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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
Awestruck
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
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