Nightstand Reads: Russell Banks

 Usually I’m reading three or four books more or less simultaneously — just starting one, halfway through a second, and about to finish a third or fourth. They await me somewhat impatiently in different spots around my house and studio: the bedside table, yes, and the chairside table in the living room, even the kitchen table. And then there’s my Kindle, where I carry books while traveling, mostly non-fiction, the kind of books I can re-enter easily after not having been there for weeks or sometimes months: books like The Autobiography of Mark Twain, or Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor. I call them “travel books” — although they’re almost never about travel.

Okay, then, my current non-travel books; that is, the ones that stay home.

A real old-fashioned travel book is D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia, which, as a matter of fact, I picked up at the airport when departing from Sardinia in June. I wanted to check my impressions of that extraordinarily beautiful island and its people against Lawrence’s nearly a century earlier. Lawrence’s book, however, is more about Lawrence than about Sardinia, as is his wont. But I hadn’t read any of his work in decades and had forgotten the pleasure of his rough-and-tumble prose, his reckless abandonment of conventional stylistic restraint, the sheer physical robustness of his voice.

A wonderful new novel called Heft by a young writer named Liz Moore will be published in January. I read it in galleys and finished it last night and wanted it to go on. The prose is clean, understated, carefully modulated and precisely tuned to the voices of her two main characters, both male, a lonely, morbidly obese ex-professor who is entirely cut off from the world and a teenaged boy, a star baseball player who’s dealing with the death of his alcoholic mother. It’s a profound, suspenseful story, tenderhearted without being sentimental. And beautifully written.

Then there’s One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road by the Kerouac biographer, Gerald Nicosia. I read this in galleys, too — it won’t be published officially until November — and finished it the other night, then had dreams about Neal Cassady and Kerouac and their fictional selves, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, and the real teenaged girl they both loved and who loved them back. Her name was Lu Ann Henderson, and she appears in the novel as the character named Marylou. Her true story is the back-story of Cassady’s and Kerouac’s fictionalized, mythologized back-story, and it provides a mostly missing point of view, the women’s, on the early Beat era that matches Joyce Johnson’s in her memoir, Minor Characters.

Not exactly bedside reading, but anthropologist Roger Lancaster’s Sex Panic and the Punitive State is a fascinating book. It’s an in-depth examination of our fears of, and how we deal and fail to deal with, sex-offenders in this country. Lancaster takes the long view, going back to the 17th century fear and persecution of witches, even looking at the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, and finds common threads that are both surprising and revealing, not about sex offenders but about our fear of pedophilia and the ways in which we express that fear.

And, finally, another travel book, Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya, one of those great Lonely Planet guides we read in order first to fill in the blanks in our vague fantasies of visits exotic locales and later carry in our backpack when we actually do go there. In this case, I’m in the process of turning my fantasy of climbing the so-called Three Passes Loop into a plan, and then from a plan into reality, sometime in the next year, if my knees hold up, which at my advanced age is not guaranteed. I’m hoping to follow a loop in the region of Everest Base Camp that crosses through Kongma Pass, Cho La and Renjo La with several ascents to 17,000 and 18,000 feet and heart-stopping views of the mother of all mountains and her sisters. But if I go, I’ll take the book itself, instead of the Kindle-ized edition. At 18,000 feet in the middle of the Himalayas, there’s no way to re-charge the battery. Another advantage of the old-fashioned paper-and-glue book.

Russell Banks reads from his newest novel, The Lost Memory of Skin, at the Central Library on Monday, October 3, at 7 p.m. A review in Booklist Magazine said that Banks has created a “commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel.” We’re excited to have Banks back at The Seattle Public Library; he was the inaugural author in the first Seattle Reads in 1998 with his novel The Sweet Hereafter.