Bill Clinton's 21 Favorite Books

100YoS

# "Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.

max otm

^^ as a side-note, it only just dawned on me that what was creepy about that username wasn't the cock, it was the UNCLE

P.S. I think I'm voting for Orwell

come sit on my lap nabisco

Didn't even pick the best Thomas Wolfe book.

ew sorry ew ew

B-b-but I'm thinking about voting for Ellison (/Bradley effect)

4 quartz

trill clinton

The Cure at Troy

and hopelessness
and President Reagan

this is a pretty heavy list, huh

that book nonzero fuckin sucks

garcia marquez and wolfe are not my thing really. marcus aurelius or invisible man

i think the collected yeats poems is overkill. he should have just picked a few.

turning and turning in the widening bubba

invisible man

"this is a pretty heavy list, huh"

Hilary is the comic relief.

I would have preferred At Canaan's Edge, but Parting the Waters is almost as good. Either way, Taylor Branch.

Yeats guys, come on

has anyone responding actually read all of these?

I haven't

i have read them all ten times

yes, those Taylor Branch books are ridiculously good reading.

list seems kinda like a smart undergrad's list (broad and kinda distracted), not that there's anything wrong with that

I've read six (or portions of six, I don't think I've read every Yeats poem ever.)

# "The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot.
# "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison.
# "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
# "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," Adam Hochschild.
# "You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe.
# "The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," William Butler Yeats.

I have read all but Hillary's.

collected yeats is a total copout, i want to know if bill is a easter 1916 kind of guy or an innisfree kind of guy or a byzantium kind of guy

Just kidding, I've read practically none of these

i read all of them and wrote five of them

and edited the other 16

this is bullshit when people do this about books they haven't read, but isn't confessions of nat turner supposed to be kind of an embarrassment?

i have read the list posted at the top of this thread

I have read all but Hillary's.

Poems?

Obama seems more capable of a defense of early vs late period Yeats.

I get "the collected poems of" shit all the time for poets I've never read

I did that with c.k. williams recently

i don't doubt that he owns it, but it's not a very revealing selection.

this is the first c.k. williams poem I found on google

A basset-hound with balls
so heavy they hang
a harrowing half-
inch from the pavement,

ears cocked, accusingly
watches as his beautiful
mistress croons
to her silver cell-phone.

She does, yes, go on,
but my, so slim-
waistedly
does she sway there,

so engrossedly does her dark
gaze drift
towards even
for a moment mine …

Though Mister Dog of course
sits down right
then to lick
himself, his groin of course,

till she cuts off, and he,
gathering his folds
and flab, heaves
erect to leave with her …

But wait, she's turning to
a great Ducati
cycle gleaming
black and chromy at the curb,

She's mounting it, (that long
strong lift of flank!)
snorting it to life,
coaxing it in gear …

Why, she's not his at all!
No more than mine!
What was he thinking?
What was I? Like a wing,

a wave, she banks away
now, down-shifts,
pops and crackles
round the curve, is gone.

How sleek she was, though;
how scrufty, how
anciently scabby
we, he and I;

how worn, how
self-devoured,
balls and all,
balls, balls and all.

xpost yeah pretty boring list

Give him a break, he has uncollected Eliot and Heaney

#22: The Game by Neil Strauss

I bet Leaves of Grass is one of his real favorites but he left it off because of Lewinsky shame.

I heard Hillary's into The Secret.

i just meant that saying the entirety of yeats's output is your "favorite" doesn't say all that much, not that the list as a whole doesn't.

I'd really love a pic of Bill reading Living History under a space lamp, quietly chuckling to himself, savoring the prose aloud.

and yeah what is the deal with that nat turner book? i can't remember.

Considering that poetry is not exactly the most widely read literary genre, listing a "collected poems" of a favorite poet does not really strike me as a cop-out -- it's a little different with Yeats, okay, but still.

# "Garfield Gains Weight," Jim Davis.

or ANYthing

Maya Angelou kind of blows imo

that book is better than her poetry. i think its presence + that of confessions of nat turner are sort of sweet--it's not just a critics' favorite list.

you guys

http://www.cultfiction.com.au/images/vox-nicholson-baker-phone-sex-novel1.jpg

No Pitchfork 500, no credibility

Wait

I think that's the only thing that could make me hate him more. xp

i hated that maya angelou book, along with 'a separate peace', when i had to read them in middle school

at least he didn't pick to kill a mockingbird, ugh

lay off to kill a mockingbird!

to kill a mockingbird is great. . . when you're in 10th grade

i will defend all this middlebrow middle school favorites! except for a separate peace.

separate peace is pretty awful

he jounced the limb!

# "Watership Down", Richard Adams
# "The Chosen", Chaim Potok

i will also defend:

catcher in the rye
okay anything else we had to read in middle school.

catcher in the rye is awesome, and holds up way better than anything in nine stories

The one about the man you can't see because he is black, that particular Invisible Man.

4 q's are ugh

shit i had to read silas marner in 9th grade!

Potok would have been a good counter to having T.S. Elliot :P

Dude that book is rad bcz this lady is having LAUDANUM FREAKOUTS in the attic, I mean how Naked Lunch is that? (NB: That is the only scene I remember from Silas Marner and I was readin Naked Lunch at the same time...tenth grade...memories blur.)

catcher in the rye is awesome, and holds up way better than anything in nine stories

Wait wait seriously? Anything in Nine Stories? Including "The Laughing Man?"

tincture of laudanum

(Imagine that is in fancy script instead of just itals)

It holds up better than Raise High the Roof Bring, Carpenter.

THAT IS CORRECT I BROUGHT CHALLOPS.

Everyone please forgive my recent deterioration in language usage.

iirc silas marner was pretty great in the end but i'd kill to have been assigned the teenage standards, or at least something a little more lively. because it's not like i'm allowed to read them now.

i never had to read any mark twain either, wtf

i bet bush is a catcher in the rye fan

i can feel that this is very annoying, making this thread a salinger fight, but let me just say that that is crazy talk, abbott!

i like Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters

gonna have to go back and look at the Laughing Man. . . but yeah when i looked at that collection a few years ago, ugh.

haha I was about to post what horseshoe just posted

let us now speak of things that are not Salinger

oh c'mon

You will note I discussed Raise High the Roof Bring, Carpenters, a bio ("with eight-page full color photo insert") of the Carpenters before Karen got skinnyitis.

someone read & defend This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise, I triple dog dare you

http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/mayonnaise.html

dint understand antiquated terminology in 1st sentence, gave up

do you think W. even has 21 favorite books?

I'd be surprised if he's really read many books besides the bible.

according to the movie "w." hes read barry goldwaters autobiography and his favorite musical is cats

Cure at Troy

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
if there's fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky.

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

Would be good at the next inauguration.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Oh thanks for reminding me about this!

I remember seeing this a year or two ago and being SHOCKED upon seeing Denial on his little list, especially since its wedged between so many mediocre liberal appeasements. It was then I realized that he -- along with most other politicians, in all likelihood -- is an utter phony. He's way, way more self-aware and intellectually curious than he put on. Actually, come to think of it, through all his TED Talks and the like he's 'coming out' somewhat.

The big mark of phoniness is this: he can't be authentically religious if he truly loves the book. Can't. Even a little bit. All politicians (especially presidents/hopefuls: Clinton, Bushes, McCain, Obama) pretend so much but Clinton (probably Hillary too) makes for an extreme example.

p.s. Denial of Death is one of the most profound works ever on the problems of human nature, strife, meaning, etc. You read it and you're shocked at just how incredibly brave it is, to look so inward.

Catalonia is a curious pick, too. Perhaps he admires him some of that anarchist utopia?

he probably can be authentically religious and truly love denial of death

Yeah, I'm definitely going to back off that statement. There must be enough room in a person's mind for interest-in-a-certain-piece-of-literature and religiosity to cohabitate comfortably.

I'd love to hear him talk about it, in any case.

Hey, I've read King Leopold's Ghost!

It is impossible to take any such list very seriously.

I'm sure a few of the odder things are there because Bill read them in the last decade and found them fascinating. I expect most of them are just decorative furniture, chosen with an eye to the impression they will make, altnhough he probably did read most of them, or much of each of them.

I'm certain he yearned to put his own autobiography on there, but knew it would be ill-taken. Hence, Hillary makes it as a stand-in. He appears in it once or twice, too.

Hillary makes it as a stand-in. He appears in it once or twice, too.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

for comparison, here's john f kennedy's 12 favorite books (plus some others):

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Favorite-Books.aspx

oh like the guy read anything other than James Bond novels