A list of ten books that have stayed with me/meant the most to me/ books I keep coming back to.
Of course, I couldn't limit myself to ten so there are twelve of them... or more. It could have easily been twenty.
In no particular order.
James Joyce: Dubliners
The fist James Joyce I read. Troubling and sad. An unflinching vision of Dublin that made me love the city nonetheless.
John Ashbery: Some Trees
I can recite from memory most of the poems in it. I could have chosen "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror". It shaped my taste for modern poetry and led me for no special reason to Allan Ginsberg.
Carson McCullers: Reflections in a Golden Eye
I started reading her with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Ballad of the Sad Café but this story of self deception and sexual frustrations is the one that stays with me. Can't help having visions of Marlon Brando applying makeup to his face...
Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust
Clever and mean. Funny and sad. I sometimes dream I'm trapped in a jungle, forced to read Dickens aloud forever.
Virginia Wolf: Mrs Dalloway
Of course I was a little intimidated the first time I read Virginia Woolf. But once I had started, it felt familiar I spoke directly to my heart.
John Cheever: Falconer
A chance discovery. I read it in one sitting, fascinated.
Jonathan Franzen: Freedom
Yes it is a best-seller. But beautifully written and complex. I couldn't put it down despite its 500 plus pages. On the other hand, I couldn't finish The Corrections. I hated so much all the characters it made it painful to read.
Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth
A recent book, maybe not his best but I can't resist a doomed love story that ends well...
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
I could have been any of the twelve or more Murakami books I've read (I'm thinking of Kafka on the Shore) but this one brings back haunting images of the horrors of the Manchuria war including the description of a man skinned alive by a very muscular Mongol shepherd...
Kate Atkinson: One Good Turn
My first Kate Atkinson. I remember laughing out loud on the beach reading it and the worried looks of my fellow sun bathers... Never read a bad book by Kate Atkinson.
Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
A retro science fiction book. Partly written in invented Yiddish so challenging to read for some. I just loved it. The redemption of the policeman through love made me cry.
Edmund White: A Boy's Own Story
I was young and impressionable when I read it. The frank description of gay sex left me mesmerized...
Peter Høeg: Smilla's sense of Snow
A story like none other I had read before. The 100 words for snow, Copenhagen's frozen harbour, the death of the little boy on the roof. The end is a little lame but I don't care, one of my favorite book forever.
I hated it when they changed the title to Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow!
But I like the original title a lot...
