Top 5 Books That Blew My Mind

5. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

I was something like nineteen when I read this book and it blew my mind. It is part memoir, part science-fiction adventure, part war story, part chronicle of failing memory and mental illness, and, as the famous opening line implies, “more or less true.” I don’t even know what else to say except go read or reread this book. I’d like to excerpt the whole thing. Here is the full title, which is impressive by itself:

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, A Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.

4. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

When I finished reading this I called a friend and said, “I think I just finished the best book I’ve ever read.” Hands-down, the best. The grittiest, saddest, funniest, craziest, most frustrating, most jaw-droppingly ambitious, most inventive book of my longish reading career. I was so impressed I didn’t want to believe it, but when I went back and read this book again it was still true. It contains the most hilarious and uncomfortable chapter I’ve read in any book, which ends like this:

So Hal’s most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother’s doubles partner’s older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meter behind him, Bain’s knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.

At this point in the book, all the above makes sense. Wallace has taught you his own hyper-specific, ironic, intentionally imperfect language, or you’ve realized it has always been your own.

3. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

This book is not out to trick you. Moby Dick does not want to pull the wool over your eyes or reveal the wool that has always been there, pulled. There is no post-modern posturing, only a boat, a whale, and the sea. Moby Dick is out to entertain, and it does. Despite the sometimes torrential purple prose (and more exclamation points per capita than a teenager’s liveblog), you occasionally come across something like this:

But far beneath this wonderous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. That lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and, as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; -even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sights.

Like a voyage on an ancient whaling ship, or a contemporary journey by modern means, the tedium is punctured by moments of elevation–and pirates.

2. Jesus’s Son, by Denis Johnson

You know how you have one or two stories where something almost goes horribly wrong, like the time you woke up behind the wheel in your own driveway with no memory of driving home, you almost got into a fight with those guys at that seedy bar by the highway, the cop who pulled you over for a broken tail light almost looking inside your glove compartment/pockets/trunk, but didn’t? Denis Johnson’s characters don’t have those stories. These are stories about when things that go terribly, impulsively, wrong. A random overdose, a spontaneous burglary, a car crash on a dark highway late at night, impromptu brain surgery, dead bunnies, voyeurism, these are not subjects for the weak of heart, but the reason they work so well is exactly because Johnson’s narrator, a sensitive dreamer nicknamed “shit-head,” is just that–a little too weak for the strange underworld he is part of. Here is how a typically untypical story begins:

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping…A Cherokee filled with bourbon…A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student…And a family from Marshalltown who head-onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri…

…I rose up sopping wet from sleeping under the pouring rain, and something less than conscious thanks to the first three people I’ve already named -the salesman and the Indian and the student- all of whom had given me drugs. At the head of the entrance ramp I waited without hope of a ride. What was the point, even, of rolling up my sleeping bag when I was too wet to be let into anybody’s car? I draped it around me like a cape. The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my viens feel scrapped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.

I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.

1. The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever

819 pages of immaculate stories that go like this (from halfway through “A Picture of the World”):

But my wife was sad.

“What’s the matter, darling?” I asked.

“I just have this terrible feeling that I’m a character in a television situation comedy,” she said. “I mean, I’m nice-looking, I’m well-dressed, I have humorous and attractive children, but I have this terrible feeling that I’m in black-and-white and that I can be turned off by anybody. I just have this terrible feeling I can be turned off.” My wife is often sad because her sadness is not a sad sadness, sorry because her sorrow is not a crushing sorrow. She grieves because her grief is not an acute grief, and when I tell her that this sorrow over the inadequacies of her sorrow may be a new hue in the spectrum, she is not consoled. Oh, I sometimes think of leaving her.

Who has the gall to start a story this way? Only someone who knows he can pull it off.

Although the Suburban Ennui theme can run a little thick, every now and then you will discover a story like “The Swimmer,” or “Goodbye, My Brother,” or “The Country Husband,” or “Reunion,” any of which could be career-capping masterpieces in their own right. In the collected stories, these are the rule, not the exception.