Ben's Picks
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FEBRUARY 2022
JANUARY 2022
I love this book. I love Igancious! This brilliantly conceived novel follows Ignacious in all of his absurd rapscallionism, as he waddles around 1960s New Orleans. We have run ins with hot dog vendors, cross dressing policemen, evil ex girlfriends, and more! He is the most bloated, grandiose, interminably pretentiously stupid character of all time. Brilliant!
NOVEMBER 2021
SEPTEMBER 2021
This beautiful collection of essays, translations, and poetry by the Zen Catholic monk Thomas Merton encompasses much of his beautiful soul searching philosophy. Great for resetting your mind in the tenants of love and peace.
FEBRUARY 2021
A hilarious and thought provoking collection of essays from the amazingly creative mind of David Foster Wallace. Here he writes on such disparate subjects as tennis, Dostoyevsky, and David Lynch films, as well as the Illinois Sate Fair and the tropical cruise experience. Reading the cynical and jaded DFW's essay about being stuck on a cruise ship is an experience not to be missed. It's like Christopher Hitchens writing about a Disney World trip.
DECEMBER 2020
This is the book that became A CHRISTMAS STORY! It's even more wry and less sanitized than the movie (just look at the chapter titles). In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash involves Shepherd/Ralphie, having returned to his home town in Indiana, reminiscing about his childhood with Flick, who has become a bartender. It's very funny, and a good book to read this particular Christmas Season.
NOVEMBER 2020
Check out this quirky, fun, and well written British fantasy. I loved it when it came out in 2005. It's the closets thing I've read to matching the wit and charm of the Harry Potter series.
SEPTEMBER 2020
JUNE 2020
This book is an absolutely beautiful and calming meditation on all things walking, and how it helps us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The combination of intertwined stories and philosophy gives it a uniquely readable flow. Walking and hiking have always been an important part of my life, and I felt as if the book really solidified my love for it, and gave voice to many of my own thoughts. You cannot be unhappy reading this book.
FEBRUARY 2020
This book masterfully weaves together Indian politics and street life as we follow the hilarious and dark misfortunes of it's main character, Balram Halwani. Along the way we meet every sort of inhabitant of modern India, whether they be decent city dwellers or con men. Overall, The White tiger is an extremely fun book to read.
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DECEMBER 2019
OCTOBER 2019
This October, check out of the most terrifyingly brutal books I've ever read, The Painted Bird. It follows the fortunes of young Jewish boy as he journeys across war-torn holocaust era Europe in search of his family. Chilling, nightmarish, savage, apocalyptic, but extremely well written and compelling, The Painted Bird has haunted my consciousness since I read it years ago. (God knows how, but it was recently made into movie with Stellan Skarsgard and Harvey Keitel. I'm planning on watching it soon.)
SEPTEMBER 2019
The Road is an intensely beautiful and harsh book, the last published by Cormac McCarthy. It’s prose still gives me chills. Just read the first ten pages and see. The book follows the fortunes of an unnamed man and his son as they journey across a mysterious post-apocalyptic America. Outlaws and far worse plague the destroyed landscape. They are heading towards the east coast in search of some unnamed hope. The whole story is shrouded in mystery. What caused the devastation? What happened in the previous lives of the Man and Son? Perhaps their love for each other is the real focus of the book.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (Paperback)
AUGUST 2019
This is an absolutely gripping account of racial injustice in Jim Crow era Florida, and Thurgood Marshall's quest to exonerate four innocent young black men of rape. Think The Central Park Five but in the orange growing country of central Florida. The story is so amazing it's hard to believe it actually happened. Read it!
JULY 2019
This is my favorite historical novel. Michener has a unique ability to capture the essence of a place and culture, taking the reader on a journey from the beginning of it's known history, and following multiple families through the generations. The Chesapeake Bay region was the center of a huge chunk of American history. This book is both literary in style, and very readable. Great for a summer beach read, actually!
APRIL 2019
This is one of the greatest satires I've ever read. Absolutely hilarious, but in a morbid way. Kind of like a less tedious Catch 22. In the not too distant future/the 80s/now, individualism has been almost entirely stripped away by the forces of mass media and rampant consumerism, to be replaced by general complacency. But death looms heavy on the horizon, both literally and in the minds of the characters who despite the constant media over stimulation are deeply unhappy. What if, however, a pill could be created to nullify their fear of death?
MARCH 2019
Celebrate this great Beat poet’s 100th birthday by checking out his most well known collection of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind. He was a contemporary of Ginsberg and Kerouac, and set up the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1953, where it still operates today. Not only is this man still alive, but he is coming out with a new novel! Little Boy is it’s title, and it’s set to be released March 19th 2019, five days before his birthday. In the mean time, check out this thin (and economical) volume of poetry from 1955 if you want to figure out what he’s all about. Also check out the other New Directions titles in the store, as well as Ferlinghetti’s City Lights (yes, he also publishes books) titles. They are phenomenal and we have many throughout the store. Just ask me!
FEBRUARY 2019
These journals bring the reader in to the true heart of what Thoreau stood for, without the more formal style of Walden or his essays. Beautiful, heartfelt, and brimming with curiosity about the natural world, as well as human nature. This is the book I go to when I’m in a rut. It just makes me happy to read.
JANUARY 2019
This is an absolutely captivating collection of essays on all things 60s by the cultural icon Joan Didion. So many subjects are covered, from short bios on John Wayne and Joan Baez, to true crime, to the hippie movement in San Fransisco, all with a psychologically penetrating eye. Fascinating.
DECEMBER 2018
From the author of Trainspotting comes a great new Christmas classic! Here we follow the fortunes of Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, a hugely misanthropic and manipulative cop in Edinburgh, Scotland, who has a violent streak and a dark secret. He's investigating a murder that is really starting to irk him as he makes his plans for his Christmas holiday vacation. Bruce is racist, misogynistic, and just overall an awful fellow, whom Welsh brings to life brilliantly, and strange to say, hilariously. I've seen blackly comic sociopaths before in literature, but this man is the absolute king. Filth is at times hilarious as hell, and at other times dark as a pit. Merry Christmas!
OCTOBER 2018
The Changeling is one of the most surreal books I’ve read in a long time. Mystery and violence are lurking around each corner. Set in New England on an isolated island, the story follows Pearl, the young widow of one of the island’s inhabitants, and her young child, in a downward spiral of alcoholism and post-partum depression. The island is also inhabited by a bunch of Wicker Man-esque children who have been adopted by her husband’s domineering brother, and who may or may not practice ancient witchcraft. They might not even be human children, nor does Pearl even know if her own child is actually hers.
SEPTEMBER 2018
This book is just fun to read! Carl Sagan is brilliant at taking the most complex and interesting theories of astrophysics (as well as biology, chemistry, etc.) and making them accessible to anyone. He also takes the great scientific discoveries throughout the ages and puts them in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. So you get a sort of history of science, with its proponents and opponents. The things revealed within these pages gives you the sense that the nature of reality is a sort of science fiction in its own right, with mind bending possibilities. One of his proteges is actually Neal DeGrasse Tyson, another well known and brilliant scientist. If you like him, you'll love Sagan!
JUNE 2018
This is one of the most controversial fictional works of all time, and it is also one of the great novels of all time. Writing in a style that was entirely unique, blending prose and poetry, Henry Miller created a novel that broke new ground both in its craft and its subject matter. Hedonistic, existential artists and bottom dwellers haunt the pages, and perversity comes to the forefront in a way hardly ever seen in 1934, the date of its first publication. However, due to it’s subject matter and our lawmakers at the time ignoring the first amendment, it was not published in the US until 1964!
So please, read a book that, alongside Ulysses and Journey to the End of the Night, broke all of the conventions and set free generations of writers to the full potential of literary art.
MAY 2018
In this truly haunting novel by Portugal's best known novelist and Nobel Prize winner Jose
Saramago, blindness is spreading like a plague, and a quarantine zone is set up. From here, we begin to see how all semblance of humanity can be stripped away from us in the face of adversity. Amidst the general confusion, there arises new social factions and leaders, as well as new predators, operating off of the basest of human traits, preying on the magnified vulnerability and weakness of others.
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APRIL 2018
This Australian exploitation novel is the story of a mans physical and existential descent into despair, violence, and self loathing in the dead dusty Outback, stuck in a sort of living purgatory. It's a quick read, but one that definitely sticks with you. (watch the amazing movie as well, with Donald Pleasance.)