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Books that make you, books that break you
Seen around: This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
Los Bros Hernandez, Love and Rockets
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Grant Morrison/various artists, Doom Patrol
Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Dennis Cooper, Try
Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing
Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
I usually don't like book memes (at least the 'check off how many of these you've read' ones), but this one felt more personal and introspective. Looking at the list, I'm struck by how many of these I read in my late teens to early/mid-20s -- basically, all of them except for Miéville and Murakami, which came later, and DeLillo, which I remember reading when I was still in high school.
And they're not necessarily my favorite books, or my "stranded on a desert island" list, though some are. They're basically the books that I was unprepared for, books that jarred or jolted me into something, some place, someone different. The process of first reading them marked a "before and after" dividing line for me, in my sense of the world, of writing, of myself. So it's somewhat bittersweet to see how often that happened when I was younger, how rarely it happens now.
Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
Los Bros Hernandez, Love and Rockets
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Grant Morrison/various artists, Doom Patrol
Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Dennis Cooper, Try
Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing
Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
I usually don't like book memes (at least the 'check off how many of these you've read' ones), but this one felt more personal and introspective. Looking at the list, I'm struck by how many of these I read in my late teens to early/mid-20s -- basically, all of them except for Miéville and Murakami, which came later, and DeLillo, which I remember reading when I was still in high school.
And they're not necessarily my favorite books, or my "stranded on a desert island" list, though some are. They're basically the books that I was unprepared for, books that jarred or jolted me into something, some place, someone different. The process of first reading them marked a "before and after" dividing line for me, in my sense of the world, of writing, of myself. So it's somewhat bittersweet to see how often that happened when I was younger, how rarely it happens now.
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Sadly Acker for me is always more of a cerebral pleasure...
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And then I was dismayed that my list was so -- respectable? Even the genre stuff is pretty much all "legitimate" for literary highbrow types! But a lot of other possibilities that I sifted through were either really important to me at a particular time in my life, but much less so now, or else couldn't really be pinpointed to a single book but were more generally about an author or a genre as a whole.
I read Acker at just the right time in my life (and maybe the right time for the cultural zeitgeist?). The last time I tried to reread her, it kind of fell flat for me and I've been afraid to try again ever since.
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OMG, Duras! yes!!!
Maybe I should do a 10 fanfic...I think that'd be easier :)
Very early in my life it was too late....
I've barely read any fic lately, and haven't been able to really get into the stuff that I have read (though I have a tab open at home with Vee's new SCC story that I'm saving for when FOX announces the show's fate).
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And Larsen's novellas are so haunting and evocative.
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They're basically the books that I was unprepared for, books that jarred or jolted me into something, some place, someone different.
This fascinates me, the more because my own reaction is so different: it's more the feeling of being taken firmly by the shoulders and shaken by a sort of HELLO I THINK YOU KNOW ME sense of recognition. Not: Whoa, yeah, what? But rather: This? Is how you say it, sweetie.
I'ma steal this meme.
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Oh, that's interesting -- when I was trying to piece together what the common denominator was in this list that made these books "stick with me", I ended up in the opposite place. I do have books that do what I think you're describing, and they stay with me in a different way, but these ones that I listed were less about recognition (though in some cases that dynamic also applies). For whatever reason, the fifteen that popped into my head were where the reading felt like both an upheaval and a revelation.
So maybe it's more that initial reading experience that's stuck with me, sometimes even more than the books themselves. I've never reread White Noise or Middlemarch since I first read them over 20 years ago; I don't think I even have a copy of Kitchen and it's probably not my favorite book by Yoshimoto; I doubt I'll ever reread Neuromancer again (and I'd certainly turn to Gibson's more recent books first if I were in the mood to revisit him); and see my above comment to
But they did mark me indelibly, like scars or tattoos -- perhaps traces of a more adventurous time in my life. I suppose that I've become a more cautious -- or more jaded? -- reader in recent years. Much as I still enjoy books, I'm less likely to come upon them unprepared (by word of mouth, book reviews, etc.) and it's much more rare now for them to shake me up like books used to.