Welcome to the first installment of The Canon According To Tomato Nation, a list of the books and authors you’ll find on my bookshelves (and in my closet, and stacked in piles beside my bed, and heaped on my windowsill, and doing duty as paperweights and doorstops) in my little apartment. I’ve chosen to memorialize my canon for two reasons. First, I went out for a drink with my friend The Lost Princess a few weeks ago, and out of nowhere she asked me what books and writers I like, and I felt like I’d waited my whole life for someone to ask me that question, but I froze up and couldn’t remember a damn thing on my bookshelf, and I sat there on my barstool with my mouth hanging open for a full minute before stammering weakly, “Uh, Gatsby?” While I do adore The Great Gatsby, as well as all of Fitzgerald’s other works, it did occur to me on the walk home – during which, naturally, hundreds of titles sprang unbidden to my mind – that I should have summoned up a more prompt and complete response, given that Amazon.com has me to thank for keeping them afloat before they expanded into books and music and groceries and whatnot, so I decided to put it all down in writing. Second, I have a tummyache today, and the fact that I suspect I’ve at last succeeded in giving myself an ulcer completely aside, I wanted to write on a topic that allowed – nay, forced – me to recline on the couch and look at my books.

I’ve taken the liberty of recommending a few of my favorites as well, in case you need something to while away your commute or stint in the doctor’s office waiting room. What a person reads says a lot about that person, I’ve found; inspecting a friend’s bookshelf lets me into his or her mind. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Let’s start with literary lions and lionesses, shall we?

Ernest Hemingway. Papa is not the fashion in politically correct English departments these days; professors enjoy accusing him of phallocentrism and “penetrating” diction and so forth. Still, the man gets it done, and he makes it look deceptively easy. Hemingway’s diction seems awfully simple until you try to replicate it yourself, and leave us not forget that the man usually started drinking at eleven o’clock in the damn morning, sitting in a Parisian cafÈ and writing while quaffing absinthe, which has since been outlawed for causing extensive brain damage. I recommend A Moveable Feast, the posthumous work Garden Of Eden, and especially A Farewell To Arms, for heartbreakingly crisp writing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. See above. Tenth-grade English teachers have a way of crushing the life out of beautiful books like Gatsby, so go back and read it again, but if the words “T.J. Eckleburg” give you hives, dip into his short stories. I might add that any man who got booted out of Princeton for turning a greased pig loose in one of the classroom buildings will surely have something in his writing to recommend him.

Eudora Welty. I hacked my way through the Complete Works last year, and at a certain point, Welty begins to sound like Faulkner with a bad head cold. Stick to The Golden Apples for the most concentrated example of Welty’s formidable abilities. Few writers can evoke a complete place the way Welty can.

Toni Morrison. All of her books have settled on my shelf, including Beloved, which won the Nobel Prize but which I don’t believe represents her best work. The Bluest Eye, which I read in high school, hit me like a punch in the stomach, but in a good way.

Margaret Atwood. She wrote a poem about the Picts, for God’s sake – a good poem, too – and I know I’ve said this before, but novels about little girls and the wars they wage upon one another don’t get any better than Cat’s Eye (or, for the same wars on an adult scale, The Robber Bride, which I gave a scathing review in my college paper when it came out, but I’ve since reread it, and it rules).

Evelyn Waugh. I had to give Waugh a chapter or two to get started, but he amply rewarded my patience. Brideshead Revisited had me in tears at the end, but if you can’t stomach thwarted love, try A Handful Of Dust or Decline And Fall instead.

W. Somerset Maugham. My father loves Maugham, and as a kid I read every Maugham book in the house – in other words, every Maugham book in print – but I’ve just recently gone back to it, and I like it even more now that I can fully appreciate how fully Maugham takes the piss out of people. Reading Maugham is like putting a leaf into a brook and chasing it downstream.

John Cheever. Never mind the fact that Cheever captures suburban anomie perfectly, which he does. Never mind the fact that his letters, which have a pH of 1 and a blood alcohol level of about twenty percent, had me rolling on the floor. Cheever despised John Updike. Good enough for me. The Complete Stories drags after a while, so go to the library and read the one in which the guy circumnavigates his neighborhood by swimming through all the backyard pools.

John Updike. I. Hate. John Updike. I hate his Rabbit books, I hate his non-Rabbit books, I hate his essays, I hate his articles in The New Yorker, I hate his golly-gee look-Ma-I’m-writing tone, I hate his long digressions, and I wish he would totter out to the kitchen in one of the umpteen houses he bought with the money he got for writing the same book umpteen different times, fire up the range, and fix himself a nice warm glass of shut the hell up. You can like him if you want. I won’t hold it against you or anything. But I have tried to like him, and I don’t. I hate him. Oh, did I say that already?

John Irving. Halfway through an Irving tome, I often find myself wishing he’d just get to the bloody point. Then he gets to the bloody point.

Flannery O’Connor. And people call me cynical.

Jack Kerouac. All of his other books stank, and parts of On The Road could use a bit of editing, but I still love it.

Sartre. If I didn’t own Nausea, they’d revoke my black-turtleneck license, but you have to love a narrator who gets so annoyed by everyone else on earth that he needs to lie down, and says so.

Camus and Dostoevsky. Ditto. Don’t let that annoying boho boyfriend you had freshman year, the one who refused to cut his toenails or use electricity, stop you from reading The Plague and Notes From Underground.

J.D. Salinger. I’ll probably get a lot of hate mail for this, but I don’t see the big deal here; I liked Catcher In The Rye okay, but how on earth did it inspire three assassination attempts? I mean, yeah, Salinger writes reasonably well, but what has he done for us lately – besides, of course, allowing Joyce Maynard to continue foisting herself on us?

Giorgio Bassani. I read The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis in English, and I don’t know from translations, but I have a feeling my heart would have exploded if I’d read it in the original Italian. By the time I finished it, the book looked like I’d dropped it in the bathtub.

Zora Neale Hurston. I think that, because I write for a living, I have different reactions to writing than “the layperson.” I don’t always do this, but often I find myself thinking things like “I can see what she wants to do with this, but it doesn’t work” or “I would have used a different word there” or “damn, I wish I could pull that off,” usually while reading fiction, because I tried briefly to write fiction myself and gave up after I realized that I sucked at it. Once in a while, though, I read a book that renews my faith in the human race – not through the story or the characters, though they might contribute, but through the sheer lyricism of the writing. William Wordsworth wrote an essay on language which traced the development of written and spoken language, and he posited that language derives from music and song, and when I find myself nose-deep in one of the faith-renewing books, Wordsworth’s theory always comes to mind; we can make the comparison between writing and music easily enough with poetry, but a work of fiction that seems like a song is rare. Their Eyes Were Watching God seems like a song, composed rather than written, and I don’t know if what I’ve just said makes any sense, but if you’ve read it, maybe you see what I mean.

More short-story anthologies than most local libraries.

The Norton Anthology Of [Insert Genre Here].

The Bible. I forced myself to read the entire thing, reasoning that, if I wanted to make fun of others for thumping it, I should know what it contained. I could have done without a dozen or so of those “begats,” but I don’t regret it.

In future installments – i.e. the next time I don’t feel well – newer writers, pop-culture jetsam, and reference books. Thanks for bearing with me.

Man, W.W. Norton has thought of everything.

The easy way out.

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