The Art of Manliness suggests one hundred must-read books for men. For the most part, I approve, though I have to say that non-English authors are sadly underrepresented. What I mean to say is, almost all of these are well worth the reading, IMO.
And don’t miss the review section, “Priapus.”
UPDATE: How manly do I like my literature to be? I prefer masculine rhyme.
Double-Dactyl
Higgledy-Piggledy
Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs
(Masculine rhyme):
One sentence (two stanzas)
Hexasyllabically
Challenges poets who
Don’t have the time.
There is nothing remotely humorous about this tragedy, and anyone who finds it at all so is a terrible person:
A 52-year-old Cohoctah Township man died Saturday after his 94-year-old mother accidentally ran him over with an all-terrain vehicle, police said.
Feminist Science by Spies, Brigands and Pirates’ Markov chain program:
- Comment by caroline hurtin (my brain) on 5/14 @ 4:53 pm # |Edit ThisThe science of peers is pan-spatio-temporal. Browsings embody the tenets of life, the void.Motion with the Cartesian coordinates are embodied browsings in her passage. The jump cuts in space of alternative plots to question our way of space strive for a result, motion is a predecessor in her original monsterâ€â€and resorting to adjust.Always looking for the unrecorded stories of emulating her story and time. Histories are both in the moments along the written by a union of time, and in the reader in doing so.Let her body parts/texts simultaneously. A browser’s yearning after being an embodied feminist flâneuse is unified (but not use Janet Murray’s terminology). We can pass through. She is a textual cosmos of our interface. Explore cyberspace peripatetically. We are lesbian writer and space, look and the browser (not to touch, and time).
If all things are constantly in knitting the magnitude of the wanderlust has long been denied to critique the narrator’s eyes, in both in the potentialities of how and mapped by the full and our body parts exercise their minds, different pages. The textual spaces. To be fixed points in the meeting of past and for a prototype of alternative plots to structure.
Patchwork Girl, no need to enact her to one that keeps returning to travel through. Motion crosses the foot’s former casket. Finally reunited with the swarm seems to reconcile this dislocation between the text to speak in space-time of the gesture of dislocation.
It is a wooden leg, and sometimes traumatic moments along dotted line. The science of connection is immediate. The trajective network of writing, plus the lines she storms out into the penny press. Lost appendage back onto our experiences in the rooms of thought: we might think of light speed.
Her lips laugh of a means of unrecorded stories of storytelling and uses this sensory space. The result of transformation of the space-time of the acceleration of forgotten stories cannot be other places, to both locations. Revisiting a browser’s quest in revisiting a woman impersonating a glimpse of her donors cluster together across the electronic text. There a space is instead a constant. This excitation, as a disconnection is inclusive and our interface with the map is always already changed by its movements, re-embodiment-meta-embodiment. We can use of mnemonic engagement with plastic surgery and perceptual space. This conglomerate of forgotten, faceless, unknown souls who are the way out in space is the notion of Jackson’s fissured creature that refuse to explore cyberspace peripatetically. We choose to deviate from the mode of the expression of her own turn the gaps between storytelling and discourse as the form: the spatio-temporal divide.
Static space where she hunts down divergent threads to be linked, never linear trajectory. It is always already a product, because with the disconnecting gestures required to shift Jackson’s novel works on the paintings of the trajective browser is a method of peers written in fiction and, when Chancy happens upon inversions of subjectivity and discourse.
That reading list is as tired as Hillary’s ovaries. Pussy tomes read by and written for docile girls yet to grow a pube.
Bring me my carving knife and I’ll show you what form it takes make it on a real man’s three-pistolero reading list.
In place of the two Vonnegut books (Slaughterhouse 5 and Bluebeard) I’d substitute Player Piano and Cat’s Cradle.
And, I’ve read the Metamorphosis–really–no one else needs to. Just let me accept that bullet. In it’s place I’d recommend The Ugly American for much the same reason they recommend Catch-22.
Need to fit some Ruark in there, Old Man and the Boy would be my choice. Sparse Grey Hackle is better than MacLean in my opinion, and I don’t see how you could not have some HST.
PPPPPPPLLLLLTTTTTTT!!!!!
Albert Camus, but no Robert A. Heinlein, the best American writer since Mark Twain.
My, my, my, what a manly library I have. I must be the most manly man-y man in Manville. FEEL MY ARMS THEY ARE STRONG!
C’mon, Scott. Jane Austen’s great, but you ever try reading all of the novels consecutively? It makes you yearn for explosions.
Definite lack of Sci Fi.
Besides, lots of guys who read men’s mags would be well served to read what’s here, even if it’s a bit Old Spicy.
Wait a minute…
No Mack Bolan? No Destroyer?
+1 on RTO’s suggestion re: Vonnegut.
The list is fatally flawed without “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” by Heinlein.
MAN-BOOKS FOR MAN-MEN!
WHO WANTS TO BE A MAN? YOU DO! SO READ THESE BOOKS THEY ARE MANLY! BUT HOW WILL THEY MAKE YOU MORE MANLY? I WILL TELL YOU! THIS ONE WILL CHALLENGE YOU ON MANY LEVELS AND WORK YOUR BACK AND
No Aubrey & Maturin? No Captain Alatriste? No John Ringo? Philistines!
Those summaries don’t inspire confidence in the book-related judgments of those penises, and owning more than one book about Teddy Roosevelt is all kinds of bad-gay.
What? No Paul Auster? No Mark Helprin? WTFO?
With the caveat that I’m interested in “good,” not “manly,” I heartily second Great Mencken’s Ghost on the Aubrey and Marturin novels. I read Moby Dick when I was fifteen because I’d inhaled O’Brian for so long the cetology chapters seemed like child’s play.
Dan:
C’mon, Scott. Jane Austen’s great, but you ever try reading all of the novels consecutively?
Actually, I did that in a course with the late Homer Brown on Austen and Charles Brockden Brown (no relation, I don’t think). And to be honest, as opposed to anticipated feeling of emasculation, I felt emboldened with the power to devastate anyone with a single cutting clause to do things better left unsaid.
Besides, lots of guys who read men’s mags would be well served to read what’s here, even if it’s a bit Old Spicy.
Absolutely … but I have a hunch they feel they’d been coerced into it by men who ain’t all that manly. I mean, I arrived at grad school intending to be a Joycean and, contra their suspicion that “even those who have written their doctoral thesis on the book only pretend to have read every word,” I read every word not once, not twice, but forty-five hundred million billion times. (I may be exaggerating.) (Or maybe that’s just how people with degrees in English count.) (The choice is yours.) If a manly man-y picked it up, yes, I do believe he’d find the Telemachiad imposing … but if he could lay down his arms and put down his beer and grant it the attention it deserves, he’d find a kindred beer-drinking arms-handling spirit. Granted, it’d be guised in the constellatory logic of modernism, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t worth reading.
I should explain the pure puzzle-solving joy that Joyce elicits — how he satisfied the urge for order desperately lacking after I was forced to transfer out of the computational linguistics program due to its no longer existing — but I’m too tired. All I’ll say is that there’s a satisfaction to making sense of a world designed with meaning that’s lacking in the one we live in. That’s why Tolkien’s so popular, and why Pynchon devotees are devotees … there’s a mindset, largely medieval, that appeals to puzzle-solvers like me. I know it’s not for every — EVEN THOUGH IT’S MANLY! — but a lot of people who think they wouldn’t like Joyce would obsess, you know, if they gave it a shot. (Literature, like you said, being good and all.)
Definite lack of Sci Fi.
Yes, RTOT, certainly. Especially of the hard variety, which is weird, given how manly these men are.
SB:
No Mark Helprin?
We all have to grow up some day, you know?
Alright, that link explains most of it, but here’s an anecdote to deal with the rest: way back when, a year or so after A Soldier in the Great War came out, a fourteen year-old me begged his father to let him go see Helprin talk. Baseball practice finished at 6:30 and his talk started at 8:00, but there was an accident on I-10 and so I barely had time to go home and shower. I arrived at his talk around 7:55 and was one of three in attendance. He came in, gave me one look, then the evil eye, then proceeded to extol the virtues of doing book tours on the East and West coasts. Apparently, the fourteen year-old who busted his ass to make it to his talk — the FOURTEEN YEAR-OLD — was evidence of the Decline of Western Civilization because his hair was still wet. I thought I’d struggled all Peter Lake-like to get there, and that the substance of my presence might outweigh the appearance of my hair. Alas, it was not the case. He spoke for about ten minutes then had some pressing engagement to get to. Since I’d told my father I didn’t need to be picked up until 10 o’clock, I had a good long time to reflect upon the way I’d been treated.
I’ve hated libertarians ever since.
I KID!
It’s conservatives I hate. Conservatives. Because of Mark Helprin. (Even though I still like his books.)
Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
Lord of the Rings by some dewd
The Plague by Camus
Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell
The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
He should ditch one of his kabillion anti-war novels in favor of “Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way!”
Far better to include a book BY Teddy Roosevelt, say, “African Game Trails”.
“I’m not just the president of Book Club for Men™ — I’m also a client.”
I didn’t say emasculation. What I mean is that 200 pages worriting about having inadvertently insulted a spinster gets a bit wearing.
Oh, and I read them consecutively, too. With Irving Ehrenpreis, for what it’s worth.
(Even though I still like his books.)
Actually, even though I enjoyed Winter’s Tale, I more had in mind Memoirs From Antproof Case. I liked that one quite a lot, even though I’m too much of a hayseed to understand why, exactly.
I completely get the adolescent crush, though. Sometimes that blissfully-unaware object of your affection can pick up your whole life and almost, almost change it completely. Or so it seems, sometimes, in hindsight.
But then you get crushed, and spring back to your natural lifeshape. Mine was a devastatingly attractive, slender, blond/blue, extremely nice young lady from Chicago who spoke fluent French and was highly into Young Life. I was within a hairsbreadth of throwing over my late-teenage agnosticism for religious evangelism, when I discovered that outside of our time together writing each other’s biographies (this was Freshman Comp), she had no interest in me at all. In a way: lucky me.
I would add The Alchemist, by Paulo Coehlo, and The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk, to any list of recommended reading, except pron.
I’d say lose the Krakaurererre and add in Beau Guest and the Three Musketeers. Shelby Foote’s Civil War is absent, so is Andersonville. The first (and only) two parts of William Manchester’s Churchill Bios. And Robert Caro’s LBJ bios. No Hobbit? No LoTR? No Illuminatus? No Brave New World? where’s Freud? Clive Cussler? Ian Fleming? Lose the book about the fat guy in New Orleans and drop in Still Life with Woodpecker. Some Came Running? What about Short Stories? Lenigan and the Ants, he Most Dangerous Game?
What kind of men are these exactly? (he said in his most manly voice while drinking black coffee, tying his windsor knot, lifting something heavy, changing a flat tire and helping a little old lady across the street)
I’m sorry, but what I’ve read of Clive Cussler is simply awful. One book is all I could take. Shock Wave, IIRC.
His fiction is the literary equivalent of popcorn. Sometimes I feel like popcorn.
His non-fiction (“Sea Hunters”, for example) is pretty damned good. You can’t beat someone who organized a fruiting of a French warship and discovered the CSS Hunley.
There’s some real crap in that list (Catcher in the Rye??) and some really weak stuff but there are good examples too. Overall I give the list a C, it’s missing a lot of great stuff and has a lot of trash, but if you’re careful you can pick out some good in it.
Ok, then. I admit sometimes I read stuff like Jonathan Kellerman and Patricia Cornwell, but I can’t stand either of them anymore. Ditto Clancy, Grisham, and a whole slew of others. Jordan’s Wheel Of Time series had me ready to give it up for a while, but now that the series is definitely winding up to a finish, I’m going to grab the last book (even if it’s released in two volumes, which it might well be) and be done with it.
Popcorn. I like popcorn, too. I just don’t like it carmel-covered.
Yeah, Christopher, but compare it to other best books lists you’ve seen on the intarwebs before you assign the grade.
I don’t think I would make a very good man.
Point is, you’ve got a main character who’s been shot in “the meaty part of the thigh” fifteen thousand times, but can still wrestle alligators and evil-doers under water, while simultaneously fucking every woman within spitting distance. How can that be bad?
Neither would I; I just don’t swing that way.
Is there a non-meaty part of the thigh? I mean, on normal people. No fair throwing Kate Moss at me.
No Tom Wolfe? Just finishing “I Am Charlotte Simmons” and it’s a pretty spot on description of life among the priveleged at the upper tier of university life. The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full are both awesome. And Wolfe’s non-fiction books are delightful – especially The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and his scathing critique Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers which has yet to be matched for its lampooning of fashionable lefty cocktail society.
Nah, I don’t grade on a curve. Still, to be fair I’m working on my own list, probably not 100 books but some at least.
I gave up after one of the books took like 800 pages to advance two plot points, both of which occurred in the last thirty pages or so.
Reminiscences – MacArthur
Sirens of Titan – Vonnegut
Mother Night – Vonnegut
Riding the Iron Rooster – Theroux
The Polish Officer – Furst
Warrior Politics – Kaplan
The Pentagon’s New Map – Barnett
Oh, I could go on. I have no life, thank God.
From the article:
“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.â€Â
Bullshit, I’m afraid; I want a book, a comfy chair, and a beer (plus, regular fillups).
I worship no-one. Do you hear that, Lebowsky?
—–
Fucking Germans. Nothing changes. Fucking Nazis.
OK for what it’s worth I put up my list.