After I finished Anna Karenina, I read The Paris Review Interviews, I, and then Judy Rodgers's Zuni Café cookbook, then the oral history of the New York punk scene, Please Kill Me, and then a New York Review book, The Ten Thousand Things.
What impressed me so much about Anna Karenina, and made me want to write like Tolstoy (ha! I said it again!), was that the novel just has everything in it. I was moved by the death of Levin's brother, and the birth of his son. I totally (that's right, totally, not just partially) cried when Anna sneaked into her former home to visit her son, Seryozhia. There is lyrical nature writing; there is a bit written from a dog's point of view; there are disquisitions on the issues of the day. The last little Christian bit felt a little evangelical, but I can overlook that. (How good of you, Rose Gowen.)
Then, The Paris Review Interviews. I don't know if they are still the best author interviews-I enjoyed the Believer's book of interviews quite a bit, and Robert Birnbaum does excellent ones over at the Morning News (and Identity Theory?). But, the Paris Review got there first, and they are very good. It was a while ago that I read that book, and the main thing that sticks in my memory is: Hemingway, wow, what an asshole. He was interviewed by a young George Plimpton, and every time George tries to bring up something interesting Hemingway said elsewhere, Hemingway says, "Did I say that? What a stupid thing to say. I must've been drunk. In any case, I didn't mean it." Apparently he sketched out all his answers on a piece of scrap paper, which, to me, increases his assholism-he wasn't being opaque and stingy just off the top of his head, but took great pains to be opaque and stingy. Feh, Hemingway. I have not read him since I was in high school, and I probably should read him again, but he really turns me off. I mean, the idea of him, since, as I said, I haven't read him in a long time. That kind of macho emotional withholding just seems lame to me. I'd rather read Tolstoy, who tells you what everyone is thinking and feeling.
I was hedging for a while about whether Judy Rodgers's cookbook is really the best I've ever read or not. I haven't cooked from it yet, but as reading, I think it is. I like Richard Olney's Simple French Food (to read, not to cook from), but he is so cranky it ends up being funny (I have a theory that Harry Mathews story "Country Cooking" is inspired by Richard Olney). I love MFK Fisher, but she's really a memoirist, and my hunch is her recipes can be ignored. Judy Rodgers's book is a real cookbook. It has some wonderful anecdotes in it, but it's mostly recipes. What's valuable about her is that her observations are so fine, and she sets them down so exactingly. She tells you not how ingredients should act, or how she would like them to, but how they in fact do act. After reading her book I did feel as if I had been cooking with my ass all these years, but she is not sanctimonious. And she has a great motto: "Stop. Think. There must be a harder way."
For a while, I was carrying the punk rock book around with me everywhere. It was riveting! I could hardly stop reading it! But, it was a little embarrassing to be carrying around a book that says, "Please Kill Me" on the cover. Especially the morning I brought it into the dentist's office with me. She asked me about it. I was compelled to say something like. "Heh. Please don't kill me. Actually, be gentle. It's early and I'm nervous." But the book: very well edited. There are no boring parts (it's like a soap opera!), and everyone is coherent (which, since they were all junkies, is pretty amazing). I learned: that Lou Reed was much gayer than I ever realized; that Joey Ramone was once too much of a hippie to hang out with the other guys, and that the Ramones was really Johnny and Dee Dee's band (and speaking of assholes ]see above: Hemingway, what an], after I read this book, we watched the documentary about the Ramones-Johnny, man, I'm glad I was never in his band!); that Iggy Pop was a lunatic; and that everyone in New York in the 70's was on heroin.
So, then, The Ten Thousand Things, by Maria Dermout. It's a much quieter book than any of these others. It's a slim novel about a Dutch woman who lives on one of the Spice Islands, who is mourning the early death of her son. It's a lovely book, gorgeously written, but its gorgeousness is not ostentatious or self-conscious. It surprised me by floating out into surrounding waters in the middle, and then, in the end, showing that the surrounding waters were where we had been all along. I love the New York Review Books. I always buy them when I see them used. I haven't liked every one, but each is a little strange, different from other books, and that's what I'm always looking for.