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?

Why I Love Young Wizards

When I first started this blog almost a year ago, my goal was clear: I needed someplace to squee, rant, and flail -- albeit in a slightly more academic manner -- about the things that I loved most in life and literature. Up at the top of the flail-worthy list is, and has always been, Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. I started reading these books when I was in the sixth grade, waiting for something to fill the void between Harry Potter books, and ended up falling head over heels for characters and a story and a world that made Harry Potter look like child's play, even to an eleven-year-old.

Since then, I've been attempting (and failing) to come up with some coherent way to express my love for this series while simultaneously making every single person who read my explanation go to their local library and find a copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard. I've recommended the series to everyone I know. I've posted about it on other sites. I've even made my mother read it.

None of this has served the ultimate purpose: to create a world in which all the cool people have read these books. This post probably won't either. But in the wake of Diane Duane's release of the long-form blurb for the tenth book in the series, tentatively titled Games Wizards Play, I feel the need to talk a little more about why these books have such a special place in my heart.

1. These are books for geeks, by a geek, that understand and make no apologies for their own geekiness (while simultaneously feeling very accessible to people who wouldn't necessarily class themselves as geeks). To the teenager I was, they were valuable because they showed me that people like me -- nerdy bookworms who'd been reading chapter books since age four and owned library cards before their peers even knew where the library was -- were important, and lovable, and not alone. To this day, these books inspire me to embrace my geek, and to be proud of it, even in circles (read: academia) where this is unexpected if not exactly unacceptable. If I'd known more geeky adults growing up, I doubt I ever would have felt uncomfortable being who I was.

2. These books have wizards. AND aliens. AND alien wizards. To phrase it as one of Duane's main characters might, it's like there really are Jedi out there. I pretty much can't think of a better sort of universe to live in. (Yes, I am a geek. See point #1.)

3. These books are also very firmly grounded in what grown-ups very frequently call "the real world." The initial protagonists, Kit and Nita, are young teens in the New York suburbs who find themselves having to juggle wizardry with the rest of their lives, with varied results. This is urban fantasy at its best, integrating what we know with what we don't and paying particular attention to the seams between these pieces.

4. The register of the books can slip from comic to dramatic in a matter of instants without the shift seeming awkward or forced. Furthermore, the jokes are funny, and the climactic scenes are stomach-clenching.

5. The language is spot-on. The dialogue sounds like the kind of dialogue that people might actually speak, and Duane's descriptive prose is so stunningly beautiful that I still stand back in awe of some passages. And she switches between the sort of mundane "invisible" prose and this more heavily-wrought description so flawlessly that I'm never startled by it, and only upon looking back do I realize that the shift has happened.

6. Diane Duane remembers her childhood. She doesn't assume that kids can't do things or that their experience of life is fundamentally different from adults'. As such, she writes kids who are fully, believably, and lovably kids. She doesn't idealize childhood as a problem-free zone, and she's great at tackling the kinds of problems that kids really do have in a real and respectful manner.

7. Unlike most young adult fantasy, which seems only capable of granting power to children in the absence of their parents, the Young Wizards series shows that parents and children can work together and be open and honest and loving with each other, while still allowing children to be who they are and make their own decisions. There are no evil stepmothers or wicked stepfathers here.

8. Magic doesn't fix everything. In fact, it often seems to make things more complicated: for example, if you get into a fight with your best friend you can ignore him for a while, but if your best friend also happens to be your partner in wizardry, you'll have to work it out sooner rather than later. Wizardry never functions as a deus ex machina, and thus is never cheapened -- but there are some things that it just can't do.

9. Magic isn't easy. Harry Potter might have been my "gateway drug" into YA fantasy, but in retrospect the idea that you can just point a wand and say a word to do a spell seems so simplistic. Duane's magic is difficult, something that must be learned and for which you must pay a price, but this makes mastering it all the more worthwhile.

10. The metaphysics of the Young Wizards universe might hinge on the expected cosmic good-and-evil axis, but they do so in complex ways that are never moralizing. Duane's vision of a wizardly afterlife known as Timeheart, where "what's loved survives," is the most poignant and -- to use a word you don't hear too often -- just that I have ever encountered. If I could trade whatever metaphysical reality we live in now for any specific fictional one, it would be this one.

11. Words are magical. While a lot of fantasy authors craft systems of magic around the use of specific words, or magical languages, I haven't read one to beat Duane's -- and I've read a lot. More importantly, though, it's not just words spoken in the wizardly Speech that matter. These novels persistently value the act of talking, in any language, with other people. Sometimes it's about solving disputes, or breaking barriers, or fighting past prejudices, but sometimes it's just about getting to know amiable beings a little bit better.

12. School matters. These aren't kids who just prance around saving the world and miraculously getting A's on everything without having to study. They have to work for their grades the same way they have to work for their wizardry.

13. You don't have to be a wizard to be important. Throughout the course of the series, we meet several characters who know about magic but aren't themselves wizards, and Duane is very insistent that they don't need to be wizards in order to make a difference. Thus, there is hope for us all.

14. Minor characters are incredibly well-developed. Some of them even come back later on and stop being quite so minor. I haven't met a single person in the novels so far who I didn't feel like I knew, somehow, even after just a couple of pages.

15. Alien characters are incredibly well-developed. By this, I mean that they do seem alien, with separate cultures and worldviews and all that comes along with it, but are never quite so alien that you wouldn't consider having one as a friend.

16. Duane deals with Important Life Issues without it ever feeling like "dealing with Important Life Issues" is what these novels are about. The philosophy seems to be that life is full of these big important things, and any novel attempting to accurately portray something like life will necessarily involve these, too. As a result, the novels involve themselves in questions of bullying, sacrifice, depression, politics, death, religion, friendship, love, and beyond -- without ever feeling like they're trying to teach you something. To (mis)quote one of her characters, life doesn't have a moral, though sometimes it is one.

17. At the bottom of all of this lies a fundamental wonder at the universe -- a desire to get to know it better, to help it be the best it can, and to engage other people in doing the same. To me, this wonder is at the heart of childhood, and something that adults too easily forget. It's also at the heart of science fiction done right.

18. Last (for now) -- but not least -- these novels continue to meet me where I am in my life, and offer me something new each time. I've been reading and re-reading them now for almost half of my life, and they never fail to be exactly what I need.

Banned Book Spotlight: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

I first encountered this book when I was in the third grade and a boy in my class gave a book report on it. We all vaguely suspected him to have done it on a dare, since Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was obviously a "girly" book, and none of us could come up with any other respectable reason for him to have read it.

I don't actually remember how old I was when I read it for myself, but I do remember understanding when I had finished both why people got into such a fuss over it and why it was so important. The story revolves around the trials and travails of the life of ordinary twelve-year-old Margaret Simon. Well, almost ordinary. Unlike all her friends, Margaret has grown up without a religion; her mother is Christian, her father is Jewish, and since they can't come to an agreement of what to raise her, they decide to raise her as nothing at all and let her come to her own decision about what she believes.

On that level alone, this book was important to a young girl still trying to figure out questions of faith, but Blume's genius extends beyond Margaret's religious questioning and into the realm of her impending womanhood. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was the first fiction I ever read that dealt frankly with the social factors surrounding menstruation, and I only discovered one other book that touched on this topic during the length of my childhood (Tamora Pierce's Alanna: The First Adventure, if anyone was wondering).

I had the fantastic opportunity to meet Judy Blume a few years back at a Book Expo America event, and tell her the story of how I came to read and love this book. She smiled when I told her about the boy in my third grade class who'd read it on a dare and said, "Well, I hope he learned something from it!"

Her books have been challenged pretty steadily throughout the years, and as such she's got some well-articulated opinions on censorship. To me, though, the following quote rings most incredibly true:

"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."

Banned Book Spotlight: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In honor of Banned Books Week, which is held every year during the last moth of September by the American Library Association, I'm going to be writing a series of posts about my favorite banned or challenged books. To kick things off, I've got quite a bit to say about the best work of dystopian fiction I've ever read, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

I actually owe my first encounter with this book to the Disney Channel original TV series The Famous Jett Jackson. In one episode -- the only one I actually remember -- Jett's English teacher assigned Fahrenheit 451 to the class, only to be told that it was inappropriate reading for such young students (they were meant to be in middle school, perhaps high school). Jett and his friends fought back, and with the help of their teacher, they were able to keep Bradbury's text on the reading list and teach a valuable lesson about censorship at the same time. I was nine years old and in third grade at the time, but I was already a voracious and precocious reader, so I approached my father (who had been a high school English teacher, and possessed a collection of books my younger self intensely admired) to ask him whether we owned the book. He was probably a bit surprised, but he promised to look through his boxes for me and find out. When it turned out he didn't have a copy, he too me to the then-newly-constructed city library, where I sought out Fahrenheit 451 (with the help of a bemused children's librarian, who kindly walked me to the "grown-up" shelves and helped me find it), checked it out, and brought it home to read.

I worked through the book slowly, haltingly, certain that there was so much I wasn't "getting" but nonetheless feeling the telltale buildup of unease in the region of my stomach that Bradbury's most thought-provoking works continue to produce in me to this day. Of course, I was still a third-grader, and even for me Bradbury's style was intense. When it came time to decide between renewing the book or returning it to the library, I decided to return it, though I was perhaps only a third of the way through.

Fast-forward about five years. By the summer before my freshman year of high school, I had been transformed from a girl who'd read anything and everything with equanimity into a fledgling fan of science fiction and fantasy (thanks primarily to the influence of J. K. Rowling and Anne McCaffrey). I was excited about entering high school, finally being one of the "big kids," and decided that it was time for me to really sink my teeth into some serious reading to prove that I was ready for this. So again I appealed to my father's book collection, grown slightly less mystical over time, and when I found it lacking, I headed for the bookstore to acquire copies of the dystopian masterpieces I kept hearing about but had never read: Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.

I read them both within the span of a few weeks, and my world really hasn't been the same since.

Most American schoolchildren past junior high probably have some idea what Fahrenheit 451 is "about": state control of the media, censorship, and of course book-burning. And it is about those things, and they're some of the reasons why you should read it. But to me, the book has always suggested a more frightening and more general premise than even these labels can provide: What would become of a society without books? Bradbury at least seems to feel like a loss of literature would result in a loss of all those things we think of as most nobly human -- and whether it's due to the power of his writing or the truth of his convictions, I'm inclined to agree.

Over the years, I've realized that I'm incredibly lucky. When I was nine years old and asked my dad if he had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 lying around, he didn't tell me I couldn't read it. Knowing full well what it was and what it represented, he didn't reproach me for wanting to read it; neither did that saintly librarian. In fact, I can't remember any adult ever telling me that I couldn't read something. If anything, they were the ones who opened my eyes to the wealth of written material the world in store for me, and the best of them offered themselves up as guides through the maze of the literary world.

Not all children grow up like I did. Not all children can take their right to read for granted. Not all adults can take their right to read for granted: censorship affects people of all ages, and though in this country at this moment we're most aware of the books that parents try to keep their kids from reading, the historical precedents in the case of book-banning don't provide particularly sterling examples.

In Berlin, there is an open square called the Bebelplatz. In the center of the square, a small glass window in the ground lets observers peer into a room constructed underneath the surface of the square. The room is full of bookshelves. The bookshelves are all empty. At the edge of the square, the above plaques are set into the ground, each of them likewise the size of a paving stone. The quote by Heinrich Heine reads, "Where they begin by burning books, they will end by burning people." As it turns out, the empty bookshelves beneath the square provide just enough space to hold all the books burned by Nazi sympathizers in this square; they are left empty in remembrance of the deeds this place has witnessed. The only thing I love better than this memorial is the living one that manifests just across the square in the form of the weekly university book market.

Read This Book: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

There are those books that people recommend to you over the years, but that always remain forgotten at the bottom of your "to-read" list, because you're not quite sure what they're going to be about or what you're going to get out of them or exactly why you should invest the time to find out -- until one day, for no apparent reason, you remember a title in the bookstore or at the library and then the book is in your hands and you have no choice but to read it.

For me, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is one of those books. It was first recommended over a year ago by someone whose taste in literature I trust implicitly -- possibly because she is the only other person in the world who obsesses over both of my obscure favorite authors -- but though I even went so far as to text the title to myself (so that I would have it with me the next time I was in a bookstore or library), I never actually thought to purchase or borrow it when I had the opportunity. It took the actions of another friend to remind me of this book, and my desire to procrastinate on my thesis research fueled my decision to search it out at the local library.

I started this book less than six hours ago, at the start of a work-out on one of the elliptical machines at the gym and not knowing what to expect. Half an hour and forty-some-odd pages later, I had to cut my work-out short because I didn't particularly want to start crying in the middle of the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facility. Feinberg's portrayal of the seemingly insurmountable barriers faced by the protagonist Jess -- a Jewish butch girl from a working-class family growing up in the 1950s -- made me angry at history. But the tears didn't threaten to start until I remembered that, for some people, many of whom I am proud to call my friends, the kind of discrimination the novel depicts is anything but history. Sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, class prejudice: all of these are just as alive in the present as they were in 1950. Derogatory slurs, employer discrimination, physical abuse, and sexual assault still face people who are perceived as "different."

Feinberg's novel is ultimately a bildungsroman, a story that follows the growth and development of an individual from childhood to maturity and beyond, but its power comes from the intersection of this basic form and its unflinching (and historically informed) depiction of the butch-femme subculture with which I, for one, was completely unfamiliar. Although the account is fictional, I feel like being inside Jess's head for a few hundred pages introduced me to more of the butch experience than any non-fictional format could have. I'm certainly not presuming to really know what it's really like to be butch simply because I've read one person's take on it, but I've always believed that one of the first steps towards increased understanding and acceptance of any ostracized or excluded group is to give that presumed "other" a voice. For a few hundred pages I felt Jess's pains and joys, lived inside Jess's mind and dealt with Jess's problems and questions, and through this fiction I was able to be let into an interior world with which I'd otherwise have little to no contact.

What's more, the form of the novel, rather than drawing rigid distinctions and placing uncomplicated labels on people and forms of behavior, presents the reader with something that I would consider truer to the complex and complicated intersections between these labels and the real results of their inadequacies. It made me question the labels that I use and the assumptions that I make about individuals based upon appearance or behavior, and it did so without trying to give me "answers" -- which are often just a new set of labels. Jess identifies as butch, but it's obvious this word has different meanings to different individuals, and rather than try to codify it or provide it with a specific, exclusive meaning, Feinberg's book explores the nuanced ways in which different characters may perform the same label.

The novel is also incredibly brilliant for the way it made me look twice at pronouns. In case you haven't noticed, so far in this post I have yet to assign a gendered pronoun to either Feinberg or Jess. In Feinberg's "About the Author" blurb, ze discusses hir life and accomplishments using commonly-accepted gender-neutral pronouns (a great introduction to which can be found here). But Jess's case seems more complicated. At birth, Jess is biologically female. However, as a butch Jess's character can often come across as masculine, and later in the novel Jess begins to take male hormones and successfully "passes" as a man for several years before deciding to stop hormone treatments. Since the novel is narrated from Jess's first person point of view, the only pronoun Jess ever uses to refer to hirself is "I": all of the gendered pronouns of the novel are bestowed upon Jess by others around hir (though I was interested to note that to Jess, fellow butches were still "shes").

Some people scoff at the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun and may be inclined to think that those who use them or demand their use are simply trying to making a political statement. But pronoun use isn't just a political act for Jess. The pronouns people use to describe and discuss hir have a great effect on hir life and hir own self-concept. When growing up, Jess is frequently called a "he-she," and though the term is used in an incredibly derogatory manner it becomes the only one with which Jess can fully identify. Later on, Jess has to deal with other people on the streets, confused by hir gender ambiguity, referring to hir as "it." But the pain of an improper pronoun isn't just emotional: when passing as a man, being referred to by others as "she" could lose Jess hir job.

The real glory of this novel is that it manages to tackle such massive political and personal issues without becoming a manifesto. Feinberg doesn't tell hir readers what to think. Instead, ze presents hir readers with an account of the way the world looks through Jess's eyes, and asks the reader to make his, her, or hir own judgments regarding the politics of the situation. I can't speak for all of the readers who have encountered this novel since its publication, but for me, Stone Butch Blues ultimately reaffirmed two important ideas about the world: first, that hate, anger, and violence are real things that affect real people, but second (and more importantly) that love, respect, and understanding are powerful counter-forces that, if marshaled correctly, can encourage and support necessary action.

Still, in the end, nothing I say about Stone Butch Blues can explain the powerful experience of reading it, and reading this post is no substitute for going out and getting yourself a copy of the novel. I meant what I said in the title: read this book. And if you have (or when you do), please leave a comment behind -- I'd love to hear what others have to say on the subject.