Garth Greenwell: A Classic Can Be Both ‘Homophobic’ and ‘Lifesaving’
What books are on your night stand? What tends to accumulate is a mix of active pleasure reading, books I hope to pleasure-read very soon and anything I might want a sip of before sleep.
It rotates seasonally; it’s a mess. A selection: Poetry: James Longenbach, “Seafarer”; Lynn Xu, “Debts & Lessons”; Shakespeare’s sonnets.Fiction: Maya Binyam, “Hangman”; Kevin Lambert, “May Our Joy Endure” (translated by Donald Winkler); Mark Haber, “Lesser Ruins.”Nonfiction: François Truffaut, “The Films in My Life” (translated by Leonard Mayhew); Ryan Coyne, “Heidegger’s Confessions.” What kind of reader were you as a child?
Which books and authors stick with you most? The first book I loved was “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” which still seems perfect to me.
As a young kid, I read a lot of fantasy: Mercedes Lackey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Guy Gavriel Kay. As an adolescent, I read all the books I could from the tiny, shadowy, wonderful gay and lesbian section at Hawley-Cooke Booksellers in Louisville: Baldwin, Barnes, Genet, Mishima, Kenan, Winterson, Woolf.
