Alex posted this meme last night and I have a Buddhism paper due on Friday that I have not even started yet so why wouldn't I do this?
Rules: In a text post list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard - they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.
1. This is just my favorite book ever ever ever. There's nothing much to it other than I love the kind of sad it makes me and I care deeply about every character. (I think how much I care about them is partly aspirational––they're cool, affected, can travel and drink literally every second of the day. They are terrible people, but they're the interesting kind.) I feel fairly indifferent about the rest of Hemingway's work, this is just THE novel, you know?
2. When I watched that Deadhead in the final episode of Freaks and Geeks say he wished he never heard American Beauty just so he could hear it for the first time all over again, I finally found a way to describe how I feel about this book. I am among the last group of millennials who will remember the events of September 11th, and while I think dwelling on this fact is simultaneously corny and pointless (an effect of my childhood being split in twain by 9/11??????), this novel helped me unpack that major American event and my weird and previously unaddressed feelings about it. I realize now, having read some criticism of the book, that it is fairly cloying and a little exploitative, but when I first read it as a high school freshman I labeled it as my first brush with poignancy. Also, photographs in a book? The red ink of someone correcting typos in the NYT in a book?? Text bleeding into each other to incoherency in a book??? This shit blew my mind.
3. Homebase - This was the first Asian American novel I read outside the Amy Tan/pocket-paperback-Chinese-women-coming-of-age genre and the first Asian American novel I read in an academic setting. Needless to say, it was really important to see an Asian Am book being given attention and to have a non-British lens at the effects of colonization. Also, this is just one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. Every sentence is ethereal with an occasional line that'll knock the wind out of you. This is less of a novel and more of a giant poem about home, or the lack thereof, that is born in America. It's also devastatingly under-read so READ IT, DUMMIES.
4. Beloved - God. Damn. Wong's writing is second only to Morrison's. I spent this whole book being equally spooked, weepy, and thrilled. I remember Keisha telling me about this book when she read it and being very scared by her reaction to it; she was mostly speechless and when she could speak, it was usually about how fucked up the story was. I was even apprehensive to start the novel at all, not realizing that by "fucked up" she meant the fact that these things happened, the fact that this is based in a real actual time period in which human beings were kept as slaves for other human beings and based on a true event that happened as a reaction to this. A specific line that will stay with me forever: "Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self as another."
5. Absolutely crucial to my teenage years. I picked this up in the 8th grade because I was obsessed with reading everything in the ~classics section of my local library and Gravity's Rainbow was too thick. I tried to get my friends to read this too but nobody really wanted to and if they did, they hated Holden. (Who doesn't, tbh.) I think this was so important to me because it sort of sat me down and said, "Look, you can't go around re-enacting scenes from Mean Girls your entire life. There are people who will do that, but you're not one of them and that's okay." It's important to have a special snowflake moment so you can move on with your life and this was it for me.
6. I bought this book at the peak of my obsession with SNL/being a comedian and devoured it. The fact that it's an oral history means it reads like a digest of juicy goss. Pair that with tales of young comedians and writers on coke and celebrities throwing fits, and you have the perfect book for me. This made me feel being a writer or comedian was a real tangible thing I could do, but I had to be prepared to deal with assholes with ridic daddy complexes like Lorne Michaels and general pieces of shit like Chevy Chase. I haven't picked this up for a while so I don't remember who's anecdote this is, but I will always have this very romanticized image of a young Bill Murray in the snow, standing in the middle of a New York street and waving goodbye to a guest as they drive away.
7. THIS IS JUST MY FAVORITE HARRY POTTER BOOK. I have read it the most of the series and I love Lupin (mourn u til I join u, bb) and it's right before all the angst and hormones kicks in and I LOVE IT.
8. Salinger is on here twice because I am that person. "A Perfect Day for Bananafis," "Uncle Wiggly In Connecticut," and "Teddy" are the jam. The Glass family is the jam. Sad intellectual white New Yorkers is my guilty pleasure, always.
9. Trainspotting My life is a series of cathartic breakthroughs connected by the moments of everyday life, and reading this novel spurred the most cathartic release I've had in my 22 years on earth. I won't detail the entire exhausting event here, but let's just say looking into the lives of heroin addicts as the daughter of a heroin addict who I never really met really helped me a lot. Trainspotting also quite literally changed my life as I wrote about the catharsis it triggered for one of my personal statements when applying to universities and I would bet my entire net-worth (note: this is a two digit number) that that personal statement is why I was accepted to both UCLA and Berkeley. I've been meaning to write Irvine Welsh about how much this book means to me but I keep chickening out.
10. Definitely read this at the height of my hippie years, in which I only listened to John Lennon and Bob Dylan and just wanted to end the oil wars, man. It helped solidify my anti-war stance but it also helped me stop believing in god and start believing in people. A "kurt vonnegut" google led me to the humanism wiki page, and the rest, as they say, is an acceptance that there is nothing after death and no reason to be good to people other than to be fucking good to people that gradually developed over several years. Also, the way Vonnegut can write about himself with equal deprecation and narcissism is v. inspirational to me.
