The Chazzbot Review of Books

Here's a fun meme I picked up from me bro. I'll try not to use all the same answers as his.

A book that made you cry:
The ending of The Grapes of Wrath, when Rose of Sharon is clutching that soon-to-be-dead baby to her dry breast, always gets me. So does Of Mice and Men, for that matter. Something inside of me is very susceptible to John Steinbeck. I also tear up every time I read Ray Bradbury's short story, "Kaleidoscope," in which a stranded astronaut contemplates the meaninglessness of his life before he burns up in the atmosphere.

A book that scared you:
Adam Johnson's end-of-the-world novel, Parasites Like Us, starts off as a broad satire of academia and the ethics of archaeology, but ends up as one of the most realistic doomsday books I've ever read. Sort of like On the Beach, only with diseased swine instead of nuclear bombs. It's all the more disturbing for putting you off guard for the first 150 pages. A book that scares me in a whole different kind of way is Shot Through the Heart, Mikal Gilmore's bio of his murdering brother, Gary. With its overtones of familial abuse and the occult, I have never been able to get all the way through it. Special mention should also be made of Jack Henry Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott wrote the book while in prison, and Norman Mailer campaigned for his release, based on the sheer brilliance of his writing. Shortly after making the literary rounds, Abbott brutally murdered a young woman. It's hard to read his book now without that fact gnawing at the back of your mind, upsetting your admiration of his prose.

A book that made you laugh:
Pretty much anything written by Douglas Adams. Also Steve Martin's books of essays, Cruel Shoes and Pure Drivel. I'm a fan of absurdist sarcasm, apparently.

A book that disgusted you:

A book you loved in elementary school:
I don't remember the name of it anymore, but I used to have a picture book of dinosaurs that I carried around with me everywhere and would read to anyone willing to listen. My first memory of having the book was in first grade; I volunteered to read it to the class one day, and that's when my teacher started realizing I was completely bored by her reading lessons. At some point, the book, after many years of loving attention, literally fell apart in my hands. Wish I could remember what it was called. I'd love to see it again.

A book you loved in middle school:
When I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, I knew there was a place for me in this world. I've written about this elsewhere.

A book you loved in high school:
Like my brother, I read a lot of Stephen King during my high school days. I would get dropped off at school about an hour before classes started, and I would usually spend that time poring over some used paperback. The Shining and The Stand were my favorites, though I still like Kubrick's film version of The Shining better than the book it's presumably based on, especially the part where the blood comes rushing out of the elevator. Ding!

A book you hated in high school:
This one's easy. A Seperate Peace by John Knowles. Fucking academy boys pissing and moaning about their horrible lives. Who gives a fuck?! John Irving covered the same territory in The World According to Garp without making me want to tear my eyes out or stab fictional characters in the ear.

A book you loved in college:
If I got nothing else out of college, it did get me to read and even reach an appreciation of Ulysses by James Joyce. I would never have read that fucker on my own, but I ended up loving that book once someone could tell me what in hell was going on in each chapter. I took a seminar on Joyce attended by only two other students, Deb Will and Gene "Conspiracy" Needham. We were all, in our own special ways, completely fucked in that class. But we all got through it, and I wear my reading of Ulysses like a proud scar earned in an Irish pub brawl. At one point, I considered getting the title tattooed onto my arm, like a sailor's badge. Such is my level of pride at having read this book.

A book that challenged your identity:
My answer here is the same as my brother's: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I've written about this elsewhere on the site.

A series that you love:
I guess an easy answer here would be the Star Trek novels, which are kind of like the literary equivalent of a box of doughnuts that someone brings to work. There they sit, all day long, and you know they are bad for you and fattening and nothing you really need, but damned if you don't pick one up every time you pass the box, until they are all gone and your fingers are left with that unpleasant sticky feeling that transfers to your keyboard and your shirt and your desk until you feel like a complete moron for ever having picked one up in the first place.

I also have read my fair share of the Star Wars novels and the Doctor Who novelizations and the Tarzan books and I'm usually tempted to read any book that comes with a number on its spine, but I'm going to go with the highbrow response and say The Library of America, which publishes American classics in these handsome editions that feel completely natural in your hand and come with ribbons sewn into the binding and look fabulous together on a bookshelf. I have almost 100 editions from this series, and every one is a gem.

Your favorite horror book:
Though I haven't read them for a while, I had my shit completely freaked by Clive Barker's Books of Blood. To this day, I carry images from his story, "In the Hills, the Cities," in my head, which often pop up at inappropriate moments to surrealize my day.

Your favorite science-fiction book:
Wow, this is a tough one. And this is such a subjective category anymore--what really constitutes science fiction anyway? I can recommend pretty much anything by Robert J. Sawyer, but I especially like FlashForward, in which everyone on Earth gets a brief glimpse of their lives twenty years in the future, and The Terminal Experiment, in which a scientist creates three electronic simulations of different aspects of his consciousness. I also like everything I've read by J.G. Ballard, particularly High-Rise and The Concrete Island, which aren't so much science fiction as they are sociological projections (assuming there's a difference). Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven is great, and I like the scope of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series. Yeah, I'm gonna need you to be more specific with the question.

Your favorite fantasy book:
This is a little bit easier, since I don't read as much fantasy. I've read The Lord of the Rings many times and have yet to grow tired of it. A distant second might be T.H. White's The Once and Future King, but ultimately I've gotta go with Tolkien.

Your favorite mystery book:
I don't really do mysteries, but I love crime novels, especially Elmore Leonard's stuff. Recently, I've started getting into Carl Hiaasen, who mixes his portraits of lowlife scumbugs with environmental messages, and Skinny Dip is my favorite of his so far.

Your favorite biography:

Your favorite "coming-of-age" book:
Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes depicts a turning point in the lives of two boys and manages to capture that loss of innocence in achingly beautiful prose that reads like poetry. When I was young, I read it as an adventure story; now it seems completely heartbreaking.

Your favorite book not on this list:
Every American should read Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon. I can give you 20 reasons to read it, but each reader will find his own meaning in Chaikin's biographical history of the men who touched the surface of another world. It is much more than a history of the Apollo program. It is a book that will renew your faith in our species.

And while we're at it, here's one man's list of twelve books that changed the world. What's almost as interesting as the list itself is the author's lengthy defense of why he didn't include any novels on the list. And it's probably the only list of its kind that includes both Shakespeare's First Folio and a football rulebook. Of course, it had to have been written by an Englishman.