Pages

Friday, July 8, 2011

Read These Books: Something Like a Top 5 List

A few months ago, something I can no longer remember prompted me to attempt to make a list of my fifteen favorite books. The list got to about twelve, but trying to figure out the last three was hell -- every time I thought of one book that deserved to be added, another three or four equally deserving titles came to mind, and while the list did still have room for some of them, it most definitely did not have room for all of them.

I was reminded of this list by a recent New York Times article where staffers shared lists of their top five favorite novels. I skimmed down their picks, noting that perhaps predictably, the only crossovers between their lists and mine fell in the field of nineteenth-century British novels (specifically ones by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot). I'm fairly certain no one listed a novel published before Sense and Sensibility, and most of the picks fell within what I like to think of as the margin of literary respectability -- they're all the kinds of books that it would be acceptable for NYT staffers to publicly admit to loving.

What follows is something like my list: more than five (but less than fifteen) books that keep me coming back for more (ordered by publication date, because picking out the best books is hard enough without having to decide exactly how they measure up to each other as well).

Paradise Lost by John Milton. One of the few books I fell in love with in a classroom, and largely because of the classroom -- but then again, I'm not sure there's any other way I would have willingly read a seventeenth-century epic rewriting of the book of Genesis. I could babble on about how he makes use of key poetic devices like chiasmus and enjambment, but you don't have to understand literary terminology to realize that his language, though difficult, is beautiful, and deserves to be read one word at a time. (Also, where else are you going to find a description of angels having sex in iambic pentameter?)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Michael Cunningham, in an essay on Mrs. Dalloway, says, "Everybody who reads has a first book -- maybe not the first book you read, but the first book that shows you what literature can be. Like a first kiss. As you read other books, you kiss other people, but especially for those who are romantically inclined, that first book stays with you." When I first came across this quote, I knew I had finally discovered a way to explain what Pride and Prejudice meant to me. When I read it for the first time, at the age of fifteen, I had no idea that it would propel me forward through an English honors thesis at Berkeley and into a graduate program at Columbia -- but it most certainly has.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Another good candidate for my "first book" that I keep coming back to because, while it has its issues both in terms of writing quality and underlying ideology, Jane is a protagonist whose emotional journey I can believe in and gather some kind of personal strength from. It's a book that I have grown up with, and that allows me to mark my growth each time I read it (which seems to happen about once a year, whether I intend it or not).

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. In addition to being one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language, Eliot is remarkable for the way she dangles potentially bright futures in front of her protagonists and her readers only to snatch them away and replace them with everyday monotony. Even more remarkable is her ability to make me loathe the way this particular novel ends, while simultaneously forcing me to evaluate the source of my loathing -- my personal adherence to some of the same conventions that her work persistently critiques. But if all that sounds too depressingly academic, do not despair: what really kept me reading this novel was the inimitable spirit of its protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, who I would compare to a combination of Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre if she weren't so thoroughly herself.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Yes, this is a bit of a jump in time, but a lot of 20th-century literature just doesn't float my boat. Bradbury's classic has been co-opted into the "literature" section of the bookstores, but it will always hold a place in my heart as one of the first novels that showed me exactly what futuristic fiction could do. I've posted before about why you should read this book, and I stand by all of it.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. This novel does what science fiction does best: it makes you think, not just about aliens and the future and advanced technology, but about humanity in the present. And it does that gently, unobtrusively, by giving you one hell of a compelling story. Genly Ai, a human, is sent to the planet Gethen to make contact with its unique local population. Gethenians are all effectively genderless 95% of the time, and when they do take on sex characteristics for the purpose of intercourse, they can become either "male" or "female" -- so that someone who has fathered a child might easily mother another. Though it's often classified as a feminist novel, I feel it's less about trying to imagine a world without gender and more about getting to the heart of the binaries that tend to shape our own way of thinking by positing an environment in which many of these could be deconstructed.

Possession by A. S. Byatt. I debated a while over whether to add this book to my list, because while it is many things, it is not perfect -- but it's perfect for me. It's a novel that parallels the research of two modern scholars of Victorian poetry with the secret romance between the two (fictional) poets they study. It's an incredibly heterogeneous text, combining standard third-person narration, academic articles, fragments of poetry, and the poets' lost letters to create a sprawling meditation on the relationship between literature and love.

A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda. This would be the novel that first kindled my interest in alien characters and probably put the "aliens" in the title of this blog! I've written elsewhere that it reads very much like a first novel, with all the uncertainties and issues of pacing that one might expect, but even knowing its flaws, I can't help being in love with it. Told from the first-person perspective of a humanoid alien woman struggling to defeat the amnesia that left her with no way of knowing why she's being chased through the galaxy, at first glance it may seem to be no more than an unappealing collection of sci-fi tropes. But at least in my opinion, Czerneda gets that you're allowed to deal with the tropes as long as you infuse them with heart, and her characters -- human and alien alike -- come alive because of this. It's a beautiful way of thinking about what it might mean to see humanity through alien eyes.

The Wizard's Dilemma by Diane Duane. I love everything that Diane Duane writes, but when forced to pick a single book of hers that I love the most, this one always wins. In fact, when silly people force me to pick just one favorite book, this is usually the book that I pick. Yes, it is a book about teenage wizards -- but before that scares you off, it's also a book that deals with the kinds of problems that wizardry can't solve, or maybe could solve but shouldn't. It's about finding hope in the midst of grief and love that defies pain, and all the other things that make me love Duane's Young Wizards series to begin with.

I would list the runners-up that didn't make it onto the list, whether because I've only read them once, haven't actually finished reading them, haven't read them in a while, or already had listed a better book by the same author...but if I did that, the list would probably triple, and besides, that's not really the point.

So, if you were making a list of five (or ten, or fifteen) favorite books, what would be on it?

6 comments:

  1. first and foremost I am elf-kissed. My first book was 'The Hobbit.' I don't think any other book I will read will have quite the same place in my heart as Tolkien's stories about Middle Earth. While it can be said that his work has flaws...I can't help but be inspired by him, what he did, and the legacy he left behind.

    2. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: This is probably the first Science Fiction book that really meant something for me. It's certainly the first one I remember clearly and have re-read more than a few times. In the story the moon was turned into a penal colony, but the book actually takes place generations later when the Loonies make their bid for independence from an Earth who exploits them ruthlessly. I fell in love with Mike (Mycroft Holmes) the kid-like AI and his not-stupid human friends...This I think is one of the best examples of 'Golden Age' Sci-Fi literature.

    3) 'The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear.' I have no idea why Walter Moer's books would be in the literature section...But this book is something special. It starts off with little Bluebear adrift in an acorn cradle during a storm where he is rescued by midget pirates and that's only the beginning. This I think is one of the better examples of modern Fantasy that occupies the other side of the coin from R.R. Martin.

    4) 'Ender's Game.'Another Sci-Fi book that really touched me. This world was so vivid I actually could see everything that Card wrote. The storyline was gripping as it was haunting and you really felt that Ender's stress and breakdown was in fact your own.

    5) Well...I'm actually having a hard time deciding whether to put 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' or 'Around the World in 80 Days.' Both are wonderful and incredibly entertaining, not to mention written by two talented writers. I feel like I lean towards Jules Vern, but then again Mark Twain had a way with satire that was ingenious.

    ReplyDelete
  2. At least one of those staffers is a liar. No one's favorite book is The Awakening. Eff that book.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Danielle Smith: That was pretty much my first thought. Had to read that book as a high school junior, and am frankly surprised it did not cause me to swear off all literature at once.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I haven't heard of The Awakening (and a good thing, it sounds like...) but The Awakeners by Sheri S. Tepper is an amazing Sci-Fi book that I would recommend to anyone who can handle a whole lot of weird...

    I think my list would have to include (in no particular order):
    Speaker for the Dead (Card, despite how much I now loathe him personally), The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing (Anderseon), The Neverending Story (Ende), The Sparrow (Russell - so good, but prepare to spend hours crying afterwards), Contact (Sagan), Pride & Prejudice (no attribution necessary), and definitely something by Shannon Hale but I can't decide between The Goose Girl, River Secrets, and Princess Academy - they're all just so dang good.

    ReplyDelete
  5. We've had this conversation, haven't we?

    The Mists of Avalon - perhaps my all-time favorite book. It's such a deeply human work of literature (and by far Marion Zimmer Bradley's best work!). The characters are all flawed as well as precious, nothing ever goes the way it was meant to, yet in the end everything is as it should be. Morgaine goes through her entire life hearing the echo of Igraine's voice; take care of the baby, which is the one thing she cannot do. I always cry a bit when reading it, even if it is feminist nonsense and the past romantically re-imagined. It's good stuff, and it transcends itself in parts.

    The Curious Tale of the Dog in the Night-Time. It's written from the perspective of an autistic boy, yet somehow manages to describe human nature at its most basic. He creates so many problems by his way of being: you sympathize both with him and with his poor parents, who have to deal with the way he is and the way the world works as well as with their own issues - often without succeeding. And for us psych geeks, it's a very interesting suggested view of the mind of an autistic child.

    The Coldfire trilogy, which is my teenage crush. Haha! The hero is not the protagonist and the protagonist not the hero. It's a fantasy series - sorta. The idea is that colonists from Earth landed on a planet that works quite differently from what we're used to: minds can affect physical reality. Their technology quickly stops working and they're forced to live in a pseudo-medieval setting, with magic, monsters, and all the other things that dwell inside our minds becoming external and taking on a life of their own. Against this backdrop, cast the Church - working toward a world with no magic, a world that can be achieved through faith because faith shapes reality - and our two unlikely allies: the Prophet, who dictated the Church and its mission, and then broke all the rules to see it through, and our priest, Damien, a sort of tough-love demon-hunting chivalrous character. They have to work together to prevent a world neither of them can live with, all the while battling their personal demons (real and psychological) as well as contemplating whether fighting fire with fire really can be justified.

    ...

    I do love those books.

    Other than that, anyone with even the slightest interest in psychological science should read Siri Hustvedt's the Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. It's terrific if you're a psych geek, and sure to be extremely entertaining as well as educational if you're not. It's a bit of a neurological autobiography, but so much more. She discusses a lot of different views on the soul, emotions, the brain vs the body vs our conscious experience, always drawing on psychological research to illustrate and contrast the different ways of looking at our problems - and ourselves.

    Hmm. A fifth. Err. (brief pause as she checks her facebook)
    The Sandman: the Dream Hunters, of course. I don't want to spoil it, but it's the strangest, saddest, most endearing little love story I ever came across, beautifully illustrated by the venerated Yoshitaka Amano. I almost can't say how beautiful a thing that book is. It's barely connected to the Sandman and far more closely related to the tradition of somber, stark fairytales - as they might have been told once from one adult to another.

    Anyway, those are my current favourites. I certainly do hope that list will keep changing!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Whoa whoa whoa, haters! What's wrong with the Awakening?

    ReplyDelete