Books are Life
A while back I wrote a list of non-fiction books that I find to be important to my life. Lately I came across this on The School of Life insta: “You’ll likely read only a few thousand books in your life. And yet, just a handful — maybe thirty — will truly shape you.” Well, I won’t quibble with the numbers (my study contains over a thousand books alone and I’ve culled it many times). Who knows what anyone reads any more. After I read that I came across the list that the clever Helen Plum Library made of mentions of books made by Pedro Pascal in various interviews over the years. But let’s say 30 books have shaped you? Which are they?
For this post, I will concentrate on novels I love. Authors I love. Here we go:
Everyone knows I love Clarice Lispector. The Hour of the Star, A Breath of Life, The Stream of Life.
Jane Austen, all the novels, but if you’ve not read her, Pride and Prejudice always rewards one. A place to start.
Beloved by Toni Morrison. I read this in a women’s literature class and I will never forget it. You will not be the same after.
I admit I love all the obvious books that most English major types love. I love the Brontes, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.
When I read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino in a world lit class as an undergrad, my mind was blown and I still love it and read it from time to time.
I love Marilynne Robinson, all her novels. But Gilead and Housekeeping make me cry with how good they are.
Magda Szabo’s The Door, same.
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner is a big one for me.
And Moonlight into Marzipan by Sunetra Gupta is a book that meant a lot to me at one time and I will always hold onto my copy.
The novels of Kristjana Gunnars.
Salinger’s Franny & Zooey.
Samuel Beckett’s trio, Company, Ill Seen Ill said, and Worstward Ho (usually published together).
Well, so many other authors, Elizabeth Strout, Colm Toibin, Michael Ondaatje, Greg Hollingshead, Anita Brookner.
What kind of reader am I? A loyal one, really. Once I’ve read one thing by an author that I’ve loved, I tend to read all. I’m a re-reader, too, often re-reading the entire book or just favourite passages. I’m the dog-earing type, the underlining type. I like to have a few books on the go at all times. I’ll always be looking up a poem that pops into my brain. I’ll have a sort of smudge in my head and a few words and I know I’ll mess the line up so I look it up and read the whole poem. I’m fussier with novels than any other kind of book because I know how they live inside you for years after you read them. I don’t think I’d enjoy novels quite so much if I didn’t also read poetry and non-fiction.
I can’t stop thinking about the book as a thing, lately. And there’s this quotation by Carl Sagan that people keep sharing around:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
I made a list at my library for National Book Lovers Day last week, and it’s got me thinking every day should be national book lovers day. Nothing stopping us amiright?
