What we’re reading says a lot about who we are – or who we want to be. In a new feature in the Globe and Mail, Jane Mount asks 100 writers, artists, and foodies to describe the books that inspire them.
I wanted to highlight Malcolm Galdwell’s and Jennifer Egan’s.
First up is Gladwell:
I’m in the middle of writing my new book, which is about power. I’m very interested in the strategies we use to keep people who are powerless in check. And the ways in which the powerless fight back. So I started reading about crime. I’ve probably acquired 150 books for this project. I haven’t read all of them, and I won’t. Some of them I’ll just look at. But that’s the fun part. It’s an excuse to go on Amazon. The problem is, of course, that eventually you have to stop yourself. Otherwise you’ll collect books forever. But these books are markers for the ideas that I’m interested in. That’s why it’s so important to have physical books. When I see my bookshelf expanding, it gives me the illusion that my brain is expanding, too.
Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire
Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, explains how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became a template for the nation.
On the Rock 2008: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz : the Prison Story of Alvin Karpis
Anyone interested in reading about old school gangsters — as opposed to this generation’s wannabe “gangstas” — and prison life in general, will find this the best book you’ve probably never heard of.
Armed Robbers In Action: Stickups and Street Culture
By analyzing the criminals’ candid perspectives on their actions and their social environment, the authors provide a fuller understanding of armed robbery. They conclude with an insightful discussion of the implications of their findings for crime prevention policy.
The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order
The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices.
Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence
With Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed, investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has profoundly influenced our culture over the last few centuries—even if we haven’t always taken notice.
The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States
A definitive history of organized crime in America.
The story tracks the deeds and misdeeds of Cole Younger and his brothers James, John, and Bob, and tells the story of a troubled state during the late 1800s. From their Civil War battles against the Union with William Quantrill and his band of guerrillas, to the raid in Lawrence, Kansas, to their first bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri, the Youngers were both heroes and foes of their state.
But They All Come Back: Facing The Challenges Of Prisoner Reentry
[D]escribes the new realities of punishment in America and explores the nexus of returning prisoners with seven policy domains: public safety, families and children, work, housing, public health, civic identity, and community capacity. Travis proposes a new architecture for our criminal justice system, organized around five principles of reentry, that will encourage change and spur innovation. It is a Herculean synthesis and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in prisoner reentry and social justice.
American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
Organized crime—the Italian American kind—has long been a source of popular entertainment and legend. Now Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the Mafia’s rise—from the 1880s to the post-WWII era—that is as exciting and readable as it is authoritative.
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I found Jennifer Egan’s bookshelf a little more interesting.
Emma has always been my favourite Jane Austen novel. A lot of people tend to like Emma – she’s such a winningly flawed person. One thing that surprises me about Austen is that her characters are very inflexible; nobody changes that much. Emma might be the slight exception, but she still stays Emma in the end, even if she’s a little bit wiser. You could almost say that Austen deals in types, which normally is a very dangerous practice and doesn’t lead to anything interesting. Yet her work is stupendous. Her novels work themselves out with a tremendous clarity that feels mathematical or geometric. It’s very spare; there’s nothing extra. Her books shouldn’t work, but they do, and better than almost anyone else’s.
Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote’s fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers’ imaginations for nearly four hundred years
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of “pseudo-events” — events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported — and the contemporary definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”
Byron’s exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, beginning with his illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave, and to Russia, where he becomes a favorite of the Empress Catherine who sends him on to England.
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.
No one who reads Good Morning, Midnight will ever forget it.
Sparkling comedy of provincial manners concerns a well-intentioned young heiress and her matchmaking schemes that result in comic confusion for the inhabitants of a 19th-century English village. Droll characterizations of the well-intentioned heroine, her hypochondriacal father, plus many other finely drawn personalities make this sparkling satire of provincial life one of Jane Austen’s finest novels.
[A] complex look at English provincial life at a crucial historical moment, and, at the same time, dramatizes and explores some of the most potent myths of Victorian literature.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
A forerunner of psychological fiction, and considered a landmark work for its innovative use of narrative devices, Sterne’s topsy-turvy novel was both celebrated and vilified when first published. Originally released in nine separate volumes, it is in effect an exercise about the difficulties of writing. Impossible to categorize, it remains a beguiling milestone in the history of literature.
Germinal is generally considered the greatest of Emile Zola’s twenty novel Rougon-Macquart cycle. Of these, Germinal is the most concerned with the daily life of the working poor. Set in the mid 1860’s, the novel’s protaganist Etienne Lantier is hungry and homeless, wandering the French countryside, looking for work. He stumbles upon village 240, the home of a coal mine, La Voreteux. He quickly gets a job in the depths of the mine, experiencing the backbreaking work of toiling hundreds of feet below the earth. He is befriended by a local family and they all lament the constant work required to earn just enough to slowly starve. Fired up by Marxist ideology, he convinces the miners to strike for a pay raise. The remainder of the novel tells the story of the strike and its effect on the workers, managers, owners and shareholders.
The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times.
It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women–seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal–becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves.
Wharton’s first literary success, set amid fashionable New York society, reveals the hypocrisy and destructive effects of the city’s social circle on the character of Lily Bart. Impoverished but well-born, Lily must secure her future by acquiring a wealthy husband; but her downfall — initiated by a romantic indiscretion — results in gambling debts and social disasters.
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