rules: in a text post, list 10 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. tag 10 friends, including me, so
I’ll see your list. make sure you let your friends know you’ve tagged
them!

I was tagged by @mightymads (thanks love!!)

1. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen – Anyone (mostly men) who thinks Jane Austen writes women who faint away at proposals of marriage has clearly never read Elizabeth Bennett giving a would-be-fiance a piece of her “lively” and honest mind.  Funny and endearing and heartbreaking, the characters face their own real flaws and find reasons to rethink their outlooks and be better…I just love this book.  I seriously reread it every time I can no longer quote dialog from memory. I have no idea how many times.

2. “The Forgetten Beasts of Eld” by Patricia A. McKillip – The first book I read where the female lead was overwhelmed by the righteous, terrible destructiveness of her own fury, and didn’t care how much scorched earth she took with her.  Revelatory to my the 14 year old mind.

3. “Complete Works” by  E.E. Cummings.  I used to keep this book by my bed and read a poem or two every night.   When I was 25 I met a man who did the same.  We’ve been together more than two decades.

4. “Late Night Thoughts While Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” and “The Medusa and The Snail” by Lewis Thomas – These are both books of essays and they all run together for me, so I couldn’t pick one.  Part science, part philosophy, part humor, and part pragmatism, when I was young and trying to decide what to do with my life, I found solace in Thomas’ ruminations.  All of you may like his “On Punctuation,” which is both accurate and hysterical.

5. “Animal Dreams” by Barbara Kingsolver – I know a lot of people who don’t like Kingsolver’s books, and I don’t love them all, but I do love this one.  The first time I saw multiple POV with different mental states in one book.  First time I realized that I couldn’t trust my narrators perceptions, and how even those of us without diagnosed mental illness can have our perceptions and understanding and even memory skewed by everyday traumas.  And the prose is divine.  I’ve used quotes from this book in Bleary.

6. “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo – It took me an entire summer to get through the unabridged novel, and the oppression in the book matched the oppression I saw around me in early 1990s, and it was sort of a psychological event.  The side plots not in the familiar musical version speak mostly of the capriciousness of fate, and how tenuous all our stations can prove.  Fantastic, but not something to read if you have depressive leanings.

7. “Wonderful Life” by Stephen Jay Gould – This is not the “angel gets its wings” Wonderful Life… this is about the Cambrian period (500 million years ago) as exposed in the Burgess Shale, and the capriciousness of fate as applied to evolution.  Fantastic read, and definitely shakes you out of that “monkeys to man” linear view of evolution that was so prevalent and wrong.  Plus, the creatures preserved in those fossils were crazy.

8. “Earthsea Quartet” by Ursula K LeGuin – When I was growing up, I loved the trilogy: the idea that names were magical and secret and could bind or free you.  But as an adult, my favorite is the fourth, Tehanu, written when LeGuin herself was much older.  It speaks to the power of an ordinary life and relationships, and it’s just beautiful.

9. “Tam Lin” by Pamela Dean.  I love retellings of old stories.  Most of the ones I have are feminist retellings of myths or fairytales, but the ballad of Tam Lin is already pretty feminist.  This novel reads like a coming of age “girl goes to college” sort of book.  The magic is woven in so subtly it’s almost like a mystery unraveling with little clues here and there among the details of collegiate life.  It sort of defies genres in that way cutting across mystery, realistic fiction, and fantasy.  It’s longish, but I was familiar with the myths being referenced, so once I started spotting the incongruities, I was hooked.  If I ever write o-fic, I imagine it will be this sort of  fusion of ordinary and arcane.

10. “Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – Read this book and then listen to congress or Fox News and tell me it isn’t the scariest thing you’ve ever read.  Religious extremism and environmental catastrophe in our own culture, and doing what SciFi does best…taking current events to their logical conclusion to illustrate how fucked up the things we are contemplating really are.  It was written 30 years ago, and is just as scarily in sync with news now as it was then.

Bonus Book: “We Learn Nothing” by Tim Kreider.  He is my favorite irreverent cartoonist and essayist.  Vulgar at times, but also insightful and very funny.  His rants in the “artists notes” accompanying the comic in “The Pain (When Will It End?)” are legendary, and the essays in this book are their more thoughtful, unrushed cousins.   Here’s a nice excerpt contemplating a near-death experience: Reprieve. 

I’m tagging @illneverstopsayingyourname, @silent-bridge, @stellarbisexual@suckmykirk, @blushingkate, @loves-pie, @pinto4life7, and anyone else who hasn’t been tagged yet.

As usual, only if you want to.