Two Cement Blocks and a Long Board

Anyone who’s ever lived in a dorm or similarly under-furnished, low-budget location will recognize these ingredients, which constitute the classic instant bookcase.

However, my intent is not to give building tips, which I think will make this nation a safer place to be. Instead, I want to think about what books I'd put on the shelves.

This isn’t exactly the proverbial “what books I would take to a desert island”. Since I am an extremely fast reader, it wouldn’t do me much good to take a stack of novels. I’d be through them in a week and end up no better off than Burgess Meredith in "Time Enough at Last”. For that situation, I think I’d need the Bible and the Baseball Encyclopedia, both of which contain enough variety and resist synopsis enough that I’d be able to get a lot of hours out of them.

Instead, I wanted to point to a few “real” books – the kind people sit down & read from cover to cover – that I really enjoyed and I felt had a special quality. I tend to read an odd combination of baseball, mysteries, and cultural history (I’m a sucker for any title with a decade in it), so I feel certain I can come up with something to bore anyone.

In the mystery field, I don’t think anything can match the novels of Raymond Chandler. He has his own distinctive style; one of my favorite lines (which he uses more than once) is, “There was nothing to say to that, so I said it.” Along with Hammett, invented the hard-boiled, and realistic, private eye.

Often imitated, never equaled, not even by Robert B. Parker, who is one of his most slavish imitators and even finished an unfinished Chandler novel AND wrote a sequel to it. To be fair, Parker not only imitates Chandler but also himself; most of his recent novels read like his early novels put through a version of the “Telephone Game”. Of course, he’s been writing Spenser so long and has written so many that he might actually have forgotten that he’s written it before. The way to tell Good Spenser from Bad Spenser: the good ones are about 150 pages in paperback, and everyone has sideburns and wide ties. The bad (i.e. recent) ones are much thicker, much bigger type, much more whitespace, and consist of about 40 3- to 5-page chapters.

I must say, I’ve never read a book quite like P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores, which manages to be a textbook on government, a conservative manifesto, and quite possibly the funniest book I’ve read. It’s also pretty close to a thesaurus, because he tends (like my favorite blogger) to use his vocabulary as a playground. I make it a policy to check out anything new that PJ comes up with.

In the same vein, I have to recommend the funniest book ever on punctuation, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, by Lynn Truss. Very British, and not recommended for those born without a sardonic gland. This is actually a tandem entry with her follow-up, Talk to the Hand, which is a treatise on manners in the same vein.

In Part II (coming soon), a few more thoughts.....