve measuredly dodged any screenings of the film-adapted version; now and then words have no equivalent – how could pictures, with their colour, have the same drearily cold effect as Krabbe’s tone? Why can’t numerous things lay untouched? Small, fleeting, yet unearthly deranged – a whispered, telling masterpiece. Not galore are creepier. Bolt your doors, draw the curtains tight.
A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway, in a 1920′s salutation to Paris, lovingly wrote ‘If you are lucky sufficient to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is A Moveable Feast’. He had lived there for a few tough years with his wife and child, shambling through it is plethora of cafes, where, with the help of the impish Gertrude Stein and doomed Scott Fitzgerald, he honed the stylistics which shaped his now worldly-cherished fiction. The book offers little as a story, but details the most aesthetically engaging of cities vividly. The perfective prerequisite before a trip to Paris, Hemingway, in his short, snappy, style, takes the reader through the streets, the parks – where, in Jardin Du Luxembourg, he once pursued a live Pigeon for dinner – and the homes of the literary elite. Honest in the only way a Hemingway write may be, A Moveable Feast is almost as enthralling as the places it describes. Read it, then go there. Walk the pathways he traipsed, peer your head through the windows of the elite. Chase a poor pigeon.
Windows on the Word – Frederic Beigbreder
Post 9/11 guaranteed a good deal of things, amidst them illimitable ashen ingredients to be interspersed into the arts – most conspicuously in fiction, as it does. De Lillo, with Falling Man, astoundingly failed miserably. Jay Mcinerney’s The Good Life was a wrenching tour-de-force, but concentered principally on it is after-affect, and the rendering of truth in the lives of those broken everlastingly after that cruel, sunny morning. Windows on the World took on the most unbearable – and, perhaps the bravest of tasks – by placing itself into the terror of the atrocity’s present, as well as supplying a distinctive voice of anguish from a veritably startling writer. The book itself is an oddity; subdivided into fiction and autobiography, we fleet, as each chapter passes, into the two voices which broke out so eerily that day: the panicked, and, as a result, the new hopeless. In the fictional story, we pass the final hours with a father and his two sons, caught in the desperation of entrapment, as time trickles by, and life fades. Elsewhere, Beigbreder traverses Paris, the eternal wearied, asking the most unfathomed of questions. Who were the people in the towers that day? Why were we never subjected to it is starkness – why didn’t the papers report the sight of a full displaced humane heart stuck to a foyer window? Further musings on love’s dissolution, fatherhood, Paris’ architecture and humanity follow. No flimsy titles are affixed to each chapter, just a hours and minutes – the tragic reality of what all humane life is always scaled down to. One of the few I’ve read a good deal of times. The lasting effect is discomforting, as it justifiedly ought to be given the theme of the book. A superb achievement.
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
Greene’s seminal work, penned in 1938, will see it is second screen adaptation this coming year, more than 60 years after the firstborn – a masterwork – hit the theatres. It comes as no surprise that Pinkie – the novel’s sinister young gang-leader – shall be entered into the innovative psyche; bold, an already practised killer, and a completely troubled young chap, his foothold over his elders, as well as the menace he purveys, marked him down early as one of the fiction world’s most cunning villains. Green’s prose – a rarefied, packed style – is like no other. Capable of loading a mere sentence with cruelty, compassion, love and hate, with Brighton Rock, he riddled the seaside resort with mayhem, supplying the reader a distinguishable delve into the shadow-lands of gang-fare. Caught up in the struggle is the ominous Fred Hale, a hapless worker sent to disseminate cards for a newspaper competition. It has been suggested, by a heap of sources, that it is underlying message is a critique of Catholicism’s view on morality and sin. For the enthralled reader, it is everything and more. A riveting jaunt through the darker side of the seaside and beyond.
How The Dead Live – Will Self
To comment at big on the unnatural is no mean feat; to transcend it is a more ludicrous accomplishment – something which Will Self, the tongue-tangling satirist, does like no other. The title itself bares light to the novel’s premise – how do the for a limitless time condemned carry on? For the faithful, there appears no need to worry. For the rest, the terror of annihilation is supplanted further after burial, when our sorry leftovers are gorged on by all types of critters. Self’s picture of things is more or less more blurred, and mixes both arrival-bays together. Lilly Bloom, 66, Londoner, perishing to cancer, succumbs to an afterlife of a London subdivided into a population severed by life and death. What follows is a devilish satire on the conception of death, reflection, and the wilderness of life lived in death. Self’s verbal cannon is amply packed as ever, as we saunter through the otherworldly hinterland of his mind’s eye. A now and again tough read, How The Dead Live, from it is Damian Hirst inspired cover, to it is societal afterlife, is an oddity of which only Self could produce, and which no other writer would even dare lead their pen to.
The Commitments – Roddy Doyle
Often classified as deeply lewd – and justly so – it would be lazy to suggest that Roddy Doyle’s writing is that of sheer comedy and little more. For behind the sordidness, the relentless squalor and infinite arse, fecks and bollixes, is the heart of the truest cataloguer of the Irish character. He is, I’m not reluctant to opine, the biggest writer to emanate from these shores in contemporary times. With this novel – later turned into a much loved film – we were staged with the primary of the hilarious Barrytown Trilogy, which later gave us the irrepressible The Snapper and The Van. Once again, as with the majority of Doyle’s writings, we are flung into 80′s Dublin, with all it is concrete, decaying flat-blocks, and dead dreams. From unemployment, to notoriety, to dissolution, we are introduced to a collection of unemployed aspirators teeming with dreams of getting a world-famous soul group. Vacuous Dublin’s grime is portrayed honestly, with Doyle’s preeminent comedic dialog slashing the bleakness with moments of sheer hilarity. As ever, the conclusion is a shambolic ending, riddled with farce and the feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized of a country’s economic decline. But Doyle’s humanism shimmers throughout, with great swathes of flowing dialog – brimming with the distinguishable gutter-slang of Dublin’s working class – making the novel at once deeply comical, humane, and utterly unfeigned to life. Fecking brilliant ol’ shoite.
Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski
Here’s a forewarning: I’m being a tad cheeky here, taking into account what’s above is all fiction, and what will roll after will be, too; for whilst Buk’s terrible tales fall beneath the required bracket, his whole back-catalogue, he was never reluctant to admit, was chiefly autobiographical. Just 99%, or thereabouts, so I’ll hop on board the minuscule leftover, if I may. Tapped out in ’82, Ham on Rye introduces us to the early years of Henry Chinaski – his chief protagonist, and lightly-veiled, alcoholic, sex-addicted alter-ego. It is, perhaps, the most telling of his novels – we meet the other Chinaskis, view the strangeness of growing up through young Henry’s impressionable, always trailing, eyes, and endure the suffering of youth: acne onslaughts, violent parental beatings, love. The prose is classic Buk – wholly unpretentious, heavy usage of dialogue, snappy lines = and flows quicker than any of his other works. The toil of Henry’s later reputation – found enclosed within the covers of the dingier Post Office, Women and Factotum – is to be found rooted with resolute determination within his young self, as he plunders through L.A., a clumsy loner, amiss and entangled in the unrelenting torture of adolescence. Though not it is basi work, it will have to be cited that the series would be best read chronologically, for no other reason than Henry necessitating a pal as he descends – perhaps ascends, even – into one of the fiction world’s most horribly astray down ‘n outs.
Child of God – Cormac McCarthy
Championed not only for his stories, Cormac McCarthy’s style – simplistic, phonetic, always captive – is a distinguishable force, and just as impressive as the tales which finally, at the age of 77, he has garnered world-over credit for. Without the other, one falls away, of course, but his is a rare blend. His narrations do not speak aloud, as a heap of do, but whisper, softly but not always pleasantly. Trained into the mainstream by way of a booker and screen-adaptations of The Road and No Country for Old Men, McCarthy’s recent notoriety, though deserved, has come wickedly late. It would be wrong to not entertain the notion that Chigurh, No Country for Old Men’s sadistic madman, was not influenced, or even born, in Child of God, McCarthy’s 3rd and most disturbing work. Bordered by mental disturbance and isolation, Lester Ballard roams the bushed foothills of a little Tennessee county, delusional and fuelled by random acts of uttermost violence. Murderous escapades follow, amounting to raged skulduggery and eventual prolonged necrophilia. It is a primary glimpse into the disturbed, American darklands which McCarthy appears best primed to unleash. A goose-pimple inducing last scene ends our foray – ghastly, yet beautifully clinical. One of America’s finest.
Portnoy’s Complaint – Phillip Roth
Roth’s output is not one thing short of mechanical n it is fluency. This year’s release of Nemesis is his 29th, and fourth in the Nemeses collection, which gave us Everyman, Indignation and The Humbling. It is back to 1969, and Portnoy’s Complaint, however, that we go for his comical masterwork and early signpost directed towards what was to in the long run come. It was his fourth – and, as it turned out, groundbreaking – novel, penned when Roth was style honing his style aged 27. It introduced us to the wondrous troubled Alex Portnoy, who, in a speech with his psychoanalyst, recounts his early, much eventful, years. For it is time, the to a considerable degree explicit content enraged and had censors salivating, leading to a banning in Australia and throughout American library collections. Depictions of Masturbation – in this case into a piece of butchered liver – run throughout, as Alex struggles to release an insoluble love harboured for his mother. We fleet amongst the here and now, to child Alex man-child Portnoy, a bachelor crumbling underneath the past’s permanence. Though perchance not Roth’s finest work, it ought to be introductory on any potential reader’s itinerary. Within the comedy, lies pain; from the torture, hilarity sprouts. You’ll give up liver, mind.
Bright Shiny Morning – James Frey
Given the intense scrutiny he received following an investigation into his disputable basi book, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise had Frey, a former drug-addict, descended into total obscurity. The debut, A Million Little Pieces, was introduced to the world under the guise of memoir, savagely detailing a young man’s drink and alcohol addiction and the struggle of rehabilitation which followed. Its release was promptly championed all around the literary world. Even Oprah developed tremors by hopping aboard the Frey-train. And then everything crashed. A reporter’s analysis, and subsequent investigation, of the text and story led to hefty stack of established half-truths, myth and exaggerations. Frey was dropped from his publishing house. Outrage erupted in America and Oprah heaved herself off the bandwagon in indignation. Frey, rather than retreat into the literary wilderness, stayed put, writing it is follow up, My Friend Leonard, and, in 2008, Bright Shiny Morning – his best of a highly impressive trio. It was a bold, telling move – and, above all, at last brave. High praise followed. The media declared Frey’s splendor once more. What of the book itself? Frey, thankfully, stuck to his core roots: L.A., basic prose, and an observance of humanity that few writers have ever come close to. We follow the lives of a flurry of characters rooted in Los Angeles: a widely known and esteemed married couple, a young intermediate couple on the run, a Mexican maid, and a homeless man, Old Joe. We are not spared the ruination that swallows many. Frey’s writing is refreshingly devoid of cliché, and always remains unflinching, even when it’s unsettling. His initial deception was a mistake, even though minuscule; he has made up for it since = spectacularly.
Girlfriend in a Coma – Douglas Coupland
‘I’m Jared, a Ghost.’ And so begins Doug Coupland’s most startling novel, his fifth and most accomplished. The Canadian-born Coupland streamed into the mainstream with his 1991 work Generation X, a seminal commentary on adolescence morphing into adulthood in late 80′s America. It was the release of Girlfriend in a Coma, however, in 1998, which cemented his right of place amidst the fiction world’s elite. With it is title pulled from a Smiths song of the same name, it’s a strange, many times bewildering, narrative. Karen, one of the novel’s 8 narrators, slips into a drug-induced 20-year coma, only to later arouse to a post-apocalyptic world which ofttimes leans into the darker realms of dystopia. The writing is always culturally precise, and, one could argue, almost prophetic in it is envisioning of a vacuous world too authenti on culture, egotism and technology. Split in two, we start out in the world we know now, and, in part two, we foot our way into the chaos of a world falling into catastrophe. Each narrative solidifies the 8′s distinctive bond, as Coupland not only brings us on a traveling into a dissimilar world, but likewise delves us into a wrought, ofttimes cruel, critique of mutual bonds amidst us all, too. A veritably distinguishable piece of splendor from our generation’s most cunning commentator. Oh, and the song’s rather lovely, too.
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Bradbury’s most celebrated work – the rest of it is cruelly under-rated as a result – is a masterful display of dystopian fiction, primed comfortably in the middle of Orwell and Huxley’s classics, 1984 and A Brave New World. It was initially penned as The Fireman, a much shorter story published in a Sci-fi anthology 2 years before it is extended self jutted into the literary world, a brave, damning challenge to society’s ever increasing dangers. Our protagonist, or fireman, is Montag – Guy Montag, a burner of books in America’s present anti-intellectual world. That is until he meets his lovely neighbour, a free-thinking idealist, who offers Montag an substitute look at a world cruelly suppressed by it is leaders. After witnessing the horror of a woman’s choosing to die engulfed in flame rather than loose her beloved tomes, Montag begins to steal creative writing of recognized artisti value in order disclose it is mystery. An old acquaintance, Faber, is sought, as Montag leads the charge as a revolutionary teeming with a hunger for education. As a lost canyon of a concealed society unfurls itself, to the backdrop of erupting warfare, Montag is pursued by Technologies truehearted servants. What Bradbury offers in this thought-provoking, and – for it is time – deeply shocking story, is a crystal ball into a world where education has been stifled to help power – something which, though we ought to be thankful is not evident in our own lives, is a real, and occurring strength of evil in societies elsewhere.
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
There’s a tag that follows Kurt Vonnegut about. Well, at least before he passed from physical life there was. It’s smeared throughout each one of his books, or at least the reasonable majority of them. It involves Dr. Cagliari, George Orwell and Flash Gordon, and ends, if one may recall correctly, the manifestation of Mr. Vonnegut. Oddly, it sounds like a blurb he could have contorted with a chuckle, but it was someone, someplace else, a lot of time. His death, in his 84th year, in April 2007 stole the world of a collection of H’s he always inspired: hilarity and, perchance more prominently, humanism. He was the unfeigned humanist – and, as prospect would have it, the greatest comical novelist to ever emerge from American shores. Everyone, in his eyes, was a prime target. – including, memorably, Kurt Vonnegut; a self-appraisal of his past works, graded in the guise of a school report, was once undertaken, refreshingly unbiased and suitably modest. Suitable, also, was his self-recognition, which writers ofttimes are as scornful of as heaped critiques. Cat’s Cradle scored a cool A+, along with his much devoured other classic, Slaughterhouse Five. The premise is specifically oddball, with oddball characters in odd scenarios chasing a very odd substance: Ice 9, a form of ice that freezes at room temperature. Our dimwit, would-be-writer protagonist, Jonah, meets Newt Hoenikken, an archetypal Vonnegut screwball, and a son of the Atomic bomb’s inventor. We retreat to San Lorenzo and grab love, religion – in the form of Vonnegut’s own Bokononism – and a newly-elected president – who, incidentally, is, um, Jonah. The rat-race for power ensues. Vonnegut’s consistent targets are with resolute determination torn apart, and, to top it off, the world’s end begins to steer into view. Just your general quiet affair, then.
Ham Rye Charles Bukowski
In what is widely hailed as the best of his galore novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library’s collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely amusive portrait of an outcast’s coming-of-age for the duration of the desperate days of the Great Depression.
Review’Very funny, very sad, and in spite of it is self-congratulatory tone, honorable in most of the right places. In a heap of ways, Bukowski may have been the perfective writer to describe post-war southern California – a land of wide, flat spaces with not one thing worth seeing, so you might as well decrease rapidly into yourself. In an age of conformity, Bukowski wrote in regards to the persons not a single soul wanted to be: the ugly, the selfish, the lonely, the mad.’ – The Observer
About the Author
Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, galore would claim, it is most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his introductory story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and started out writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He passed away in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.
Ham Rye Charles Bukowski Photo
Ham Rye Charles Bukowski Image
Ham Rye Charles Bukowski Image
Ham Rye Charles Bukowski Pic
Bukowski at his best!
Most fans of the late, great Charles Bukowski, myself included, list Ham On Rye as their bestloved Bukowski novel – and rightfully so. This novel is genuinely a thinly-veiled autobiography of the man we knew and loved as “The Bard of Booze and Broads.” We see through the eyes of young Henry Chinaski as he comes of age in Depression-era America, the product of a dysfunctional and physically abusive household. From his early childhood as a desperately lonely, yet antisocial little boy to his adolescence (where he struggles with crippling acne and gives rise to a love of literature), we see the genesis of a great writer. Bukowski pulls no punches (no pun intended) in his descriptions of abuse suffered at the hands of his father, a coldhearted, arrogant, sadistic SOB. The reader is drawn in to Bukowski’s enthusiasti determination to be the precise opposite of what proper society tries to mold it is youth into. A powerful and heartbreaking read. Great work, Buk! R.I.P – you will be missed!
Growing up Chinaski
I have been returning to the work of Charles Bukowski (1920 — 1994) after reading his novel “Factotum” and watching the movie based upon it. Bukowski’s novel “Ham on Rye” (1982) is a coming-of age novel in that it tells the story of Bukowski’s protagonist, Henry Chinaski, from his birth to his young manhood, ending with the attack on Pearl Harbor. (“Factotum”, written in 1978 covers the next amount of time of Chinaski’s life, after he has been rejected for the draft and wanders from city to city in search of work.) Chinaski is based loosely on Bukowski’s own life; but “Ham on Rye” and Bukowski’s other novels are, after all, works of fiction and ought to be read as such.
HAM ON RYE, The American DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN
In all of Bukowski’s work there is a ceaseless search for truth and freedom. With each breath that Bukowski takes he is locked in a fevered struggle with the forces around him that contiually undertake to make him walk the path of the mutual man. Bukowski sees this as not one thing more than falling into a lock step towards sure death. Though he portrays himself as a repulsive type of humane being, he is capable to convince us that it is the world around him that is far more repulsive. In Ham On Rye, we are lead through the more significant chapters of Bukowski’s childhood and early adulthood. There are very few pieces of creative writing of recognized artisti value that reaches readers with more honesty. As we read Bukowski we may at one moment feel relieved that we do not have to live his life, but in the next moment, are envious of the freedom in which he enjoys. Ham On Rye is one of those exceedingly rare pieces of fiction that allows a outstanding work of art to plainly flow into us. Reading Ham On Rye is merely effortless. It is almost as if it passes directly into us. This is, without a doubt, the most indispensable American novel of the last quarter century. How may the readers of outstanding creative writing of recognized artisti value wonder, in horrific despair, with the passing of Salinger, Miller and Bukowski, if a genuinely outstanding writer will appear in our lifetimes. I, for one, have very little hope, but carry on to stand vigilant
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