Tailor Made

One of my favorite feelings upon reading a book is the sensation that, somehow mysteriously, the author has written this specifically for me. It doesn't crop up too often, so I know it when I feel it -- that headlong rush into stunningly familiar territory, the thrill of discovery underwritten by a sense of comfort at the fact that you and the book exist within the same universe, have the same notions of right and wrong and have come to a basic agreement as to how stories should work.

But there's a flip side to this coin. Sometimes, my reactions to these kinds of books seem so intricately (and intimately) tied up in specific strands of my personality that I'm wary of recommending them to others who don't share my values and obsessions. More often than not, I'm afraid to admit the depth of my affection for these books, despite feeling like my bookshelves are empty when I don't have them near. Maybe it's because I move in academic circles and the books that have hit me in this way are mostly not academic. Maybe it's because I'm afraid what portrait of me might be constructed from the books that I feel drawn to in this way. And maybe I'm just afraid to think about what this list of books might tell me about myself -- about what I see as fundamentally me, what I care about, what makes my heart beat.

Whatever the reason, I'm about to (begin to) find out, because here -- for the moment -- is my list.

So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane

On the run from bullies, Nita Callahan takes refuge in the children's room of her local public library and finds a book called So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she's sure that it must be a joke, but she picks it up and begins to read it -- and the moment when it stopped being a joke for her is the moment I would have known (or at least so furiously desired) the same:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world — a tree, say, or a stone — that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skilfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing, or into it — freeze fire, burn rain — even slow down the heat death of the Universe.

That last, of course, is the reason there are wizards. See the next chapter.

Nita's copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard goes on to change her life. My copy continues to change mine.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I have a complicated relationship to this novel, but it all started when I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, just starting to take life and literature (and love) seriously, and searching for a paradigm that would speak to the struggle that I felt, but would do so without rejecting the goals I'd set for myself. I don't exactly understand how this came to pass, but Jane Eyre helped me find those answers I hadn't even known I was looking for Four years later, I've read it for at least three other (college) English courses. Thumbing through my well-worn Oxford Classics copy (thoroughly underlined, festooned with Post-its and dripping with marginalia) in search of a single quote that would sum up this book's impact on me, I find it impossible to choose just one, because so many of the words of this book are like old friends, pleased to meet me in my re-perusal.

Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier

When I first read this book, I was overcome with a sense that this was the novel I had always wanted to write. In fact, its plot is in some ways quite similar to the one I've been trying to write for five years: a retelling/homage to the story of Beauty and the Beast, which pits an educated heroine against a culture that cannot value her education and carefully questions what it means to be a "beast" and what it means to be a man from within a richly-defined world. Marillier's tale departs from mine in many ways (not the least of which being that her version is finished and published), but I nonetheless feel a connection to it that ignores its occasional flaws in favor of lovingly attending to the moments where everything happens just as it ought. And from my perspective, at least, there are many moments like these.

Possession by A. S. Byatt

"Do you ever have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects — all the time — and I suppose one studies — I study — literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful — as though we held a clue to the true nature of things?"

I knew long before this passage of dialogue that Possession had been written with me in mind, but this is perhaps one of the most coherent examples of why this book speaks to me in a voice at once wise and familiar. Roland's hesitant shift from "one studies" to "I study" speaks to the dilemma of every modern academic, but particularly those in the humanities: how much of me is meant to be in what I do? The questions he asks here are in some senses rhetorical -- he wants, like I want, to believe that there is some "clue to the true nature of things" secreted away within literature -- but also intensely doubting. Who is he -- who am I -- to say that things even have a true nature at all? And yet. By the end of that second sentence, the question that he started all those interjections ago isn't really a question at all.

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?