My Back Pages: Midlake Made Us A Reading List

Anyone familiar with Midlake’s soft lyrical, ’60s-tinged indie folk won’t be surprised to find out they’re a band of book nerds. Even the title of their break-out LP, 2006’s The Trials Of Van Occupanther, sounded like it could have been a long-forgotten short story penned by Mark Twain. And with a new album on the shelves — the somewhat meatier Antiphon, which came out last year — they’re heading to Australia for a tour.

On the eve of the Texan sextet’s Antipodian trip, keyboardist and vocalist Jesse Chandler shared with us a few picks from his library. “In glancing at my bookshelves, it seemed a bit overwhelming to choose just three to five books that have affected me,” he says. “So instead I wanted to select some books that I’ve been reading recently — since I’m usually reading at least three to five books at a time anyway”.

Spoiler alert: he has great taste.

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Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme

Jesse Chandler: This is a great collection of stories by Donald Barthelme from about eight different smaller story collections, which I read over the course of our European tour in February and March this year. I also have its companion volume, Forty Stories, which is just as spectacular.

Barthelme is a wizard at short story-writing. His prose just oozes with unbridled, unadulterated, pure creativity. I’ve read a few of his stories in the past few years, and heard some of them in audio form on the popular NPR radio show/podcast Selected Shorts. His story ‘The Game’ is one of my all-time favorite pieces of fiction; it’s so concise, yet packed with so much humor, morality, and social commentary (it was written at the height of the Cold War). Another great story is ‘School’.

Barthelme could get quite abstract at times, going into free association or making oblique references to obscure film books, like the Truffaut/Hitchcock book, but I just love how different every story is: some are narrative, others purely impressionistic, almost like prose poems. He also practically invented flash fiction.

A couple other short story collections I’ve enjoyed recently are Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, which has all his best ones, and Tenth of December by George Saunders, which came out last year and is simply brilliant.

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Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

Jesse Chandler: I usually try to read at least one large doorstop-size tome per year, and this year it’s Don Quixote. (Last year was the great 2666, by Roberto Bolano, so I guess I’m sticking with the Spanish theme.) I am about done with book one right now, and I fully expect to spend the remainder of 2014 reading book two.

I was not expecting this book to be so funny, especially when you consider how highly-lauded and canonised it is. I mean, there’s even an adjective named after him! There’s a surprising amount of physical humor as well — almost a slapstick, Buster Keaton-style of comedy. At times you feel almost sorry for the bumbling Quixote and his lackluster sidekick Sancho Panza; in modern times they might be diagnosed with some kind of mental condition.

Some people say to just skip the “novellas within the novel” altogether, but I think they’re fantastic. I loved ‘The Man with the Reckless Curiosity’ so much — it’s a great piece in its own right.

I’m reading the translation by Edith Grossman (who also famously translated Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera), and she does a great job of capturing the humor and explaining the plethora of puns that Cervantes throws in, which to me seem translatable. It would be great to read this in Spanish, but I’ll do the next best thing and read it in Spain when we’re there later this month for Primavera!

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Stories from the Twilight Zone, by Rod Serling

Jesse Chandler: I like to have a “fun” book going, and right now I’m enjoying Rod Serling’s prose versions of some of the Twilight Zone episodes he wrote (he actually wrote 92 of them!).

Serling was first and foremost a writer — that’s what he thought of himself as, and what he wanted to be remembered for — and I find that the eerie, haunting vibe of the show really comes across on the written page. It’s on par with Ray Bradbury, in my opinion.

Serling was a master of bringing out the emotional and psychological dilemmas that we face, and in this medium, a lot of the characters’ inner dialogue — which on TV you can see through facial expressions and body language — is described here with the deft pen of a brilliant craftsmen.

One of my favorite things about the series was that the episodes spanned time (past and future) and place (earth and elsewhere). It was so versatile. Serling seemed like a pretty interesting guy — I’d like to read the biography that came out last year by one of his daughters. (I should also point out that all of Serling’s out-of-print Twilight Zone stories, along with prose versions of episodes from his other show Night Gallery, have recently been reissued.)

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The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Jesse Chandler: This is another huge volume, but it’s such a page-turner that I’m sure I’ll be done with it well before I finish Don Quixote. It’s in the style of a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale, like Great Expectations or Catcher in the Rye, and contains such beautifully descriptive accounts of characters and objects that I find it hard to put down. I’ve stayed up way too late reading this book, which is not good when you have two small children at home that wake up by seven!

Admittedly I was a bit skeptical with all the hype surrounding this book when it came out last fall, but I’m glad I chose to crack it open, because it is truly a sprawling gem of a novel. I think the Pulitzer Prize she won for it was absolutely well-deserved; it makes me want to read her two other books.

Another recent Pulitzer-winning book I’d recommend is A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I read it on our tour with Neil Finn, and enjoyed it immensely. Its chapters all focus on different characters, but all of their lives interweave and intersect. Plus it’s about a rock band and a record label so it hits close to home! (Also, Egan recently wrote a fantastic sci-fi-ish story for the New Yorker called ‘The Black Box’ that consisted entirely of 160-character-or-less Tweets!)

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Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig

Jesse Chandler: I, like most people recently, found out about Stefan Zweig through Wes Anderson’s latest film, the Grand Budapest Hotel — which I loved, and which was inspired by Zweig’s life and writings. This, his only full-length novel, is a deep journey into the human spirit and the idea of pity, and how it can lead either directly or indirectly to tragedy.

I have such an affinity for his writing style, and the way he can tell a story. For me, it was like putting on a suit perfectly-tailored for me. I read Beware of Pity feverishly on the last week of our recent European tour, and as I was reading it, I could already tell that it was becoming one of my very favorite books of all time. It’s a true masterpiece in my estimation, and it’s a mystery to me why Zweig is not more well-known, especially considering that he was probably the world’s most famous author during the 1920s and ’30s.

In American schools, the majority of required reading is non-fiction, but books like this prove to me that more can be learned from a work of fiction; authors can really explore the depths of the human psyche and our relationships with each other in a special way, because they don’t have to adhere to “The Facts”.  Zweig was an Austrian Jew who sadly committed a double suicide with his wife in Brazil after fleeing the Nazis in the midst of World War II. I’ve recently poured over some of his other works, such as his autobiography The World of Yesterday, in which he gives detailed accounts of turn-of-the-century life in Vienna. It’s so beautifully written that it reads like a piece of fiction. I also adored two short novellas (Zweig was ever the literary economist, boiling down and distilling stories to their absolute essence): Chess Story and Twenty-Four Hours In the Life of a Woman.

Thanks to NYRB Classics in the US and Pushkin Press in the UK, all of Zweig’s books are coming back in print, with superb translations.

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MIDLAKE AUSTRALIAN TOUR

Sydney: Friday May 23, 8pm @ Joan Sutherland Theatre — tickets here

Melbourne: Saturday May 24 @ Corner Hotel — tickets here