I was recently discussing with a friend the topic of personal libraries. We agreed that there are certain books that we simply could never get rid of, no matter how much shelf space it'd free up. We both felt that these collections were signifiers of our personalities. If we didn't have these specific individual libraries, then a causal onlooker would not be able to discern who we had been, who we are now, and who we want to be in the future.
A few weeks ago I did some spring cleaning, including a thinning of my book library. There were about 20 that I easily singled out for donation, while about 10 that were somewhat difficult to give up. After the assessment, approximately 50 books - mostly novels, poetry collections, social science texts, and a handful of biographies - remained and will do so into the foreseeable future.
Running with this train of thought, I have created a deserted island list. These are the 5 books that I could never ever be without. They are those texts that I could read over and over again and never be bored. They surprise me every time with something emotionally striking and/or new. I wouldn't be satisfied to have these volumes on Kindle, Ipad, or any other digital reader. I need to own the actual book and be able to hold it in my hands, turning real pages and cracking real spines. These books say something profound, at least to me, about who I am.
In no particular order:
1. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." If you can come up with a more gripping first sentence, tell me, because I can't find one. I am quite biased, true, since I know the rest of the tale. I don't care; it's a stellar beginning to a book I could just sit with all day and flip through, marveling in the dazzling strands of story/web that Atwood spins so skillfully.
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The allegorical town of Macondo is rendered unforgettable as told through the history of the BuendÃa family, both imaginings of Marquez's passionate prose. This novel swings between passages of lulling calm and those of thundering violence, gorgeous and sprawling landscapes and claustrophobic moments of terror. Beautiful and epic in scope, a veritable myth of a book.
3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The decision between this Vonnegut masterpiece and that of Cat's Cradle was one I wrestled with, and perhaps still will do so into the future. But something in my mind/heart(?) tells me that Slaughterhouse-Five would be the one of the two I would grab from my shelf if a fire were cutting through my home and I had only seconds to escape. Billy Pilgrim is a name I will never forget, and his journey as he becomes unstuck in time is that of a hilarious romp combined with an exploding, shrapnel-filled morality tale.
4. The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche
"Gathering this world together without seam, The Country Between Us reflects back to us that which is most difficult to view - the mire and complexity of our society - and alters it into that which cannot be turned away from. The sensual language on display in these poems never oversteps the dramatic narratives unfolding from real experiences and remembrances. The resulting realization that everything within happened - the causal and cruel violent acts, the striking injustices, the moments of pure and transcendent glory - does not soon abate." - Excerpt from my 04/21/14 review of the collection.
5. In The Skin Of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje
"...the quiet yet clear sensation of a true epic masterpiece unfolding among the scenes and chapters of In The Skin Of A Lion is sincerely swoon-worthy. I have read and re-read nearly all of Michael Ondaatje's works, but this is the one that rises highest among them for me. Certain turns of phrase and specific revelations have the ability to make my hair stand on end in pleasure." - Excerpt from my 04/27/14 review of the novel.
Cheater Bonus Book - Memoir: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
The book might confuse some looking for a linear narrative of a life story. But this particular memoir edges between fiction and fact, elemental and original. Hong Kingston uses her fierce clarity of words to blend her own tale with that of becoming the "female avenger" of her dreams. At times dizzying in scope but always rooted in the profoundly personal.
Super Cheater Bonus Book - Non Fiction: If I could take a huge, heavy volume, it'd have to be the illustrated and annotated edition of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams compiled by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. That's a BIG book!
Even if you vehemently disagree with things that Freud proclaimed true, you have to admit he started the conversation, as well as the fact that he was a talented and evocative writer. And this annotated edition of his greatest work brings the other voices of the discussions and arguments that it sparked into the fold. The book that makes my head spin with free-wheeling imaginings and swirling notions of thought.
"There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing."*
This slim volume sends one gliding from the civil unrest of 1970s El Salvador to the steely Eastern Europe of the Cold War and into the forever-troubled pulse of all modernity. Author Carolyn Forche blends the personal and political into something deeper - more fecund - with its ability to sear into one's mind a lyrical mixture of the beautiful and horrible. Gathering this world together without seam, The Country Between Us reflects back to us that which is most difficult to view - the mire and complexity of our society - and alters it into that which cannot be turned away from. The sensual language on display in these poems never oversteps the dramatic narratives unfolding from real experiences and remembrances. The resulting realization that everything within happened - the causal and cruel violent acts, the striking injustices, the moments of pure and transcendent glory - does not soon abate. This is a collection to be read again and again to relive its undeniable power to bear witness and change.
*excerpt from the collection
She runs west, into the wilderness, into the mountains, into her own darkness...
At 19 years old, Mary Boutlan is newly widowed by her own hand and is pursued by two towering, vengeful twins. These trees of men are her murdered husband's brothers and they are close on her careening path into the ragged, unforgiving Canadian Rockies. Alone, except an old mare given by a empathetic benefactoress, she climbs into the heights. There she is chased by scent hounds and the twins, and she is plagued by visions and specters, real and not, phantasmagoric scenes of what may or may not have been her life before this flight. There are those she meets on her journey, the bird lady, the Ridgerunner, Bonny, the dwarf, and the cat-skinner, whose lives also lack steady rhythm and meaning. And each sees something of that in Mary as she flashes in and out of their existences, heading towards what is only known to inevitability and fate. A landslide is fast approaching, perhaps metaphorically, maybe literally, and its harbinger sounds could miss her ears, so overtaken with the echoes of pounding blood. Breathlessly suspenseful and excruciatingly gorgeous against the senses, The Outlander is a novel that floods the reader with the amazing experiences of a young woman fleeing into the wilds of her own making.
Undeniably lyrical and experimental, Coming Through Slaughter gives life to the imagined narrative of one of jazz music's founding fathers. Buddy Bolden, his name whispered and renowned by all the greats who came after, breathed the essence of himself through his trumpet and out into the sprawling, colorful city of New Orleans. There his presence was legendary. But his performances were never recorded and his true story, one of genius, spirit, and unknowable madness, was never fully told. Here Ondaatje weaves and bobs through the tales and rumors, the scenes and snippets, the leaps and halts of a phantom's history with sincere verve and craft. Buddy may have been experienced by so many in that city at that time in the lifespan of music, but his true rhythm was undiscoverable to all, including himself.
The White is one of those singularly-affecting books that is also the only one its author has ever completed. Published in 2002, this evocative novel tells in lyrical and beautifully wandering detail the story of the real Mary Jemison, a Pennsylvanian frontier girl. She was captured by a Shawnee raiding party at 16 years old in 1758 and spirited away to be raised by two kind and quiet native women. Eventually she marries into the tribe and decides to remain the rest of her days among them. Real quotes from Jemison are intwined with the imagined narrative of her life so gorgeously and with what seems like effortless writerly grace. Despite what can be viewed as a white romanticization of an indigenous people and culture, Larsen sidesteps this understandable criticism of her story with a sensitive account of a life uniquely and truly well-lived.
I cannot describe sincerely enough how thrilling and visceral Mary Shelley's classic is when given the time and effort so deserved. The inextricably intertwined existences of the ingenious and enterprising doctor and his cruelly cast-off creation, Frankenstein sets the stage for the entire genre of gothic horror that came afterward. An absolute master course in sophisticated yet completely accessible and riveting craft writing, the novel's true authorship has always been hotly debated. Some louder critics argue that Shelley's more accomplished and learned husband actually penned the novel, due, of course, to the book's almost "masculine" assuredness and intelligent design. But there are many who care not for those kinds of sexist, confining labels and, instead, simply reveal in the true genius of Frankenstein.
Banking into a cover of clouds off the New Guinea coastline on July 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart vanished forever. That day she disappeared from an intensely public and infamous life within the silver body of her beloved Lockheed Electra aircraft. In writer Jane Mendelsohn's novel, the imagined life that came after that red letter day vibrates and sounds itself into an existence just as enticing as that which has been so renowned and retold. The words of this story flash forward and backward through Amelia's true and fictional history, from the greatest altitudes of flight to the depths of what an individual can endure and yet still remain herself. A novel of one famed and long lost heroine finally found.
J. M. Coetzee's Booker prize-winning novel is a devastating tale of a man who discovers himself disgraced many times over. Living the latter years of his middle age in post-apartheid South Africa, Professor Lurie does little outside his comfort and means. But a brief affair with a university student throws the bored and dulled man's plain existence off it's course. Coetzee sets a brilliantly drawn character within a modern world, illuminating a dazzlingly clear view of his country's, and the world's, searing political and personal struggles.
Moon Tiger is a gorgeous, sprawling novel about one woman who never hesitated to write her own way through history. Claudia's life has taken her from the English seaside, the Egyptian deserts of World War II, the Central American jungles to the cusp of death. This final place is the setting for her journey through that past and that of the entire known world. A love story and a forceful fictional memoir, Moon Tiger will always remain on my shelf of favorites.
An elegant and subtly-rendered portrait of humans clinging to the end of civilization. The Children of Men puts its readers in a greatly realized time and place soaked with violence, disillusion and dread. A novel that posits the notion that the end of days may bring about the worst in most but can also inspire the good in a few. This story was also the inspiration for the, in my opinion, superior film version Children of Men by director Alfonso Cuaron. The review of that movie is pending posting on this blog.
