The instructions are simple: show me who you are via the books that have stayed with you. The top four, all time. Tell me why you chose them. That’s it, that’s all. Pick the four most meaningful books to you, according to whatever measure(s) you value, and reveal your innermost depths.
Thank you so much for the tag, @rookamell !! This got me thinking but I realised that if I think too much about it, I'll never get to the answer, so here goes!!
1. Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente
"That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play you part and say your lines."
So in this particular company, Deathless is an outlier, because it's the only book I haven't reread (obsessively, compulsively). I've only ever read it once, years ago, and it emotionally destroyed me. My plan is to reread it this winter, and see how it comes back to me -- because I don't think i can capture in words the way I felt first reading it. There is something in this book of the fairy tales of my childhood, in all their beauty and gore. It is deeply fantastical, and at once anchored in such a specific and gruesome part of history. I was raised in a country traumatised by authoritrian communism, that lived in the shadow of the USSR. There are, however, few things my mother speaks of the way she does of the wonders she saw, visiting Sankt Petersburg (Leningrad to her, always Leningrad) as a youth - there was terror in it, but also awe. There are horror stories of the way people from my country were used as canon fodder in the Siege of Leningrad - my grandmother would terrify me with them as a child.
All of these are present in the book -- to follow Marya Morevna as she ages and changes with her city through the shifting regimes, was to hear my mother's stories in a stranger's voice. It is achingly, beautifully written, baroque and roccoco in the way Angela Carter describes her own prose. Its use of space and genre is fascinating - we are in history when within the city, incapable of escaping the mistrust and hunger; but when Marya leaves it, we step out of time and place with her, and straight into the fairy tale. This book stayed with me for years, and will probably stay many more.
2. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
"All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change."
So I have a lot of thoughts on faith and belief and the way religion was used against people like me, to shame us out of existence and into conformity. The topic is a thorny one for me, and one that I constantly turn around in my head. With that being said, if I had to choose to believe in a god, it would be Lauren's -- this book is a fascinating meditation on religion and god, or rather, Change, as the only constant of a dying world. If anybody told me one of my favourite protagonists of all time would be a prophet, I would have laughed, but here we are!! I love Lauren with all my heart, with her bite and introspection and pragmatism, and painful empathy. She's one of a kind.
This book is phenomenal, not only because of the way it anticipates 2025 with what is, at times, terrifying accuracy, but also because of its depiction of humanity -- both the sublime and the horrible. It's not gentle on the reader, but at the same time deeply comforting to me in the way it refuses to conform. I don't know that this book, as it is, could be written today, and I treasure it deeply.
Also, it played a big role and did a lot of the heavy lifting of my crusade to get my book club friends to open up to SF and fantasy, and they LOVED it, so I just hold a very special place in my heart for this book.
3. The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner
“He’d had a porcine habit of eating her food when he’d finished his own. When his wine cup was empty, he would reach without comment for hers, having noted if she’d sampled it first. She sat through her wedding feast with her lips stinging from the poison of the powdered coleus leaf that had touched them as she pretended to drink, then watched as he took her wine, as casually as he had taken her country, and choked on it and died.”
First things first -- there are no books like The Queen of Attolia. With every new one I open, a part of me chases the high of reading her again for the first time (and the second, the third and so on and so forth - remember the part about obsessive rereading? well.). I didn't even know which quote to pick out of it, because I have tens of highlights. The Queen's Thief series as a whole is deeply precious to me, but this installment owns my heart.
I don't know how to begin explaining it, because in my heart of hearts, I believe that everyone deserves to experience it for themselves. It's the second book in a series that treats storytelling as a love language - the narrator of each book has something entirely unique to them, and every single one of them is lying to you, reader. And you learn to love them for it. Who tells the story is incredibly important, because control of the narrative means control of one's life, but just as important as that -- to whom is this story told? Who is listening, and what is the narrator trying to hide from them? All these books present a certain story on the first read, and a different one entirely on the second. They are masterworks of the narrative craft, and insane efficiency -- not one word is amiss. On every single read-through, I discover something new, and it's incredibly satifying. The best reading decision I've ever made was to go into this series blind, and let the story take me along for the ride.
But to leave off with something about the titular character -- no villain is so beloved by the narrative as the Queen of Attolia. She is a fiend from hell, she is a murderess, she believes, but chooses not to worship. I planted vivid pink and purple coleus in the tiny little garden in front of my apartment, out of love for her. She is up there as one of my favourite characters of all time.
4. Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
"The eye does not see things, but images of things that mean other things."
This little book is imminently different from the rest of this list, but means the world to me. It's a fantastical little collection of descriptions -poems? lies? hallucinations?- of impossible cities around the world. The framework of it is delighfully campy -- Marco Polo tells tall tales of the cities he's seen on his travels through Kublai Khan's vast empire, while the Khan interrogates his fabulations.
This book found me at a time when I was deeply uninspired in university - architecture school is not kind to its students, to say the least, and at that time there was very little of myself that I saw in this field. This book was the first thing I encountered that married my work to my passions, as it finds itself at this odd little crossroad between architectural theory and fantasy fiction. It's fun, and delightful, and it helped me discover that there is room for this, too, in an otherwise pretty unforgiving field.
I terrorised my profs with quotes from it for years, and that brought me a deep joy <3
A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin - the drawings from this series on this blog date to shitty pictures of my sketchbooks from like, 2016. As a whole, this is one of my favourite series of all time, with its qualities and pitfalls. One of the most iconic moments of my teenage years was at summer camp, when the supervisor was trying to do a headcount of all the drunk teenagers partying around this mountain cabin, only to find me tucked in the reception at 3 am, asked me what on earth I was doing there, to which my only reply was "JON SNOW WAS JUST STABBED" while shaking my copy of ADWD at him. Poor man.
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte - to tell you something about my reading capacity as a teen, on that same summer camp mentioned above, I brought with me and finished both Jane Eyre and ADWD within the same week. She is fundamental to the way I think about life, and personhood, and love and loss. While finishing it, I was biting my pillow so as to not wake up the other people in my bunkbed room with my sobbing. This is also why I decided to sneak out to said reception area to finish ADWD.
The Accursed Kings, by Maurice Druon - a historical fiction series about a French dynastical curse, that I had no business reading at 11, even though every adult in my life was deeply supportive of it. With that being said, grrm apparently quoted it as an inspiration for asoiaf (which I wound up reading like, 3-4 years after this, and the similarities that i noticed on this year's reread are HILARIOUS) and it informed my taste for political intrigue and medieval shenanigans for the rest of my life, so like, it all ended well.
The Count of Monte-Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas - we're still on the French classics here, and this is maybe the first Big Book I read as a pre-teen, and loved every single moment of it. The drama of it all! The swashbucklery!! Betrayal! Revenge! Lies! Complicated feelings about Napoleon, and god, and questionable age-gap romances! Queer side-characters who escape into the sunset! This book had it all, and is the root cause for one of my closest friendships.
Persuasion, by Jane Austen - I read this last year, on my first ever -and long-awaited- trip to the UK. There is a mixture of time and place and feeling that happened with this book that I cannot replicate or explain. I knew the Letter was coming, and yet I was not prepared. It is deeply special to me.
Uprooted, by Naomi Novik - This book is my annual spring reread. Novik's world here is achingly real to me - the area where I grew up and where my family is from is comprised of little villages with fortified churches and towers nearly a thousand years old. There are large woods with unspeakably old and strange trees, which I can't hike through because of the bears and wolves. Whenever I miss home in the spring, I reread this book and I can hear the wind in the green and growing fields back home.
Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin - My most recent read!! I had to include it here, as it is probably my favourite book I've read all year. I wish I could inhale this prose, and bathe in the beauty and ache of this story. I need it, and everything else Baldwin has ever written, on my shelf like, yesterday.
Phew!!! This was SO LONG but it cannot be helped haha. I need to cut myself off here, or I won't ever shut up. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to ramble like this, friend!!! If this sounds like fun, I'm gently tagging @virshiral @shivunin @mariuspompom and @swordmaid <3 No pressure, though!!
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