Reading Flavorwire’s “50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers” challenged my literary fortitude. I found myself wanting to buy a bunch of new books, then take kickboxing lessons, hit the gym, or maybe dive of a cliff.

I applaud the effort to compile a list of fifty tough books. Even putting this list together required its own toughness and determination. I would have agonized over leaving off Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and struggled with including Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. It’s a great collection, but tough or extreme? I don’t see it.

The guidelines for this list were clear. The books included some that were “absurdly long, some notoriously difficult, some with intense or upsetting subject matter but blindingly brilliant prose, some packed into formations that require extra effort or mind expansion, and some that fit into none of those categories, but are definitely for tough girls (or guys) only.”

Here are a few highlights from the list.

1. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
2. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
4. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
5. JR by William Gaddis
6. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
8. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
9. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
10. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
11. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
12. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
13. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
14. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
15. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
16. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
17. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
18. Tampa by Alissa Nutting
19. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
20. The Tunnel by William Gass

Check the Flavorwire post for the complete list and reasons for each novel’s inclusion.

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As some lament the death of literature, and others argue that recent versions of it are terrible, a new study in the journal Science suggests that reading literature, in nothing else, makes us better people. A New York Times blog piece provided a summary of the study.

It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.

The same benefit doesn’t, however, hold true with other types of reading. Again, from the New York Times from the times piece.

Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor at Cambridge University’s Darwin College, said he would have expected that reading generally would make people more empathetic and understanding. “But to separate off literary fiction, and to demonstrate that it has different effects from the other forms of reading, is remarkable,” he said.

Quite remarkable, indeed. Read the rest of the NYT piece for more information, or read the abstract of the Science study here.

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Here’s a great reading list given to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nurse and written down in her handwriting.

Here’s more on the list from Open Culture:

In 1936 — perhaps the darkest year of his life — F. Scott Fitzgerald was convalescing in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, when he offered his nurse a list of 22 books he thought were essential reading. The list, above, is written in the nurse’s hand.

Fitzgerald had moved into Asheville’s Grove Park Inn that April after transferring his wife Zelda, a psychiatric patient, to nearby Highland Hospital. It was the same month that Esquire published his essay “The Crack Up”, in which he confessed to a growing awareness that “my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

Here’s the list in full:

1. Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
2. The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan
3. A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
4. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
5. The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
6. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett
7. The Red and the Black, by Stendahl
8. The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant, translated by Michael Monahan
9. An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, edited by Gardner Murphy
10. The Stories of Anton Chekhov, edited by Robert N. Linscott
11. The Best American Humorous Short Stories, edited by Alexander Jessup
12. Victory, by Joseph Conrad
13. The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France
14. The Plays of Oscar Wilde
15. Sanctuary, by William Faulkner
16. Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust
17. The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
18. Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
19. South Wind, by Norman Douglas
20. The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield
21. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
22. John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works

(Thanks to Tarcher/Penguin for the link)

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The documentary, which is narrated by Meryl Streep, is described on the official site as a movie that:

draws us into the topsy-turvy world of words, illuminating the turbulent and exciting journey from the book through the digital revolution. Jeff Bezos, Ray Bradbury, Scott Turow, Jeffrey Toobin, parents, students, educators, scientists – all highlight how this revolution is changing everything about the printed word – and changing us.

Here’s the trailer:

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“I, who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened. I have indeed awakened and have only been born today.” —Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about money, and I hate thinking about money. Ask my wife.  However, finances have been so tight as to make this unavoidable. Yes, I’d rather leave the riches to those obsessed with material gain. Yes, I am better off than a large percentage of the world population. And I appreciate those things, I really do. Still, it weighs on me when I must choose between taking my dog to the emergency vet, buying a book I need for my graduate program, patching a flat tire, eating, or paying rent; when every month I’m holding my breath; and when our parents and siblings are having their own hardships, so that I feel guilty we can’t lend them the money they need, and way too guilty to ask to borrow.

But those worries always come with an asterisk. The truth is that my wife and I chose instability because it was necessary to our family’s survival. We moved 200 miles to escape jobs at our hometown newspaper that had slowly withered us and drained our emotional cores. We moved to escape the entropy of abandoning our first home to live in my wife’s childhood bedroom when we couldn’t afford the rent, and because we were bitter, and our marriage was nearly over before it had begun. We moved to finish school, which had fallen second to our abrasive jobs and home life.

All this, which had remained in a state of stagnant decay for so many months, began to change when I read a book that had been given to me by my uncle years ago.

The book was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I picked it up at random from the shelf, at a time when I was becoming more and more complacent, dejected and resentful toward my job as a crime reporter. I began showing up later in the day, spending a lot of my time reading. I’d read in full view of my editors and co-workers, but I also avoided workplace stress a lot by going into the men’s bathroom and reading for an hour or two at a time. It was a place to hide, and I felt like hiding from just about everything at that time. I took out the slightly-worn, slim hardback and began to read. I had no expectations, except to forget about things for a little while and become engrossed in someone else’s existence.

Soon I began disappearing every day; I couldn’t stop reading. Hesse’s Siddhartha seemed not like someone from another universe, but in many ways like me. He lived many lives, and yet he was not fulfilled. He could not find himself in the tasks of his life. It was only when he had completed his journey and could look back on its entirety that he gained internal peace.

It occurred to me that the life I was living was one of many possible paths, and that my essence would continue to collapse until I moved on to another destination in my journey.  Soon after, my wife and I left our jobs, sold our belongings and relocated to pursue our educations. It is the reason I am able to write this to you today, but not because of some philosophy or creed—that’s not the purpose of a good book. It is because Siddhartha was as real a person to me as I am to myself. It is because a good book is essentially human. A good book is the most important survival tool. A good book is a gift.

Whether in big ways or small, many of the books that have influenced my life have literally been gifts, from family, from friends. All of us have this power: give books away, buy them for people, don’t wait for birthdays and holidays—do it like the world is ending, because for each of us the danger of total annihilation is constant. You never know when someone might pick up that book you felt to be so innocuous with its cover shut as it changed hands. You never know when the cover might be opened. You never know when someone might begin another life.

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