Thanks to:
Heather at Capricious Reader
Andi at Estella's Revenge
Jenny at Reading the End
Ana at Things Mean a Lot
Here's where I introduce myself through five books. So difficult!
1. Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped is a book that just killed me with its beauty and its honesty. Beautiful, beautiful sentences, scorchingly honest scenes from the author's life as she tries to understand why the beautiful young black men in her life are dying.
2. Another Country by James Baldwin. Baldwin is one of my favorite writers. I love his essays; his writing is brilliant and searingly honest. This novel just held me in an unrelenting grip.
3. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. My copy is bristling with post-it notes. There is no other book quite like this one: a lady-in-waiting in the Japanese court of an eleventh century empress, Shonagon wrote poetic lists, sarcastic descriptions of life at court, and the most exquisite vignettes of her daily life.
4. The Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood. I read Oryx and Crake when it first came out, then reread it and the other two books (The Year of the Flood and Maddaddam) last summer. This is my sweet spot: intelligent writing, irony, climate change and greed. Plus, Margaret Atwood is my spirit animal.
5. All the Victorian classics. And all the Russian classics. That should cover it. This essential me-ness comes from a childhood where I stumbled upon Jane Eyre, and teen years where I discovered Dostoyevsky. I wouldn't be me without The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, everything by Anthony Trollope, all the stories by Anton Chekhov, and George Eliot's Middlemarch. Is that more than five books????
14 comments:
I wouldn't even know where to begin with this prompt but you did a great job!
Margaret Atwood as your Spirit Animal....... I like.
@bermudaonion-I did really well until #5. I love lists though....
@Marce-Margaret Atwood *is* my Spirit Animal. I wonder if she knows....
Oh gosh, books I love and books I still need to read. Atwood's trilogy has been on my mind to pick up lately for sure.
I cracked up when I got to the end of your list and you'd just selected whole genres. Way to go! The assignment was an impossible one anyway! And sometimes it's not a single book, but a whole aesthetic that represents who you are as a reader. Love it!
I love it! All the classics! It was tough wasn't it. I ended up listing a book that represented the various branches of mystery novels. Favorites are so, so many!
Ha! I love your creativity in sticking to "five" books. This was a hard prompt!
And I really do need to get to the Ward book. I loved Salvage the Bones.
I've only read Go Tell It On the Mountain by Baldwin. I'll have to read more! Way to cover all the best classics in one swoop :)
@Andi-The Maddaddam trilogy is so good. Try to read the three books all together. So powerful!
@Jenny-I find myself making these kinds of lists all the time: My Ideal Bookshelf, My Top Ten Books, etc. But I can't commit...It drives me crazy!
@Kay-So hard to pick favorites, or even just five that you love. There are just so many books that are part of me....
@Kerry M-Oh, Salvage the Bones is on *my* list! Its sitting on my shelf giving me the side eye...
@Shelley-Go Tell It On the Mountain is powerful too...especially the passages about Baldwin's father.
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