15 Books (I’m a copy-cat)

I’m following Diana’s lead and using this as an excuse to tell you about books I adore.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

My Dad read this to me as a bedtime story when I was eight or nine. Having my father read me things was like getting an annotated version – he was able to tell me what the Questing Beast, and Robin Hood, and the Quest for the Grail, and all the other side-stories White integrated into his Arthurian legend were. And why White had done it. Then I re-read it when I was old enough to understand things like politics, and angst, and incest, and realized what a heavy, brilliant book it really is. White’s dry, British sense of humour helps, as well.

The Riddle-Master by Patricia McKillip

Where to start? This woman’s prose is beautiful, her stories have the flavour of grand myths, her characters are real, flawed people, and this trilogy-in-one-book is a grand coming of age story where age is full of strange and incredible powers and responsibilities, and where growing up builds and destroys your life over and over again. Perfect to read as an adolescent, and poignant to read now.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I had no idea what I was getting into with this book, but it turned into a novel that my friend and I would jointly read hidden under our desk in class. Pullman made the world very real, very sinister, very big and very exciting. As well, I was just the right age to grow up with the protagonists of the trilogy as the books came out, and the big ending blew my mind.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

These rabbits did not fuck around. Do not mess with Hazel. This is an epic, epic novel.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I have never, and I mean never (and I’m a Terry Pratchett fan) laughed so hard at a book. Everything in this novel is brilliant, the narration, the book within a book within a book, the characters, the chopped-out sections, the red herrings, and to top it all of you get an ambiguous ending that reminds you how much you care for these one-line-quipping oafs you’ve spent the whole novel on a grand romp with. I promise, it is even better than the movie (which, by the by, was scripted by Mr. Goldman, and so the dialogue is often verbatim from the novel).

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

I read this in one intense weekend, and have never felt so drained. This novel is a heavily objective investigation of the ultimate tragedy of human development, and the parallel self-destruction we wreak with religion and technology, and the beautiful people who get crushed in between the two every day, right up to the end. It is dry, but that is what makes it so, so, so sad.

Shogun by James Clavell

I will forever blame my Dad for this. I would never have admitted to myself that pulp fiction was fun and worth reading until I whipped through this enormous book in the course of a summer. I could not put it down! Gore! Samurai! Monks! Pirates! Sailors! Ninjas! Geishas! Sex! Torture! And the most incredible mind games! The amount of power-struggling that goes on behind every line of dialogue in this novel is, in itself, a work of art. If you like fun, or things that are badass, or exciting, or dramatic, you’ll like this. That’s just how it is.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

This book represents a turning point for me. When I read it when I was 14, I adored Jane, I adored Mr Rochester, and all I wanted was an epic romance. I recently re-read it, out of curiosity, and found myself hyper-aware of how passive-aggressive and manipulative and self-destructive they both are, and had trouble enjoying it at all. So, yeah, I guess it stuck with me.

Life After God by Douglas Coupland

This had a similar effect on me as Canticle, but with a quieter, smaller, more banal sense of internal apocalypse. A series of short stories and anecdotes, it makes you worry about Coupland, and then, as you get drawn in and admit to all these same feelings in your own mind, about yourself.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

I have never been disappointed by LeGuin’s writing, but this book stands out as an adult appreciation of place, society, culture, gender, power and language, which is why I picked it over any of the Earthsea novels, which do the same thing but sometimes more didactically, what with the younger audience. If anything, I will never think of glaciers the same way.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

I haven’t liked much else Card has done, but this book blew my mind as a kid. The barracks, the gravity-free games, the general feel of it all, still defines science fiction for me. What is technology for, if not stealing our youth and corrupting it?

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

This book introduced me to a kind of fantasy-mythology-based horror I continue to pursue. I don’t remember a whole lot of the plot, but the settings were amazing, and terrifying. In some terrible chase scene the two children had to follow dwarves through flooded mineshafts so narrow they had to squirm along on their stomachs, and eventually on their backs, to be able to keep their mouths above the water level. The enemies were dark, floating, cloaked beings that I was instantly reminded of when I saw the Dementors on screen, and there was a terrifying wolf. Terrifying wolves are key to childhood terror, I think. The wolf-nothing in The Neverending Story also haunted my dreams for years. Anyways, this may or may not be a good book, but damn, did it ever creep me out.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

This made me cry. It is quirky and beautiful and delicate and reserved and quiet and poignant and brief. It contains two stories about loss and departure and relationships and grief, and they do what they do amazingly well. That is, they made me cry.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

This is where that fantasy horror I loved as a child overlapped with serial-killing and zombies and all of the delightful urban legends that haunted me as a teenager. Mingled with the nerdy joy of picking out who’s which mythological figure, I really enjoyed reading this.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Other people love The Lord of the Rings, but it was too long for my brain to categorize it as a single story. The Hobbit, however, I can remember the plot of probably to the smallest detail from beginning to end, no problem, and the plot was awesome. A journey on horseback and on foot for months through fields, mountains, forests, plains, to a shipping town to battle a dragon? The finest fodder for my imagination at any age.