10 Book Challenge
In honor of International Literacy Day, I'm taking the brief list I posted on my FB feed and expanding on each of my ten books here. Each of these books has impacted me in some form or another, and all of them have stayed with me since reading them. Mostly doing this because I'm geeking out and giving myself a brief break from the real world tbh. But here goes!
1. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. It's a really wrenching book, told in diary entries from a developmentally disabled individual named Charlie, who undergoes an operation that dramatically increases his IQ and changes his life. This was an emotional read for me, particularly because my brother is autistic, and a lot of the changes I read in Charlie also occurred in my brother over the course of his life.
2. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I read this book in high school, and I would credit this book as the one that made me think of reading and writing completely differently after that point. The way Wharton constructs the events of the novel are cunning; this is maybe the first book I've read and truly understood/appreciated how biting, even furious, an author can be in how they hide information in their prose.
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. This book covers a slew of my own personal interests--social movements, postcolonialism, recovery (re: sexual assault), and of course, ~TrUe LoVe~ (barf). But what shocked and impressed me about the book is how lush it is, how fluid Roy's writing becomes with each new line, and most dumbfounding of all is that she wrote the book over four years and did not edit a single line. She wrote everything in this book, and did not rewrite it, period. The central theme of the novel, to simply appreciate the smaller things in one's life, stays with me.
4. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Stream of consciousness is insane enough, but throwing it between multiple characters (and in third person) is almost too much. Almost. This is one of the hardest books I've read, and I do not mean to say that it's a favorite, but it's definitely stuck with me. I love how all of her characters more or less despise where they are and their general surroundings (lol, #me). And queer characters!
5. His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman. I didn't appreciate these books growing up, tbh--I read most of TGC when I was 12, got bored, and forgot about it. I picked them back up the summer after I graduated high school, and they're incredible! I reread the whole set close to once every other year, and I pick up new details and different perspectives each time. Not to put down HP by any means (casual diehard fan), but these books taught me that you can write books for children by rewriting Paradise Lost, which is awesome (and kind of fucked up?). My heart still breaks for Lyra and Will, not gonna lie.
6. The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam. This book, somewhere between fact and fiction, chronicles Mam's account of growing up in the sex industry and in human trafficking in Cambodia. Recently, Mam's story has been unraveling, and large parts of her lived experiences as accounted for in the aforementioned text have been proven to be untrue: Mam did not, presumably, spend even one year "trapped" in anyone's brothel. She grew up with her parents (who she claims were her "adoptive" parents in the text--this may or may not be true), and went to high school. I put this book on here because it resonates with me deeply, despite what feels to me like a huge betrayal from one of my personal heroes.
7. Caucasia by Danzy Senna. This book gets a lot less acclaim and recognition than it deserves, imo. I was assigned this book in an introductory lit class in college, and I wound up devouring it in maybe four or five hours in the laundry room of my dorm. As soon as I finished, I went back to the first page and started reading it again.
8. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Another not-a-favorite. But I spent a whole summer chewing on this book, and I think it's important to note that this book taught me that some books do deserve more patience and time (though rarely). I still get tripped up thinking about the passage Steinbeck inserts into the middle of the novel, a chapter that diverts from the plot, and is basically just the author trying to compel the reader to care about the dustbowl instead of just reading another "classic American novel" and then spewing junk about culture, or whatever rich people did back then.
9. After Dark by Haruki Murakami. Okay, so Murakami is arguably my favorite author. I've read every last thing he's had translated into English--every last thing--and After Dark stands as my favorite. It's so unlike his other novels in how it diverts from his usual formula (think mid 30s-ish guy with a nondescript office job goes on Some Kind of Quest, usually has to do with a former or current significant other, involves at least one supernatural character/element, etc), but for a novel that's especially light in language and quick to read, it packs so much into it. I've reread After Dark more than any other novel in my life (except maybe the HP series--again, casual diehard fan nbd), and still with each time I read it, I learn something new. Also, fuck every single review that has called it one of Murakami's "weaker" texts, 'cause y'all clearly do not know a work of art when you see one.
10. Edinburgh by Alexander Chee. When I said about #7 that it was unappreciated, take that and multiply it by maybe fifty billion, and then you have how I feel towards this book. Edinburgh is both a heartbreaking story, an exercise in writing beautiful prose in present tense, and also just so, so important as a cornerstone of literature that covers topics "too dark" or "too deviant" for public appreciation or recognition--sexual assault, child molestation, depression, suicide. Chee doesn't pretend to have answers for his readers; he just presents the events of the novel, walks his readers through the events as they happen. And the way he plays with time is incredible. And this is his debut. This book is really close to my heart, mostly because of how closely I identify with Fee, the main character, and what happens to him as he grows up. But this book is also a personal standard and model for what kind of writer I would like to one day become.
Read all of these books, but especially plugging Edinburgh, because that shit does not get nearly the credit it deserves!
