Search Results for: Charles Portis

Charles Portis’s True Grit

Saturday, December 26, 2020

my wife got me this OG copy for Christmas

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like a man fighting bees.” Charles Portis is the only novelist whose books I’ve read twice. (He only wrote five of them, so that helps.) True Grit is the most-perfect of his novels, a lean 215-page tale of a girl seeking revenge on the man who killed her father. Like all of Portis’s books, it is funny and absolutely packed with great sentences. No other fiction has given me so much comfort in the past few years. I plan on re-reading Portis until I’m as dead as Tom Chaney.

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more favorite books, check out my reading years.

RIP Charles Portis

Friday, February 21, 2020

RIP Charles Portis. He’s the only writer whose novels I’ve read twice. (I re-read all five of them last summer when I was in a real funk.)

If you’re wondering where to start, you can’t go wrong with True Grit. After that, I’d probably read the books that came after in order of publication — The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, Gringos — and then swing back for his first novel, Norwood.

Portis was a master not just of opening lines, but opening pages. (Levi Stahl posted all five of them on Twitter.) Here’s the opening of The Dog of the South:

When I re-read Gringos, it not only became my personal favorite of his books, I’ve adopted several of its sentences into my (mental) file of life-guiding aphorisms:

“We had both known the despair of trying to sell things that nobody wanted.”

“The trick is to make yourself first useful and then necessary.”

“Short was good in a book.”

There are many nice remembrances of him out there: John Brummett sat next to him at his regular bar, Jonathan Rogers’ mom used to quote Mattie Ross to explain her teetotalling, and Wells Tower says he feels less mean when he reads him. (Same.)

I used to hope he was working on a final novel, but I also sort of wished he was on his porch somewhere in Little Rock, sipping whiskey, just hanging out and enjoying life. (Unfortunately, he spent the last six years in a memory care unit.) But it seems like he lived right: kept his overhead low, kept away from unhelpful fame, wrote, traveled to Mexico, and shopped yard sales to find extra parts to keep his typewriter working.

Since there aren’t any more novels to read, I’m off to finally read his miscellany, Escape Velocity. (And maybe sip some whiskey.)

My reading year, 2023

Monday, January 1, 2024

Here are all the books I finished in 2023. I am tempted to just leave them here in this big visual pile and say nothing else about them.

I’m tired of making these lists! And I often wonder if I stop making year-end lists if it will free me up even more to stop slogging through books I don’t like, to be even more promiscuous, read intros and articles and websites and PDFs and just generally be more reckless.

As I tweeted to Elisa Gabbert, who makes my favorite year-end list, I am “trying to fight my completist Brian.” I loved that typo — it was supposed to be “brain” but I like the idea of a completist Brian inside me that needs to be silenced. “Shut up, Brian!”

But I’ve had these reading lists going since 2006 and I just can’t let it die. So I’m just going to share a few books here that I already shared in the year-end newsletter.

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Fiction

Don Quixote was the best book I read. I read it right around the solstice. Everyone will tell you to get the Edith Grossman translation, but what brought me the most joy was listening to David Case’s reading — his voices for the knight errant and his sidekick made me laugh and laugh. Instantly became one of my favorite books, one I will read again and again, I’m sure.

Frank Herbert’s Dune was perfect for August in Texas.

I loved Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, as I do most of his books.

Larry McMurtry’s All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers was bawdy and fun.

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These packed a punch in a tight, short book.

I re-read 3 Charles Portis novels for the third time because I can’t seem to stop reading him — Donna Tartt’s audiobook of True Grit was sublime.

I read two hardboiled classics: James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

I read Matilda and several Harry Potter books and Grimm Fairy Tales to my kids.

Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese was a perfect graphic novel.

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Non-fiction

I turned 40, so the work of James Hollis came to me at just the right time. I found The Middle Passage and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life particularly helpful — no real answers, just good questions.

I enjoyed Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game and Antifragile.

Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind gave me a really wonderful framework for thinking about my creative practices.

I liked Seneca’s wisdom and occasional bitchiness in Letters from a Stoic.

Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is just that.

Geezer Butler’s Into The Void and Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All were worth listening to just to hear them read.

Will Hermes’ biography, Lou Reed: The King of New York, was pretty much exactly the book I wanted it to be.

A delightful year-end surprise was Dwight Garner’s The Upstairs Delicatessen.

Box Brown’s The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood and Bill Griffith’s Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy are about as good as non-fiction comics get.

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Here is a map I tried to make of all these books and how they related to each other:

This year I would like to be more reckless than ever — I would consider it a great triumph, actually, if I finished fewer books, if I sampled and skimmed and scraped more books, and saved finishing for books where I can’t stop turning the pages.

It’s been almost 10 years since I made this list of 33 thoughts on reading. I feel that I might be getting closer and closer to living up to it.

Filed under: my reading years

Circuit boards and clowns

Saturday, April 29, 2023

“Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home. I’m on the alert for omens. Odd things happen when you get out…”
—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

Here are two images from this week’s walks. I think they neatly summarize our present moment: circuit boards and clowns.

Seneca on reading

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

I’m reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which is basically a 2,000-year-old advice column.

Here’s what he said in letter 2 about reading, and specifically, spending a lot of time reading writers “whose genius is unquestionable”:

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer, but skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all.

While I am a great proponent of reading more than one book at a time and letting books talk to each other, I also believe that when you find a writer who unlocks something in you, you should spend as much time with them as you can, read and re-read everything they wrote, and then “swim upstream” and try to read what they read.

This need not happen all at once. I like to think of these writers as old friends that I can rely on. No matter where we are, we can pick up where we left off.

Right now I’m reading Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South for the third time. (I’ve read all his novels twice.) And the normal things are happening that happen during a re-read — I’m noticing new things I never noticed before, re-underlining passages that I’ve already underlined — but I’m also starting to feel like I’m really understanding what’s going on in his sentences.

I re-read Donna Tartt’s remembrance of him and laughed out loud when she recalls their first phone conversation:

“Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you were my crank caller… I have a regular crank caller and almost every day he telephones about this time. If I don’t pick up he rings and rings.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No, it is just some prankster. Local, I think. Many people around here do not seem to have much to do.”

“That must be a big nuisance.”

“No. To tell you the truth I am a little disappointed on the days he does not telephone. I have come to look forward to his calls.”

This exchange reads almost exactly like something out of his novels. My reaction is the kind you would have upon hearing from somebody something your friend had said to them. “Yeah, that sounds just like Charlie.”