Books of Influence

By Kevin Stevens

I do my best to include history, biography, and science in my reading, but mostly I read fiction. Novels give me what I need most from books: linguistic play, a search for the true, and pure aesthetic pleasure – what Vladimir Nabokov called the "indescribable tingle of the spine."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – I grew up in the American West, on the banks of the Missouri River, and Mark Twain’s tale of boyhood, violence, and the power of a great river has been a literary touchstone for me since I read it forty years ago. I re-read it once a decade, and each time it has something new to offer.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy – No novelist holds a mirror to the world as completely and accurately as Tolstoy. We come to know his characters as if they are members of our family. Anna is fiction’s greatest hero, a woman so completely realized that she rises above the moral censure of her creator and commands our deepest sympathy.

Herzog, Saul Bellow – Bellow taught me that a prose style can be both streetwise and intellectual, a novel both profound and profane. Herzog is a magnificent character study, a comic masterpiece, and a defining document for post-war America. Though it reads as if flowing from the spontaneous musings of its narrator, it is carefully and beautifully structured.

Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, Evan S. Connell – Connell deserves to be rediscovered if only for this duo of superb novels, set in Kansas City in the 1930s. Telling the same family story from the point of view of husband and wife, he defines a place and an era with uncanny effect in a stunning display of crystalline nuggets of prose.

The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford – “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Who can resist a novel with such an opening line? And Ford delivers – his novel of deception and cultural disintegration in the wake of the Great War is sad in ways the narrator never understands. Timeless, heart-rending, unique.

Published in The Sunday Tribune, 2005