Book Review|By the Book: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
I have two nightstands, one by my bed and one by my recliner in our family room, from which I grade the weekly one-page assignments for my graduate seminar on the Harlem Renaissance. I keep, on the nightstand by my bed, the reading assignment for my next class. On the stand by the recliner, I keep three or four books that I'm reading either as part of a research project, for a book I'm writing or a documentary film I'm making, or because I've read a review about it. More and more, I read to write or read to teach. James Weldon Johnson's early modernist novel, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man," is by my bedside because I'm teaching it next week. On the table by my recliner sit David W. Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, Jeffrey C. Stewart's biography of Alain Locke, Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer's "To Night Owl From Dogfish," Sarah Ladipo Manyika's novel "In Dependence" (in galleys) and Toni Morrison's "The Source of Self-Regard," her new book of essays.
The book I never tire of rereading is Wole Soyinka's tragedy "Death and the King's Horseman." The Swedish Academy cited it when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. It's a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, charting, in an irresistibly beautiful and densely lyrical poetic diction, the rise and fall of the king's most privileged nobleman or chief over a 24-hour period on what he knows is meant to be the last day of his life. His judgment beclouded by hubris, he mistakes Thanatos for Eros, with the deadliest of consequences. Whereas by day's end one person should have died, alas the number of dead will total two. "Death and the King's Horseman" is one of the greatest plays written in the 20th century. It is timeless, a play about being and the will, and the relation of both to the duties of tradition versus desire — the desire to live — without regard to the consequences. Because the tragic hero is so very human, so likable and so compelling, so very much like all of us, this play will, I believe, remain a classic for a very long time. I also read "The Souls of Black Folk," by W. E. B. Du Bois, every year.
I have three favorite books that I don't believe are read anymore: "Song of Lawino," by Okot p'Bitek, "The Master of Go," by Yasunari Kawabata, and "Narcissus and Goldmund," by Hermann Hesse.
What books would you recommend to someone who wants to know more about American culture?
I would suggest that they read Toni Morrison's novels, in chronological order, after reading Faulkner's novels and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." If by "American" you mean the Americas throughout the Western Hemisphere, I'd add García-Márquez. Ellison, Morrison and García-Márquez descend straight out of Faulkner, improvising, signifying, playing the dozens and tap-dancing on his Yoknapatawpha head.
I love Jamaica Kincaid's fiction and essays, especially her essays on gardening; the poetry of Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander and Jorie Graham; the essays of Adam Gopnik, Zadie Smith and Malcolm Gladwell; Simon Schama's art criticism. David Remnick on Russia. Joyce Carol Oates on boxing. Anything Helen Vendler has to say about any aspect of English or American literature. Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare. Kwame Anthony Appiah on ethics and identity. Paul Krugman and David Brooks on this moment in the history of world civilization. William Julius Wilson on race and class.
Darryl Pinckney's review-essays in The New York Review of Books. He's a master of the art of the book review.
In the mornings, after doing email. Just before going to sleep. I do my class preparations mostly on weekends. But I read most enjoyably at the beach. I read more during two months on the Vineyard and our forays to Varadero than I do the entire rest of the year.
A phrasing of a structure of feeling that I didn't really know I had, something so beautifully or hauntingly stated that I used to copy the words longhand in a commonplace book when I was in high school and college.
I love biographies, science fiction and detective novels for pleasure. I don't read cookbooks, but I have recently fallen in love with "The Great British Baking Show," which is like 60 minutes of Zen meditation between the evening news and the latest episode in the continuing saga of Donald J. Trump unfolding 24/7 on CNN.
David Reich's "Who We Are and How We Got Here," a brilliant new history of human evolution.
The 1806 edition of Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," with which I fell in love in graduate school at Cambridge. And perhaps a lovely set of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Writing was always magical for me, starting with the first book, I think, that I ever read on my own, "The Poky Little Puppy." Books would grow in length over time, but it took awhile. I went through a period in elementary school when I only read books about sports, especially basketball. My breakthrough "real" novels, in the eighth grade, were "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Les Misérables," with "The Agony and the Ecstasy" squeezed in between. And then, at an Episcopal Church camp in the summer of 1965, I discovered James Baldwin's essays. No turning back after that.
Eric Foner's "Reconstruction," especially the sections about Andrew Johnson.
Soyinka is always good company. I'd love to listen to him talk tragedy with Euripides and Brecht, if Lorca wasn't available.
Jean Toomer's classic work of modernism, "Cane," which took Du Bois's metaphor of double consciousness as both theme and structuring principle, to show that what Du Bois felt to be a social malady — an outgrowth of Jim Crow racism — which had to be cured, as it were, was in fact the definition of modernity itself.