My friend had an idea to exchange lists of our top 50 books. Books we’ve read, loved, and have to share. This is the list I wrote for her. Some have changed since this list was made, so the list itself is a time capsule of a time of my literary life, spring 2006.
Children’s Books
- Bright Shadow (Avi)—To be honest, I don’t remember too well what this one’s about. I believe it’s about a girl who becomes powerful, which would fit the theme of most of my childhood favorites (probably most books written for female children starting in the mid/late 20th c.). I do remember checking it out from my school library, and liking it so much that a year or so later I went to check it out from the public library. They had to go to some back room to find it, and nearly didn’t find it. A few months after I returned it, I got a bill for about $5 (a lot to a kid) saying I hadn’t returned it, and requesting that I pay for the book. I had returned it, but I paid anyway. A few years later I got a check for the same amount from the library because they had found the book (probably again in that same back room). This lead me to believe that I was the only person who liked this book and that libraries are honest. also liked by Avi: The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (2, 2)
- Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt)—it’s good. I had a crush on one of the boy characters. I haven’t yet seen the movie. (1)
- Winter of Fire (Sherryl Jordan)—I read this book every winter break for about 4 years in a row from junior high into high school. A girl becomes powerful. Yes. (4)
- A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle)—a girl hero, time travel, what more could you ask for as a pre-adolescent girl reader(3)
Literature
- Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)—obvious to the max, but a darn good book. I’ve read it countless times, and still find it amusing and entertaining. Not bad for a woman who had to cover the fact she was writing whenever someone came in the room. (”countless”=4?)
- Underworld (Don Delillo)—I wish I had the time to read this over and over. Delillo took the story I wanted to write, about the baseball game I wanted to write about, made it 100 times better than I could ever write it, and then turned it into a huge, but enthralling novel about trash and memory and people. (1)
- The Brothers Karamozov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)—Good old Fyodor. Tells the story of (could you guess?) brothers who don’t always get along (who’d of thought it?). Interesting philosophical, political, and religious comments and questions. Read also: Notes from the Underground for the age-old example of an unreliable narrator. (1, 2)
- Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)—I didn’t expect to like this book at first. Nothing to do with blatant racism, but just the assumption that I, as a white girl (at the time) wouldn’t find a lot in common with anything in this book. (C’mon, I don’t expect Mr. Ellison read a lot from my above girl-gains-power-and-saves-world genre.) Turns out, it’s a great book…. About racism and people and self knowledge. (1)
- The Sound & the Fury (William Faulker)—The book that made me discover that I did in fact like Faulkner, after denying it since high school. He tells a good story, this man. He sometimes goes the long way about it, but he does tell a good story. See also, Absalom, Absalom!, which follows some of the same characters in much different plot, and inspired one of my friends to want a tattoo that said… Absalom, Absalom! That’s love that lasts a lifetime. (1, 1)
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Milan Kundera)—nice style, nice writing, about memory somewhat, which is a subject I love. (1)
- High Fidelity (Nick Hornby)—Okay, I know it’s not high art, but it’s an enjoyable read, and recent novels aren’t well represented on this list, so here’s one at least. The moral of the book is not to judge people by what they listen to—something we could all learn to live by. The movie’s good of its own right, the Americanization of the British, poor folk. (1)
- Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler)—Truly terrifying the stuff that actually happened in Soviet Russia, and the rewriting of history, even as it was happening. I think many dystopia novels probably owe something to this story (the book and actual historic facts). (1)
- Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)—It’s good. It’s pleasant. It reads well. It’s not about a child having sex with an older man (that got cut from the list, tough call though). I think mostly I’m just impressed that this man knew so many languages and was so into butterflies. What a character! (1)
- My Name Is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok)—Potok claims the position in my life of being one of very few authors to actually make me cry. This book did not make me cry, but is a very good book anyway. From it I learned not to become a whore, no matter what my profession. (1)
- Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rainer Maria Rilke)—I hate having to read things in translation. I don’t know if I’m loving the actual work or the translation, or maybe some combination. Nevertheless, I truly believe that this is a good book. If I ever learn German, I’ll let you know whether or not I’m right. (1)
- East of Eden (John Steinbeck)—Yes folks, the book that (re)launched a thousand readers…that is, Oprah’s book club! Another author I didn’t like in high school. Another story of brothers who don’t get along. It’s good old-fashioned family drama. good movie too—launched a career “the new Marlon Brando…no…the only James Dean!” (1)
- Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne)—One of the most surprising books I read in college. There’s a black page when someone dies. There’s a character named Yorrick (Ok, so Shakespeare started it, but it’s still a great name). There are a lot of castration fears. Men are wimps. I also endorse the movie as being surprisingly in tune with the book. (1)
- Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)—I couldn’t decide. They’re both good in their own right. They’re both about not really understanding other people, and about marriage and love, and the impotence of love and the impotence of men (figuratively this time) and the weakness (or perceived weakness) of women and the strength of women and destruction caused by time. (3, 2)
- Bee Season (Myla Goldberg)—convincingly conveys the mind of a child, and a family so crazy that they’re absolutely believable. Like Delillo, she stole some of my writing thoughts and did it better: she’ll tell a scene through one mind, then another, so without narrative interruption, you see how people subtly misunderstand. (1)
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- Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)—This is not, in fact, a play in which nothing happens. But it’s a play in which not much happens, and that’s what makes it so great (absurd, if you will). (2)
- The Crucible (Arthur Miller)—One of few literary endeavors I did actually like during those aforementioned high school/junior high years. I got it. I got what it was really about and didn’t need a bunch of annoying animals (think Watership Down or Animal Farm. and gag me with a spoon.) for the point to get across. History repeats. Tell me our stories. (1, 1, 1)
- No Exit (Jean-Paul Sartre)—Having lived several years in very close proximity with others, I got this one too. (2)
- MacBeth (William Shakespeare)—Yes, it’s obvious. But I’ve read this play at least 8 times, and written at least 5 papers at least in part about it. It’s a short little guy and chock-full of great stuff. Dense, even. (> 8.)
- The Father (August Strindberg)—The war between the sexes may never be over. If you’re a guy, ponder this: how will you know it’s really yours? (Okay, so this was before DNA testing.) ah those Scandinavians and their crazy moms and dads. (2)
- The Four Quartets (T.S. Eliot)—Reads beautifully, and I know it does because I’m not reading a translation. Try “Little Gidding” if you don’t want to deal with the whole thing (all 20 or so pages). (countless)
- Palm Tree at the End of the Mind (Wallace Stevens)—The one book on the list I haven’t read all the way through (ignoring my skimming of Dickens). But every time I pick it up I find another enjoyable poem. Who knew that modern poetry could be so enjoyable? (1/2)
- Myth of Sisyphus (Albert Camus)—another one to I’ve read and re-read and written numerous times about. Existentialism and suicide and studies of the absurd. Somehow in all the classes I took that dealt with existentialism or Camus in some form, no one talked about this. (I still wrote about it.) So maybe that means it’s not great, but it’s philosophy I can understand, whether that means it’s good or bad. (5?)
- White Album (Joan Didion)—Essays about California and Los Angeles traffic and water and the self and more. She’s best known for her non-fiction I think, but she also wrote novels, like Play It As It Lays (which, like many other novels on this list was turned into an actually-not-so-bad movie) (1, 1)
- Totem and Taboo (Sigmund Freud)—Sigmund doesn’t believe the Judeo-Christian myth-set about why things are the way they are, so he makes up his own. See also, Moses and Monotheism. (1, 1)
- Fear and Trembling (Søren Kierkegaard)—Another Scandinavian, another Christian. This man takes one of the most horrifying Jewish stories and jumps right in. The story of Abraham and Isaac was up there with the story of Job, when I was a child, on my list of proof that God might be a little off his rocker. I mean Jesus was nice and all, but that God fellow was a bit frightening. In White Teeth, Zadie Smith says, “It must have been a hell of a shock for the apostle [John in Revelation] (after that thorough spin-job, the New Testament, all those sweet words and sublime sentiments) to discover Old Testament vengeance lurking around the corner afterall.” (3, 1)
- On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (Friedrich Nietzsche)—They’re together in my edition of the book, so I’m pretending it’s only one book. Here we have Nietzsche’s mythology. Fascinating look at violence and people. In Ecce Homo he just kind of sums up all of his work and why he’s so great and all. (1)
- Billions and Billions (Carl Sagan)—Made me want to stop driving a car and destroying the environment, and here I am (not driving, still destroying but always feeling guilty—refer to Freud for where those guilt feelings come from…not from Carl Sagan, I can tell you). Starts out slow. I would suggest skipping the whole first section, unless you’re really curious what 10^6 means and somehow don’t already know. This man’s easy to agree with, easy to disagree with, and nothing if not opinionated. (1)
- Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris)—I laughed out loud in public on several occasions while reading this book. (1)
- Flatland (Edwin Abbott)—What if the world was 2D? He uses that as the starting point to touch on the nature of space (as in what’s around us, not the “final frontier”). quick and interesting. (1)
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)—radio program, TV show, computer game, and now movie. A great sense of humor this man has. (1)
- The Gods Themselves (Isaac Asimov)—made me realize the perhaps-obvious fact that if you don’t give people another option, they won’t give up the things they think they need. I wonder if Mr. Sagan’s read it. (1)
- Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)—chock-full (I have honestly never used that expression before these few pages) of biblical and literary allusions, an English major’s dream-dystopic novel; others I’ll list here to pretend my list isn’t so long: Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), 1984 (George Orwell) (1, 1, 1)
- The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)—you’ve read it, you know (1)
- A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)—the invented word part is cool. need I say, great movie? (1)
- Dune (Frank Herbert)—a different look at messianic myths (there are TWO movie versions of this!—I’ll let you judge their quality.) (1)
- The Castle (Franz Kafka)—It doesn’t begin nor end. like that song. (1)
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)—unique doesn’t even begin. like a crazy Japanese version of already-crazy Kafka. (1)
- The Once and Future King (T.H. White)—I used to have this thing for King Arthur stories (alright, “Arthurian legends”). This one is less fantastical than many of the others. I remember it being long, and sometimes dragging a bit, but still being good overall. (1)
- Life After God (Douglas Coupland)—truly modern. a good read, I say. (1)
- I Am Not Jackson Pollock (John Haskell)—a look at acting, fictionalized retellings, the death of Jackson Pollock (1)
- The Dead (James Joyce)—I took Ulysses off the list because you’ll either read it or you won’t. I can’t convince you of anything other than maybe it truly did something unique that is worth looking into. The Dead is much shorter much more accessible (I always feel insulted when people say, you’ll like this better, it’s more accessible. what, like I won’t get inaccessible? access this…). The Dead makes me want to be a painter. (3, 1)
- “You’re Ugly, Too” (Lorrie Moore)—a story that maybe only certain types of women can relate to, but if we’re of that type, oh can we relate! (2)
- Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut)—I’ve finally gotten over my addiction to the man. These short stories span his styles. He’s prolific some might say. (1)
- Goodbye Chunky Rice and Blankets (Craig Thompson)—adorably cute and I could relate (1, 1)
Plays
Poetry
Essays/Philosophy/etc.
Science Fiction/Fantasy/Dystopias
Short Stories/Collections
Graphic Novels