80 books like Trout Fishing in America

Maybe you’ve read this book, but maybe you haven’t. The kids like me who used to carry the 95¢ Dell paperbacks are now dead or thinking about it.

The author, Kurt Vonnegut, was an American prisoner of war and spent 24 hours underground in a meat locker during the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. He said of his experience the bombing “killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.” It’s fair to say that this book was his imagination’s way of dealing with the war. “One” acts as a preface, so the novel really begins with “Two,” “Listen:/Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time,” and then imagination fights its way out.

I saw my first raven near Mount Rainier. The bird looked me in the eye, hopped to the left, sized me up, and continued his business. The advancing Russian army drove Bernd Heinrich and his family into the forest near Hahnheide, Germany, where they lived in a small hut for five years.

There, he began his lifelong quest to connect with insects (especially bees), owls, trees, antelope (he runs ultramarathons), geese...and ravens. The mind of the Raven is a deep, scientific meditation on the intersection between being human and raven. It concludes that “ultimately [our differences are] less a matter of consciousness than of culture” (342).

I wonder how culture has dulled my imagination, a struggle Heinrich clearly has fought more successfully than I have.

I love story collections where a writer has nothing to lose. The writer tries out ideas, and when imagination goes off the rails, we all go for a ride. This book has a central voice, Victor, who takes us to the carnival. There is Thomas, the storyteller whose imagination destabilizes like an LSD trip, but when Victor, Thomas, and their friends all take hallucinogens, everyone’s a Thomas.

As the stories unfold, somebody’s waiting for Crazy Horse, Jesus, Qualchan, or Coyote, and maybe they come, and maybe they don’t. It all boils down to “Survival = Anger x Imagination. Imagination is the Only Weapon on the Reservation” (150), an equation worth the price of admission.

I repost art that catches my eye. I click when I see a piece of Egon Schiele on social media. It’s impossible to look away, which is saying something, considering the variety and audacity of modern art. Born in Tulln, Austria, in 1890, Schiele died of the Spanish Flu in 1918 at only 27.

A student of Gustav Klimt, Schiele’s art is expressionistic, graphic, and transformative. His imagination is a slap in the face, a Munch “Scream” of a crime scene photograph. Steiner has done a great service in producing this art book, in which all of Schiele’s work is reproduced in color. His commentary is, at the same time, chronological and thematic. Schiele survived derisive criticism and prison, and although his life was short, his imaginative punches still landed.

I love Richard Brautigan, and In Watermelon Sugar was my first Brautigan book.

I was in the ninth grade and ready to be transported to a land that was hippie without trying to be so. A living room with trees and a stream. A sun that shines a different color every day, especially on Thursday when the sun shines black and there is no sound.

Written three years before the summer of love, the seeds of the hippie dream-turned-nightmare are already sown. Too much whiskey. And yet, this book lit the way for a life of creativity. Still does.

Cory Doctorow, the champion of nerds everywhere really hit the nail on the head with his book about the state of current politics and society with Little Brother. This book was released in 2008 but seems truer to life now than ever. His protagonist Marcus, watches appalled as the government begins to strip away citizens' rights under the guise of our protection. This book has been called dystopian young adult fiction, but I disagree. It all feels very familiar to the current climate we live in. It can get a little preachy but regardless of your personal politics it’s a must-read for all.

Forced electroshock or “electroconvulsive therapy” (ECT) is still commonplace, and it caused Linda Andre massive memory loss—but she recovered enough to write one of my favorite of many important books by people who’ve personally experienced forced treatment.

Her commentaries on the science are good, but Andre, once a leading activist, was frequently interviewed by news media and attacked by pro-ECT psychiatrists, and she exposes the behind-the-scenes politics and public relations of psychiatric science, forced treatment, and ECT in fascinating ways.

Her observations on how journalists tend to work, and of the many ways even “responsible” news outlets can misrepresent, manipulate, and get manipulated, are unnerving.

With revealing irony, Doctors of Deception criticized pro-ECT psychiatrists for rarely disclosing their conflicts of interest—and the book was viciously attacked in a prominent review by two pro-ECT psychiatrists who didn’t disclose to readers that they themselves were criticized in the book. 

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath unscrews the top of her skull and invites us to peek inside. This is one of my favourite first-person narratives.

Considering Plath’s struggle with depression and her ultimate suicide, the book portrays the tribulations of a tortured artist in New York’s beatnik fifties. Plath’s lyrical language infuses the prose which appeals to my love of poetry.

When my book club read this, we were universally blown away by Augusten Burroughs’ humor. Mining his tumultuous childhood, Burroughs paints a vivid and unforgettable picture of life with the ultimate dysfunctional family.

I went on to read the author’s other memoirs, and while I always enjoy his one-of-a-kind spin on the world, this remains my favorite of his works.

The Words We Lost is a powerful portrayal of the surprising gift of kindred spirits, of the trust required to grow deep friendships, and of the intense emotions when friendships are interrupted by death—all things I’ve been dealing with in the recent loss of a dear friend. 

This book is a beautiful study of the long and complicated, individual journey of grief, and of the persistence needed to restore broken trusts. Trust, friendship, betrayal, grief, and the journey to restoration of trust and friendship are all themes close to my heart—themes beautifully portrayed in the contemporary story of The Words We Lost.