booknerdery

Ah I missed a week… in my defense, this post has been sitting in my drafts, 3/4 completed, for over a week! Horrors. I have been working on it for four days, believe it or not. And it is a good long one too, containing more information about my book-reading habits than you could possibly ever want to know.

I also wanted to write about the surreality that was the tube strike, but that is a post for another day.

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There was this awesome 15-book meme making the rounds on Facebook, and after reading a number of my friends’ responses I feel like I have a lot more to ponder on the topic of books that have been important to me in my life, so rather than edit my note (who would read it?) or write a new one (too annoying) I thought I would make a gloriously long post of booknerdery. And long here really means… long. Like, close on 3,000 words. I am putting most of it under the jump for my poor index page but if you are reading this in Google Reader or somesuch, be warned. I still haven’t figured out how to snip posts in RSS feeds. Anyone? Any idea?

The Original 15

Name 15 (or so) books that have been important to you in your life. Don’t take too long to think about it.

1. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Still the quintessential book on being a teenager. Yes Holden is really whiny and annoying, but let’s face it, we were ALL Holden at one point or other (or you were an exceptionally well-adjusted teenager), and I think I had the fortune to come to this book at the point in my life when I was him. It still resounds with me in a lot of ways – especially, especially, when Holden says he likes the museum because everything there stays the same. I felt, and still feel, the same way as he does…

2. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
This book changed my life. It really did. The weirdest thing is I really can’t say why. I don’t think reading it transformed my worldviews in any particular way, or revealed to me some splendid truth of life, or anything so drastic, but I can’t shake the feeling that this book has had an incredibly profound impact on me. I think for all I enjoy literature I never realised how magically intoxicating, and powerful, words and writing and created worlds could be till i read The Lord of the Rings… and I certainly had never considered any fantasy books to possess literary merit. Tolkien changed all that. Also, the Fellowship still represents to me the ideal of brotherhood and trust.

3. The Belgariad, David Eddings
This was the very first fantasy series I read. My dad recommended me Pawn of Prophecy when I was 12, and it began an epic love affair with fantasy literature that’s still going strong, though I haven’t plunged into any new fantasy series for a while (Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy is probably the most recent I’ve read). I recognise now that Eddings’ characters are all rather cookie-cutter, but judging it in fairness by the standards of the day, it was pretty fantastic stuff. Certainly you can’t fault its addictiveness. I had such a crush on Garion (and later Silk – which girl who’s read this series hasn’t??).

4. The Harry Potter series, JK Rowling
HP and I go way back… before Prisoner of Azkaban was released. Another series that my dad foisted on me where I was initially unimpressed by the tacky cover art (cf. the Belgariad) and wound up head over heels for the book itself. And like with Eddings, I now recognise that Rowling’s writing is not exactly top-grade, but I can’t deny the tremendous part this series has played in my life. From making friends with fellow fans to epic overnight queueing sessions, a lot of my best HP-related memories have nothing to do with the books themselves, but without them I think my life would be very different. I don’t know if Christie remembers this – one of the first conversations we had with each other was about HP (I spotted you reading CoS in art class in Sec 2 and offered to lend you my PoA, and you said you had all 3 books; this was before HP hit the big time and I was super excited to see someone else reading it!!) ♥

5. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
This is going to sound bizarre, but I actually really feel that Hamlet was the Catcher in the Rye of the Elizabethan era. Just as Mr Purvis often said that King Lear was a play for older people, so I think Hamlet is a play for the young and angsty – there are times when Hamlet, in his indecision and sheer callousness towards friends and family, is extremely annoying in the same argh-I-just-want-to-shake-you!! way that Holden is. But at the same time you (well, I) can’t help truly identifying with a lot of what he says. I think Hamlet contains Shakespeare’s most beautiful lines (though The Tempest comes very close indeed), about death and being and humanity. I actually felt chills when my all time favourite Hamlet line was quoted in the Coraline movie (I can’t remember if it was in the book?):

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?”

6. The Solitaire Mystery, Jostein Gaarder
I think the only reason this book isn’t bigger is because it’s overshadowed by the truly monumental Sophie’s World. And while I can totally see that Sophie’s World is a far more staggering achievement on many scales and levels, it doesn’t speak to me the way The Solitaire Mystery does. This was the book that made me a thinker, that got me interested in big questions, that had me checking out philosophy primers at the library… and literally every single time I read it, I find something new.

7. Violet and Claire, Francesca Lia Block
For me, Violet and Claire is the defining book on friendship. It is really as simple as that. I came to this book at a time of my teenage years when my friends were more important to me than anything else, than family, than school, than life, and the strength of the bond between Violet and Claire – their dynamic, their interactions, their reconciliation – hit me like a sledgehammer… I really cannot put it more subtly. Francesca Lia Block has the most beautiful imagery and turns of phrase of any writer I have ever read in my life. Her writing is breathtakingly ethereal and reading one of her books is like sampling the airiest, lightest, most delicately exquisite dessert you can possibly imagine. Go find the book and you’ll see what I mean.

“This was not a faerie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.”

8. Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
This book got me started on Neil ♥ but in retrospect, it is really a lot more Terry-esque than Neil-esque, particularly in its wry gentle humour (Neil is a lot harsher and darker I reckon). And as with a lot of Terry Pratchett’s works, its fantasy exterior hides a lot of surprisingly profound truth about being human… not to mention Crowley and Aziraphale are hands-down THE best fictional duo I have ever come across.

9. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
This book is Perfect. Everything about it is Perfect. The writing is stunning, the imagery is beautiful, the characters are almost all impossible to like and yet so, so relatable, and the story is heartbreakingly staggering for something so short. It profoundly affected me when I first read it, so much that everything was veiled with the tragedy of Gatsby for a while, and I couldn’t shake the sadness… sometimes, I still think of him and the green light. I identify with Gatsby in a lot of very scary ways. And I think I am still a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

10. Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
…and of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, though to a lesser extent because I feel it’s a less complex and bittersweet work than Looking-Glass. I have always loved the Alice books, but the reason they are on this list at the expense of other similarly thought-provoking children’s books such as Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh is solely because they took over my entire life for the most part of my MA year, in the process becoming so much more than just fiction. I really don’t know how to put it without sounding like a nutjob. I lived, breathed, thought and dreamed Alice. It became scarily real and haunting. Even now, I sometimes feel like I’m looking at everything through an Alice-filtered lens…

11. At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill
This is the only book on the list I have deliberately chosen not to read more than once. It is almost druglike in its raw, unbridled power, too much of it at one go I think would have ruined me. It is one of the most tremendous, moving, and epic novels I have ever come across, it is so much more than a love story between boys; set before and during the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland, it sweeps relentlessly across history, probing at the heart of a troubled time in a troubled nation, while never losing sight of the sweet intimacy that characterises the relationship between the two main characters. Like Gatsby, this is another of those books that wouldn’t stop haunting me once I was done with it. It wouldn’t leave me alone. This book redefined all my ideas about love, loyalty, and nationhood.

“I know Doyler will be out, and where would I be but out beside him? I don’t hate the English and I don’t know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I’m sure of that now. And he’s my country.”

12. The Last Herald-Mage trilogy, Mercedes Lackey
I feel sorry for Misty Lackey for having put her trilogy right after At Swim, Two Boys, as no praise I will be able to heap on The Last Herald-Mage will ever match the effusion of my previous paragraph, and this has nothing to do with its merits or lack thereof. The Last Herald-Mage entered my life at a time of great transition and uncertainty. It’s not the best written fantasy trilogy in the world. The plot’s not the most compelling, it doesn’t have the greatest characters, it occasionally lapses into rehashing of fantasy tropes and Annoying Main Character Syndrome (HP is another notable offender). What it sets out to be, however, it accomplishes masterfully, and to date I have not read a same-sex love story in the fantasy genre more powerful than this one. It is very special to me, and shortly after first writing the list and realising that I didn’t know where my copies were, I forged out to Waterstones and bought the entire set again (they were discounted, w00t)!

13. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Guards! Guards! isn’t my favourite Discworld book… but it changed my life because it was the first Discworld book I read and fell in love with. Before this I had read The Colour of Magic (it was okay) as well as Truckers (which I think is non-Discworld?), concluded that I didn’t understand the love for Pratchett, and left it at that for years. Fast forward to university when I meet Ailin and Kevin-ojiisan, who profess incredulity that I don’t like Pratchett, and get me started on his books again – especially Ailin, who recommended the Watch books. Guards! Guards! is the first of them. The rest is history and I am now convinced that Pratchett is one of the greatest, most criminally overlooked writers living. Also, I am deeply in love with Carrot ♥ and this is the book that has the most of Carrot (if my memory serves me right).

14. Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Agatha Christie
Again not my favourite book by one of my favourite authors… but probably the first one I read that really moved me and left an impression. I don’t know why this book more than any of her others, to be honest, because it isn’t particularly highly-regarded by Christie fans in general and hardly makes anyone’s top 10 list. I guess this was the book that proved to me that on top of weaving deliciously mazy intricate plots, Agatha Christie was also capable of creating characters and situations that grab you emotionally. This has since been proved many times over in books I came across subsequently (particularly Crooked House and Curtain), but Mrs McGinty’s Dead has the position of honour for being the first for me.

15. Blankets, Craig Thompson
Gentle, heartwrenching, epic, moving – it’s funny, because Blankets wasn’t the first graphic novel I came across by a long shot, and I actually came to it after reading another Craig Thompson work first (the equally amazing Goodbye Chunky Rice). So you’d think by the time I got round to it, I would’ve been well used to the idea that just because a book is full of pictures, it isn’t any less of a tremendous literary accomplishment. Somehow, however, Blankets really hit me. Hard. It was one of those books that touches a very raw nerve, somewhere deep inside, in a place you didn’t even know you had. At it’s heart, it’s really just a coming-of-age story of self-discovery… but it is so profound in its simplicity. It is also one of the most thoughtful explorations of faith I have ever come across in fiction.

Honorary Mention: The Sandman, Neil Gaiman
I can’t really say anything about The Sandman that hasn’t been said a million times over, so I guess I will just say that to me, The Sandman was like… a portal. It opened my eyes and my mind to a lot of things that were new to me. Some were horrific and disturbing and still are, but some were beautiful, others were deeply thought-provoking, and still others were simply different perspectives on things I thought I knew. Like with Lord of the Rings, I can’t put my finger on the impact this series has had on my life, but it has left an indelible imprint.

All the while as I compiled this list, my mind had somehow only thrown up books I like – it wasn’t until I saw Christie’s brilliant list that I remembered books I hate can also be very important to me. So here is an addendum of Books I Hate (or merely dislike/couldn’t get through in some cases) that have undeniably impacted my life in one way or another…

1. Ulysses, James Joyce
Finishing this book was THE crowning glory of my undergraduate career. If not for my dissertation it would probably have gone on to be the crowning glory of my entire university career. I recognise the greatness of this novel. There are even parts of it that I rather enjoyed, and I would still recommend that people read it and decide for themselves if they like it, because it is a tremendous work of brilliance. That said, it had the effect of turning me off modern literature well and good, and this is from somebody who is a Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fan…

2. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
This is the book that finally had me throwing in the towel when it came to science fiction. Figuring that since I’d managed to read Ender’s Game and really, really enjoyed it, surely I could handle other sci-fi… but I couldn’t get past the first chapter or so of Brave New World. I tried several times. The machines frustrated me, so I gave up and haven’t touched any sci-fi since.

3. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
This was the first unabridged, proper classic-classic novel I can remember reading – you know, the stuff of lit seminars and all. Which is funny because I remember vividly Wen En saying to me in JC that he thought Jane Austen must have been the Francine Pascal of her time, and two English degrees later I still think it is one of the truest statements I’ve ever heard about Austen. Anyway, long and short of it is, I found Sense and Sensibility a really tedious bore back then and haven’t tried to reread it since… but in spite of the characters and plot failing to interest me in the least, I really liked the writing style and fortunately went on Pride and Prejudice right after, which was much much better. If I had read another ditchwater-dull book immediately afterwards I might never have touched another Romantic/Victorian novel again.

4. Magician, Raymond E. Feist
This is an odd one. The book itself, and the rest of the Riftwar Saga, isn’t particularly important to me; the extent of it is that I tried very hard to read Magician in my JC years and found it impossible to get past Feist’s choppy writing style. I am consequently guilty of not having read a large number of fantasy classics, such as Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, and Katherine Kerr’s Deverry cycle. One of my most enduring memories of childhood, however, is watching my father play the computer games based on the Riftwar Saga – Betrayal at Krondor and Return to Krondor – and although I have no particular love for the books, I am sure that these games have had a massive impact on my life. They were the seeds of the relationship I have with my dad: sitting beside him for hours watching his party fight, helping him with the word riddles on locked chests, picking up the fundamentals of RPGs and fantasy gaming that still forms the bedrock of much of our conversation. So I guess this book is important to me because if it didn’t exist, the games wouldn’t either, and who knows what I would be talking to my dad about these days?

And finally some books I am determined to squeeze in even if I don’t have the space or energy to elaborate on them:

Veronika Decides to Die, Paulo Coelho
The Babysitters Club, Ann M. Martin (ah, nostalgia)
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Eight, Katherine Neville
Maurice, E. M. Forster
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

So many books, so little space. I could add a whole lot more, but I really ought to stop before this turns into a full-blown dissertation…!