So, do you know what the problem with coming up with a list of Top 10 Books is?
Definition.
How to compile a list of hundreds of possible choices, dozens of finalists, and bitter bracket-tournament combat over style and effect and significance and just plain likeability? How to balance an objectively great work of art with the first book you ever read that made you terrified? What of the old favorites, the books that were at one point defining but who stick out in awkward places like dated statues (What, after all, would the Justin of today do when asked what Atlas should do with the weight of the world on his shoulders? Probably keep walking, head down, and ignore the question.) Favoritism is rampant, and none of this can truly be objective. This list will, therefore, be in no particular order. The books stand around the circle of my life, not jockeying for position in some top-down list. There are greats, there are beloved guilty pleasures, and there are the books that define worldviews.
In short, then, it’s a question about values.
Our first entry is all of these things, and to those who know me personally it’s expected and will therefore be first.
We begin, as we must, with The Sun Also Rises.
To discuss the impact of this book in its entirety would require more introspection that I think I allow myself in the day to day. The best place to begin would be that second mentioned category above. Guilty pleasures. There’s, on its surface, no reason why this book should be a guilty pleasure, save for those times when a particular person at a particularly impressionable age and a particularly impressionable mood should find its story somehow allegorical.
This is a risk of any book, mind you, but it is more pronounced in stories like this.
Why, then, The Sun Also Rises? Well, first, it was, and this is no longer the kind of metric it used to be, the first book to make me cry. This was because it was the first book to put into words the kinds of things I was experiencing at the time I was experiencing them, at an age where one begins to develop the kinds of abstract passion that really good literature can spark and fan into inferno. Tie teenage arrogance to Jake’s introductory philosophy of mistrusting frank and simple people, add the drama of life’s first great romances to the entangling, heart wrenching experiences surrounding Brett (never mind the same kind of thinking applied to friendships. Nicknames abounded. Poor Cohn…), a bit of the zeitgeist shared between the Lost Generation and Millennials, the pauses to reflect on paths of escape, of nature, of values, and, of course, that fatalistic nostalgic optimism so brutally encompassed by the almost dull, then sudden stiletto of an ending- therein lies the dangerous charm of The Sun Also Rises.
And all this was before I could drink like they do in this book. Good. Lord. In their final interaction Brett and Jake consume together six martinis and five bottles of Rioja Alta (as heavily implied as it is that most of the latter went to Jake, and Brett’s ask if he could please not get drunk. (He just likes to drink wine, you know.))
Therein is the subtlety shaken with the melodrama that so encapsulates The Sun Also Rises’ deserved listing under that first category. I make a point of reading this book annually, usually on my first trip to Vermont (an occasional allegory for Pamplona) or else on the first day I go fishing (similarly allegorical). Although, and here my friends roll their eyes, the opening and ending lines are ingrained in my brain, there’s plenty of the smaller details that I either wind up forgetting or genuinely rediscover depending on the mood I’m in during the rereads. There’s a blink-and-you’ll miss it quality to the prose and the dialogue. Often it reads far too sparse, and the entire scene must be conjured from the reader’s mind, or else there’s a sense of over description bordering on dull, with a key line buried, almost as if to be missed, that hits home when or if you find it. The book, then, gives the overall sensation of hiding something, either by talking over itself or distracting you with something else.
Those of my friends who’ve ever dealt with a mood of mine know what I am talking about. If these sound like familiar defense mechanisms to anyone else reading this, you certainly know what I’m talking about.
Even Brett’s introduction is nearly skipped over. She’s with them, and then Jake’s angry. Her appearance plays as the menagerie of other people meeting over the course of the evening, and only then does Jake come around to acknowledging what it all means.
Back to the drinking, and a reader notices the same. How easily they go down, and in what quantities, and in what variety. What significance in a bottle of champagne too good to toast, because emotions would spoil the taste? The beauty of a river-chilled bottle of wine after a day of fishing. The ordering of the oldest possible brandies, because of the value found in a bottle of something that great.
The careful interplay of values, something missed only until I had a few more years apart, if that can be said, from what drew me to the book originally, and the measures of irony and pity, have come to rest as the primary reason to recommend and reread The Sun Also Rises. This is, of course, outside of the gorgeous travesty of a relationship at the book’s core, though this reason is as much informed by allegory as by the themes that lead one to pick the book up in the first place, and therefore warrants inclusion in the above. Values. Where in life does one place value, what things does one value, and how do you exchange values with others?
It’s not a premise about finding happiness or satisfaction, but of that basic search for something perhaps greater than either of those things. That’s if the book is to be believed. You can be valued and feel undervalued, or value something too highly that others may view as worthless. Are they wrong, or are you? Does that even matter? If not, how then do you cope with others valuing life itself differently than you?
These are not easy questions, of course, and perhaps you’re wondering if I have answers to them. If I’ve come to terms with the things I value, how I’m valued, and in turn how I value others and life itself.
I point to the five copies of this book on my shelf, mix up a Jack Rose (or a martini, but Jake takes his with olives and that just won’t do) and recline with a statement shaped like a question:
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
