maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me

April 15, 2023 8:26 PM

The books of my life: Colson Whitehead Pulitzer prize-winner Colson Whitehead on Ralph Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, and why he loves World War Z.

Books mentioned:
The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats and its sequel, Goggles!
The Twilight Zone Companion, Marc Scott Zicree
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Carrie, Stephen King
The Lathe of Heaven and the Earthsea novels, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith
World War Z, Max Brooks

Previous books of my life articles in The Guardian include presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Neil Gaiman ("He wrote about wasting time, how you look around and time’s gone. It plugged straight into everything I had ever thought or dreamed about becoming a writer and in that moment I was determined to become a writer. I thought better to try and fail than not to try and let the time blow past."), Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, novelist Barbara Kingsolver, poet Warsan Shire, singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, and novelist Karen Joy Fowler ("I made a New Year’s resolution to stop pretending I had read books I hadn’t. This necessitated a crash course in all those I had already pretended to have read.").

posted by joannemerriam (17 comments total)

Heart heart heart
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 8:49 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

These were great, thanks for sharing! It was interesting seeing the different interpretations of “The book I could never read again” question and the responses.
posted by pseudoinversedly at 9:23 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

If Colson Whitehead changed his mind and started writing Spider-Man, I'd probably start reading it again.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:40 PM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

When I heard World War Z was getting made into a movie, I had visions of a Burns-style faux documentary, with interviews of survivors dissolving into scenes of the war, but not always. Some stories would just be the actor telling their story to the camera. The interviews would be, like the book, after the war, so that there was an overarching sense of hope, even as bleak as the story got.

So much for that.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:31 AM on April 16, 2023 [19 favorites]

I need to read more Colson Whitehead. Thus far I have read only The Underground Railroad. It is a remarkable achievement and I sort of walked around in a daze after finishing it. Thanks for the post, OP!
posted by Bella Donna at 4:08 AM on April 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Gaiman's comment about The Shadow of the Torturer is interesting because that is a book I feel like I should like, but I just can't ever finish book 1, let alone get into the series. I think I did complete book 1 in high school, and I've probably tried to revisit it once a decade since then. I've accepted me, and that book just don't connect.
posted by COD at 7:16 AM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is a great idea for a column - I like that David Mitchell's comfort reading is a Jamie Oliver cookbook and Abdulrazak Gurnah's is cricket reports.

I know Whitehead did this because he has a new book out this summer (and Harlem Shuffle is great and I'm excited for the new one), but if you're looking around for your next Colson Whitehead read, may I suggest his debut novel The Intuitionist? A mystery about philosophical divisions in the elevator inspectors guild, but also so much more, good stuff.
posted by the primroses were over at 7:23 AM on April 16, 2023 [13 favorites]

Also—and especially given the discussion of World War Z—you should check out Zone One if you haven’t already, as it’s Whitehead’s take on the zombie novel.
posted by thecaddy at 7:25 AM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Whitehead is one of my absolute favorite writers, and his Lost and Found essay is the best piece of writing on post-9/11 New York City I’ve ever read. But I still can’t bring myself to read Zone One because I don’t like horror and I really don’t like zombies (I don’t think I got more than two chapters into World War Z) . I thought that book was an outlier, but reading this interview I wonder whether it might actually be closer to his heart than some of his other books. But I still don’t know if I could stomach it.

Thanks for posting this.
posted by Mchelly at 7:31 AM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

he has a new book out this summer

Thanks for the heads-up. I've read Harlem Shuffle and now I'm on the notification list at my library for when Crook Manifesto becomes available.

his debut novel The Intuitionist

I'm a solid fan of Colson Whitehead's books but this one didn't work for me. It felt like he was trying too hard to impress. I'm glad he's matured as a writer to someone more secure in his abilities.
posted by fuse theorem at 8:31 AM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mchelly, if you enjoyed Whitehead’s novels (especially his earlier ones) and you are not put off by genre books in general, then I encourage you to try Zone One. To me, it was less horrific than The Underground Railroad. It does have zombies doing zombusiness but I think they serve the same function for Whitehead as elevators, steam drills, or railroads do in his other books.

As an aside, literary genre novels (for lack of a better phrase) are in my sweet spot, and when I read Zone One several years ago, I enjoyed it so much that I looked up the reviews on Amazon to see how others felt about it. Amusingly, that just demonstrated that the Venn diagram of people who read literary fiction and people who read zombie novels is relatively small, with the majority of reviews saying what a bore it was as a zombie novel. It looks like the ratings have improved since then, which I’m guessing happened as Whitehead’s readership has expanded.

Thank you for linking his Lost and Found essay. I probably haven’t read it since it was published and it was good for me to think about again.
posted by steadystate at 9:28 AM on April 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Wow. A lot of love for Middlemarch, a book I've never read or that has ever been in contention. Any readers of it here to comment?

Also, so fun to read what authors I like are reading/have read. Thanks for sharing.
posted by the sobsister at 9:40 AM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for reminding me that he wrote Zone One — his name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Funnily, I read Zone One after hearing him interviewed about that book. Something about the way he speaks — not his physical voice but the words and how he puts them together — just tickles my interest and curiosity in a way I can’t really describe.

The WWZ comment here is exactly in this vein. I can’t point to anything particularly novel or profound in it, but I instantly want to read however many pages he’d like to write about it.
posted by bjrubble at 12:24 PM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I will admit I had a similar initial response as some of the Amazon reviewers — more zombies please! — but it was the parts that weren’t easily digested as genre fiction that turned out to be the most interesting.
posted by bjrubble at 12:32 PM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love Middlemarch at in-hardback and once-a-decade-or-so level. Probably not appealing if you can’t care about women’s lives constrained by social acceptability. Also, as I get older, strangely the same characters are less heroines and villains but more or less lucky with "and the world brings the iron ".
posted by clew at 2:25 PM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Neil Gaiman on Enid Blyton (his choice for “the book I could never read again”):

I’m somebody who loves going back to beloved children’s books, and yet whatever I loved isn’t there when I go back as an adult.

I think about this a lot. For me, most books I like seem to fall into one of two extremes: I can re-read them over and over forever, or I can enjoy them once but never recapture that a second time.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:04 PM on April 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Haven’t read his stuff, but based on this I really should, everything here I recognize a banger.
posted by Artw at 8:55 AM on May 14, 2023