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Marginalia

Awestruck

What books have stayed with you through the years?

Ed Tankersley
Dec 28, 2021
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If you’re a reader — and I have good reason to believe that you are — then there are certain books that hold particular importance to you, that have earned a place in your personal literary pantheon.

A book in this category might have found you at an especially receptive or vulnerable or curious time in your life. Perhaps it’s a book that awakened you to the transformative and transporting power of fiction, to the way that you can sink into a comfortable chair and disappear into a novel, emerging hours later, blinking and awestruck at the once-familiar world that surrounds you, now remade in subtle but undeniable ways, just as you yourself have been. Chances are that there’s a book that you’ve recommended over and over again, or maybe only once or twice because you understand that only the right kind of reader will appreciate it the way that you do. Maybe you even snatch up every copy of that book when you find one on the clearance shelf in the secondhand bookstore so you’ll have it on hand to give away when that ideal reader appears in your life.


Marginalia, which is what I call this section of Read Write Repeat, is about those special books, and my relationship to books, what they mean to me and what they’ve done for me and to me. If you’ve subscribed to Read Write Repeat, then you’re already subscribed to Marginalia. You can change this here, if you’d like, or subscribe to other topics within Read Write Repeat.


Here’s a metaphorical stack of books that made an indelible impression on me when I first read them. These are some of the titles that I grab up at Half Price Books whenever I spot them and keep them “in stock” to give away. I expect I’ll spend some time talking about each of these books in future posts, but for now, this is just an extemporaneous emptying out of my book memory, presented roughly in the order in which I read them, from my earliest favorite book — Frederick — to the most recent novel that left me awestruck.

  • Frederick - Leo Lionni

  • Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury

  • Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger

  • The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

  • Dubliners - James Joyce

  • Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard

  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

  • Winesburg Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

  • Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

  • Plainsong - Kent Haruf

  • The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

  • The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery

  • Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

  • Tenth of December - George Saunders

  • The Art of the Lathe - BH Fairchild

  • The Book of Men - Dorianne Laux

  • Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

  • Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

  • The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

  • Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders

  • Night Boat to Tangier - Kevin Barry

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Cathrine McClure
Jan 3, 2022Liked by Ed Tankersley

I would say that each of these books has influenced me to want to be a writer. They have influenced my desire to write about the human experience in a fantastical setting. They all have depth and most contain humor, along with excellent craftsmanship.

Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh

Charlotte's Web - E. B. White

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

Tenth of December - George Saunders

Fun Home - Alison Bechdel

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - Anthony Marra

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John Wise
Jan 1, 2022Liked by Ed Tankersley

While loath to ever recommend anything I read, I thought it might be interesting to note what I've loved:

Everything from Nietzsche

Les Chants de Maldoror - Lautréamont

Dialect of Enlightenment - Adorno / Horkheimer

No Sense of Place - Joshua Meyrowitz

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe

The Decline of Western Civilization - Oswald Spengler

Democracy in America - Tocqueville

Cool Memories - Jean Baudrillard

Les Fleurs du Mal - Charles Baudelaire

The Western Lands - William Burroughs

Post Office - Charles Bukowski

Crowds and Power - Elias Canetti

Listen Little Man - Wilhelm Reich

One Dimensional Man - Herbert Marcuse

The Third Unconscious - Franco Berardi

The Social Conquest of Earth - E.O. Wilson

The Fabric of Reality - David Deutsch

Your Inner Fish - Neil Shubin

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