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?

Books with Pictures

Comic books -- or should I say "graphic novels"? -- are coming up in the world, but as far as my experience is concerned, people still don't take you entirely seriously if you enjoy reading them. This strikes me as incredibly silly. One of the prevailing tests of "culture" in the western world seems to be one's ability to appreciate the visual arts; another is, of course, one's ability to appreciate the literary arts. So why is it that an artform which combines the visual and literary, often in stunning and innovative ways, gets such a bad rap?

Part of it, I suspect, stems from the fact that "picture books" are considered the province of children, "comic books" the domain of adolescents, and "chapter books" the signal that one has moved up into something like (young) adulthood. The smaller the print, and the fewer the pictures, the more "grown-up" something is. But this makes the huge mistake of equating literary form with content. While it's true that a lot of books for kids have pictures, and most books for adults don't, this doesn't mean that the picture book is an inherently poor medium for addressing "grown-up" ideas. I'll be the first to admit that I have only read a limited number of what I think of as picture books for grown-ups, but the ones that I have read have blown me away. Art Spiegelman famously uses the format to tell the story of his father's struggles as a Jew in Nazi Germany, and his own struggles with what his father's history means to him. Shaun Tan's work is more whimsical -- I fell in love with one story in Tales from Outer Suburbia about the afterlife of lost or discarded notes and scribblings -- but even if his subject matter doesn't always appear complex, his treatment is always nuanced. (If you want to read a really good essay on picture books by someone who knows them better than I do, check out his "Picture Books: Who Are They For?".)

Most recently, I've been working my way through the ten volumes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, which feel about as intertextual as a T. S. Eliot poem, full of references to mythologies, history, and history, western and eastern, modern and ancient -- and still manage to keep this allusion in the background and tell a series of compelling stories about identity, duty, personal choice, and the things that make us human. When the cover tells you the story is "suggested for mature readers," I like to believe that this isn't because there's sex or violence or other things people don't want to think their kids are reading (though sometimes there is). It's because it takes a mature mind to appreciate the complexity of the universe Gaiman has crafted. I don't see how any reader could fail to take seriously a text in which the character of Lucifer ironically quotes from John Milton's Paradise Lost -- and then cites his own quotation!

Some of the stigma against comics may also stem from the assumption that they are newfangled inventions of an unpredictable popular culture, therefore lacking the respectability of tradition and elite status. There is a much larger question at hand here, about what constitutes "popular" and what constitutes "literary" (and why the two should be considered separately, if they should be at all), but on the small scale it seems important to point out that supposedly "literary" works have been relying on pictures for hundreds of years. Dickens and Thackeray both supervised the illustration of many of their major novels (with Thackeray even contributing his own illustrations, in come cases). William Blake is the prime example: he invented his own reverse-etching technique and hand-etched his poems alongside images that he watercolored after they had been printed. To call them "illustrations" is to miss the point; often, instead of simply "illustrating" the kinds of things discussed in the poems, Blake's images provide additional clues to interpretation, or serve to increase readerly confusion. Since all the pages were colored by hand, no two are the same, and radically different versions of the same poem exist -- for example, look at these two different prints of "The Tyger":

(If you're looking for more, check out the Blake Archive, where you can access images of Blake's works held in different collections across the world.)

So, if comics aren't "kid stuff" and they aren't really "new," what's the problem? As a final guess, I'd suggest that, while we live in a world that bombards us with thousands of images on a daily basis, we're only very rarely asked to read them. Comics, graphic novels, picture books -- call them what you will, this is exactly what they demand of us. By juxtaposing images and text, they call attention to the fact that pictures, in addition to simply being seen, can be read, and they challenge us to perform this reading, which is a challenge precisely because so many of the images we encounter on a daily basis seem to demand internalization without reading (just think of most advertising). In the process, they make some people a little uncomfortable -- but if art doesn't do that, at least a little, then I'm not entirely sure it is art to begin with.