Mark Richardson

Three Books I Remember Reading in Part Because of Where I Read Them

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
When I was 23, my friend Josh and I spent six weeks “bumming around Europe.” We had a Eurail pass, backpacks, the whole nine. We got over there and back with a service called Air Hitch. This was sort of a pre-Internet version of Priceline. You would register and pay a certain amount of money and you would be allowed to take seats on airlines that hadn’t been purchased. If I remember right, it was $270 each way. You’d call each day and see what was available. The thing was, you didn’t know: 1) when you would be leaving—you had to give a window of five days; 2) which city in Europe you would be flying to. Specific plans weren’t important to me at that point in my life so these restrictions did not seem like a big deal. One thing I remember about the flight home, from Paris to New York, on Tower Air, is that I chain-smoked all the way back. Yes, I can remember smoking on a commercial airliner. 

We brought some books to Europe and one of them was Slaughterhouse Five. We actually read the book to each other on long train rides to keep ourselves entertained. So I was reading about WWII and Dresden and looking at the European countryside passing outside the window. We spent a week or two in Prague, not all that long after communism collapsed, and when I was reading about the destruction of Dresden, all the beautiful buildings it had before the firebombing, I was picturing the buildings outside of the apartment we’d subleased. So it goes. (sorry)

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
I read this book when I was on a fishing boat in Alaska (wrote about that a little here). A close friend gave me a copy just before I left. This friend had allowed me to stay with him in Seattle while I was looking for fishing jobs. Being in the belly of a ship while reading about Ishmael definitely added something. I remember being amazed at how the “crew share,” that is, the pay structure based on volume of catch + experience, worked exactly the same as it had in Melville’s time. I also remember that the book was surprisingly funny at points. Like this part:

“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.

“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”

“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.”

“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?”

“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!”

Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in what a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”

3) Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
In 2000, I DJ’d a wedding of good friends of mine in New Orleans. The wedding was performed by a judge, and after the ceremony he gave the new husband his business card and said “Call me if anyone winds up in jail.” Like, he’d take care of it. That’s New Orleans for you. Crazy amounts of fun. On the way home, my flight was overbooked. They offered a $200 voucher and first class tickets on a flight a few hours later to be bumped, so I said sure. I wandered around the airport and eventually picked up this book in hardcover at an airport bookstore. I started it just before we boarded the plane.

It was my first time in first class. It’s hard to convey that feeling of sitting down early and having a flight attendant come over to take your drink order. You’re like, “This is how other people live.” We took off, and it was night. I had a few drinks. And I became immersed in this story about Jimmy Corrigan, reading by that narrow shaft of light that comes down from the plane’s bulkhead.

Part of this amazing story is about the life of the main character’s great grandfather, who as a child attended the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. My father’s family is from Chicago, from way back. And my father had a great grandfather who was also, in his spare time, a writer. My father’s great grandfather wrote an autobiography, which he self-published in 1917. I have a copy. And inside my copy is a ticket to that world’s fair, which was, I’m guessing, at some point used as a bookmark. The ticket is similar to the one above, but it has George Washington on it, and it’s blue. The 1893 World’s Fair was really something. It introduced the Ferris Wheel, lightbulbs, Juicy Fruit chewing gum, and a whole lot more to the world.

At one point in Jimmy Corrigan, Ware draws an image of the same ticket I have. And something about the tone of the book, the lost opportunities with fathers, the chance to look back at the childhoods of other fathers to see where things went wrong, it was all very emotional for me. So the entire flight back I was riveted there in the first class section, feeling a little bit like I was reading the story of my own life. 

Posted at 12:18am.