RTW #115: Best Book of January

(Mandatory plug: Check out my new short story!)

Two posts in one day? Surely the world is turning on its head. It's Road Trip Wednesday, though, and I actually have something to say about today's prompt, which is: "What is the best book you read in January?"

There's not much of a choice: I only finished three books in January. One was a romance novel, which was okay but only just. One was Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, a very informative book that I definitely recommend. The third was Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men. Not surprisingly, the third one won hands-down.



Bit of a funny story about this one. All The King's Men was assigned in one of my classes during my last semester of college-- that was Spring 2006, if anyone's counting. I can't remember why, but I couldn't get my own copy in time, and so the professor loaned me his.

Now, historically I've been pretty good about reading books assigned for school. Before college, the only exception was Heart of Darkness, which for some reason I didn't even open. (Still passed the test, though.) In college, however, I was less conscientious: I was a double major, my music course-load was pretty heavy, and none of my professors seemed to care if I did the reading as long as my writing was okay (and it always was). This professor must have been particularly tolerant, because in his class there were three or four books I didn't read. One of them was All The King's Men. 


Well, you know how things are at the end of the semester. You're moving home, you're trying to turn in all your papers while taking care of your graduation paperwork, you're throwing things together into big bins without really looking at what they are. One of those things happened to be my teacher's copy of All The King's Men.

I still have it.

(Sorry, Dr. Addison.)

When I got home, I kept the book, of course. I think I meant to return it-- I know I meant to read it. But I was working full-time in a bookstore that first year, and had millions upon millions of fascinating books around me every day. Little time to spare for one that didn't even hold my attention when it was assigned, you know? And then I went to Korea. Naturally I didn't take the book with me. It languished on my shelf for the next four years, until my long-suffering mother packed it and the rest of my things up for her move to a new house. When I started getting things out of storage this summer, there it was.

In December I finally got tired of looking at it and picked it up again.

It was Not Easy. It was Hard. All The King's Men is one of the denser works of fiction I've ever encountered. It is grim, tragic, and depressing. People do good things for bad reasons, and bad things for good reasons, and strange things for reasons they don't understand. They hurt each other and sleep with the wrong people and ruin each other's lives. Good characters become corrupt, and corrupt ones go unpunished.

At the same time, it's undeniably brilliant. Warren was a poet, and it shows: every image is intensely evocative, and every character is precisely and cuttingly depicted. There are large passages of prose poetry that describe slices of Southern life that have nothing to do with the story but are essential in establishing the setting, which is at least as important as the plot or characters, and possibly more so. Key images are introduced early, and then alluded to again and again: Jacks mother, for example, always holds her face up "like a damned expensive present."  You can't skim, or you'll lose most of what makes this book so impressive.

The whole thing took me about a month to read. I wasn't making much headway at all-- even a page can be a bit exhausting-- until I set my current reading policy: I try to get through 25 pages of every book I'm reading every day. I didn't always manage it, but in the end it did get me to the end.

You have to read to the end, because every page is essential. I wasn't at all sure how I felt about the novel till I'd finished it. As I said, it's unrelentingly tragic, and things get worse and worse before they get any better. In the end, though, everyone who's still alive is about where they need to be. Most of the characters seem about to start out on new journeys, and you get the idea that they're going to be much better stories for everyone involved than the story of Willie Stark, the "Boss" for whom the protagonist spent the novel working. All the loose ends are tied up, and most of the characters' fates are about what they should be. I won't go into more detail, because I'd hate to spoil the story:  it's one really worth reading, and I hope some people will pick it up. My one caveat is that the story is set in the Deep South during the Great Depression. All the main characters are white, and there's about as much racism as you'd expect. There's some language in the story that might upset people-- although I think it does get better as the main character grows up and becomes a bit wiser-- and there's a depiction of slavery in the middle that I found deeply disturbing. If you go in prepared, though, I think those things shouldn't impede your enjoyment of the story: they seem to be mostly the product of an unreliable and racist narrator.

Anyway, All The King's Men is by far the best book I finished in January, and I recommend it to anyone who's a fan of Southern literature. What are your favorite books from the past month? Any recommendations?