Cuddly stuffed lion not for sale. Mine. All mine.
Once again, Facebook wants to know what ten books have stayed with me. I can’t tell whether no one listened the last time, or they figure my answers will have changed. Either is possible.
I don’t actually spend my entire life on Facebook – though you could be forgiven for thinking so, just based on my blog posts.
This one intrigued me, though. The written word constitutes such a huge part of my life. Even during my twenties when I focused on acting, I spent my days interpreting someone else’s writing in the script. I loved the time spent pouring over the words, trying to figure out what clues about my character might be hiding in the text.
The instructions on the Facebook request say, “Don’t think about it too much.” Ha. Good luck with that. It’s hard to post a list for everyone (and on Facebook, I really do mean everyone) to see and not wonder what it will tell people about you, especially once you’ve read some other people’s lists. Ooh, they put the Bible. What does it say about me if the Bible isn’t on my list? Well, it might say that it isn’t important, or it might say that it’s overwhelming, or that it’s part of your every day life so when you think about a particular book at just one moment in time, it doesn’t come to mind. Really, the request should probably say, “Name your ten most influential books aside of the Bible and Shakespeare.” That way, we get more interesting lists, and we can relieve everyone who thinks they’ll look stupid or shallow if they don’t.
But the request gave no such qualifiers, so I have to take everything into account.
I enjoyed thinking about this, considering which books have stayed with me over the years, which books I have read over and over again, and why. Bottom line: I’m shallow. The ones that came to me immediately were not grand works of literature. I remember Les Misérables, but mostly because I still can’t figure out why Victor Hugo felt he absolutely had to make the book 10% longer with details about the campaigns of Napoleon. (No. Flipping. Point. I don’t care if they did have more time to read then.) I recall The Three Musketeers, because in those last seventy-five pages, Alexandre Dumas had me absolutely transfixed. (The previous five hundred fifty, not so much.) I have an impression in my head that Crime and Punishment wasn’t bad for required reading, but I couldn’t recall a single plot point if my life were at stake.
Here are the ones that did stick, and why.
1. Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery
“Do you never imagine things different from what they really are?” asked Anne wide-eyed.
“No.”
“Oh!” Anne drew a long breath. “Oh, Miss–Marilla, how much you miss!”
This one is a children’s book, but I didn’t read it until I was in college. When I finally did read it, though, it was like meeting an old friend. More – almost like reading about myself in another lifetime. So many of her sayings could have dropped from my lips when I was a kid. “I’m in the depths of despair.” “If you only knew all the things I want to say and don’t! Give me some credit.” Anne introduced me to the phrase “kindred spirits,” which sums up a million things in just two modest words. For that alone, I owe Lucy Maud Montgomery a great debt. The only thing I could never understand was why Anne hated her red hair so much. I love the red in my hair, always have. But I could understand desperately wanting to fit in with everyone else, and knowing you never would. It was a great comfort to know that Anne was different, too. Not everyone loved her for it, but in the end, the right people did.
2. Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Cleary
A children’s book that I actually read as a child, Ramona was my walk on the wild side. I was the good kid in the family. I lived in fear of making mistakes. I identified much more with Ramona’s big sister, Beezus, but I loved peeking into Ramona’s head. She wasn’t a bad kid. She never did anything from a place of malice, just ignorance or maybe at worst revenge. (Didn’t we all want revenge on Susan, who so had been copying Ramona’s artwork and never got punished for it?) After the perfect little blond girls in the Dick and Jane books, it refreshed my spirit to read about Ramona, whose short, straight hair never fell exactly into place and whose clothes didn’t match or had dirt on them, whose brilliant ideas always came out differently in real life than they had seemed in her head. As one with a vibrant imagination, I had great ideas in my head, and my failure to make any of them materialize properly was the bane of my existence. (Still is, sometimes.) Sure, sometimes Ramona’s family thought her silly, but they still loved her at the end of the day. That was comforting.
(Ramona and Her Father gets an honorable mention. It was the only book I knew of then to tackle life when a parent is out of work. When my dad had to retire, our family went through some major adjustments, and Ramona made me feel less alone in that transition.)
3. Black and Blue Magic, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
I read many of Ms. Snyder’s books as a kid, and actually liked The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case the best, but I can remember Black and Blue Magic better. Set around San Francisco, a place my family visited many times, it deals with a boy who can grow wings. I loved Harry because he wasn’t automatically good at flying, and again, the perfect scenarios in his head often fail to translate to real life. (Monkey Island at night: just say no.) This author’s work stuck at a different level than the others on the list because she came to visit our elementary school. She was the first real live author I ever got to talk to. I remember her telling us that she got ideas from ordinary things. If memory serves – and I was ten, so it might not – A Fabulous Creature stemmed from a random scene she witnessed, where a woman carried a box out of her house, stopped, and carried it back in again. Ms. Snyder wondered what was in the box, and her imagination took off. (She also taught us the layers of the word fabulous, and how not all of them equal good.)
4. The Keeping Days, by Norma Johnston
I’m cheating. This is a series of six books, recommended to me back in junior high (elementary school? No, I’m almost positive it was junior high) by Erika Gardner. The first four take place around the turn of the 20th century and feature a teenaged girl named Tish. The last two are set some fifteen years later and center on Tish’s niece, Saranne. Scandals happen in the first four, and everyone swears never to tell what happened. In the last two, the infants of the first set are now teenagers, picking at the loose threads of those secrets to unravel the truth. Strong women in three different generations shape these stories. (The image of Tish’s aunt sliding down the snow drift on her best tea tray in order to deliver her sister-in-law’s baby will stay with me forever.) Each generation gets their share of romance, for good and ill. I learned that not all love affairs would end up in the tidy happily ever after that I wanted, and that sometimes people came back into your life long after you thought you’d turned another corner. Most of all, though, I learned that life has a way of unearthing secrets, no matter how well you thought you’d kept them hidden. It’s safer and – in the long run, at least – easier to tell the truth. (These are the only books on my list that are currently out of print. Most disappointing.)
5. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
Not cheating this time. I read the first book as a child, and didn’t get around to reading the rest of the series until a couple of decades later. I liked most of them, but they didn’t stick with me the same way. (Didn’t actually care much for Book #7. Susan got the shaft.) This was one of the only high fantasy books that I loved as a kid. Black and Blue Magic has fantastical things about it, but that person lived in the same world that I did. (Almost literally. I’d been to some of the places Ms. Snyder wrote about.) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, however, took place somewhere else, in a land that required my imagination instead of my memory. I attribute my love of wardrobes to this book. (I have an armoire, but I will work my way up to a full-blown wardrobe one of these days.) Sadly, I’ve never found a magical land in the back of a coat closet, though I have looked. This book teaches that children can be brave, that people can make mistakes and get over them, and that strangers with candy are not to be trusted, even if they call the candy something really cool like Turkish Delight. (I didn’t get to try that until years later. Disappointing.) It also stands up to time. I re-read it a few years back, and realized that I had glossed over the whole taken-from-their-mother-during-a-war thing. C.S. Lewis wrote this book from a powerful place, and long after his time, it still works.
6. The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin
I read some Nancy Drew and liked it, but The Westing Game gets credit for turning me into a mystery junkie. The occupants of all the apartments in Sunset Towers try to figure out who murdered eccentric millionaire Sam Westing. Every character in the book has more to them than you think. I remember reading intently, trying to figure out who exactly Westing was. This was the first book I encountered that didn’t give up all its secrets in the first read. I went back to it a couple of times later, each time finding details that I’d missed before. As with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I picked this one up again a few years ago, and enjoyed it just as much as an adult. That is a well-crafted piece of writing, my friends.
About now you’re probably wondering, “Have you read any interesting books as an adult, Kimberly?”
Why, yes! Take a break, make yourself a sandwich with peanut butter and fresh strawberries (just heard about that combination, yum) and I’ll let you know my grown-up choices.
7. The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey
I can’t remember exactly when I read this for the first time, but I’ve read it at least five times since. Josephine Tey’s story of a police detective with time on his hands made me think about Richard III in a new light, but also opened my eyes to something much bigger: historians could be wrong. This blew my mind. Political propaganda could make its way into history books and masquerade as fact for centuries. The particular lies in this story intrigued me. My favorite line came from Marta, an actor friend of the detective, trying to figure out how she would portray the twin boys’ mother moving into Richard III’s castle after he supposedly killed them.
Picture by FTD, accessory advice by Josephine Tey
“Of course the thing is farce, I hope you see,” Marta said, going on with her flower arranging. “Not tragedy at all. ‘Yes, I know he did kill Edward and little Richard, but he really is a rather charming creature and it is so bad for my rheumatism living in rooms with a north light.'”
This means even more coming from Marta, who chooses lilies as a gift for her friend in the hospital because they match her outfit. If Marta thinks a decision is shallow, it probably is. Ms. Tey serves up a powerful reminder not to believe every rumor you hear about someone, either in the fifteenth century or now.
8. Faking It, by Jennifer Crusie
I wasn’t a romance novel girl. I accepted that about myself. It struck me as a let-down to read about sex I didn’t get to participate in, and the writing in your average Harlequin is bad. (At least it was, back in the 1980s. He killed her entire family, burned down her village and stabbed a puppy, but there was something about him she just couldn’t resist...Um, you know who can resist him? Me. Not a problem.) Then one day, my friend Deborah said, “You should read Jennifer Crusie.” Dear God, I never knew it could be like this. Reading Jennifer Crusie is like finally making out with a guy who knows what to do with his tongue. It makes you want to slap everyone who ever offered you less. Smart, funny dialogue. Intelligent characters. Plots that sometimes involved questions beyond “Will they get together?” (Yes. It’s a romance novel. The answer is yes. We knew that going in.) Ms. Crusie’s women love fiercely and enjoy sex, but they don’t throw the rest of their lives away when the right guy comes along. When Deborah described the author to me, she said, “Sometimes her characters have bad sex.” It’s true. Even better, the anticlimactic (sorry, I couldn’t help it) lovemaking doesn’t necessarily mean the characters are a bad match. Sometimes characters we like, people we know are supposed to end up living happily ever after, have a disappointing experience their first (and second) time out, and don’t find the magic together until they get to know each other better outside the sheets. Almost like real people. Faking It was my first Jennifer Crusie, and its tale of a slightly shady art gallery is still my favorite. Funny, sexy scenes and you get to learn the difference between a fake and a forgery. What more could you ask for?
9. And So It Goes, by Linda Ellerbee
Another one I’ve read multiple times. Linda Ellerbee tells stories in a way that does her Texas background proud, sly and funny and always making the reader feel like she’s in on a private joke. I recommend not eating anything while reading this book, unless you want to clean it up after you spit it out laughing. You’re not really reading a memoir here, you’ve just been pulled aside at a party to hear stories from a journalist who’s had enough drinks to stop censoring herself. (There’s a lot of drinking in this book. Her coming out as an alcoholic in a later tome didn’t come as a huge surprise.) Learn how so many “man on the street” comments in political campaigns end up sounding alike, get some pointers on airplane surfing, and find out why you don’t let amateurs connect sound equipment. (They think too much.) Oh, and laugh your fanny off while you do it.
10. The Bible
Yes, I know. I debated about this. Thing is, it had a huge influence on me, in a different way than I expected. Having heard it piecemeal my whole life in church, I decided in my early twenties that I would read the whole thing in order. Unabridged. I was a judgmental person, especially of myself. The day I brought home a report card with three Bs, I cried. Sure, I knew about the “judge not, lest ye be judged” thing, but I still expected a list of rules to follow. I was shocked to read how often people screwed up in the Bible, and how comparatively little smiting went on. People broke covenants with God all the time. The Almighty didn’t care as much about what people did as how they dealt with the aftermath. The thing that really ticked God off? Shirking blame. Yes, there are examples of people being struck down for a single offense. I was moved, however, by how often God watched people do bad things, often on purpose, and after getting angry, said, “I forgive you. Let’s try again.” The overwhelming message I got from the reading wasn’t “Straighten up or you’re going to hell.” It was, “Ease up. On everyone, but especially yourself. I love you.” I still struggle with judgment, all the time. But that initial read gave me a place to start.
Another pretty flower picture, for those who read my last column
What sticks with me? Mostly, the funny, light reading. At first, this realization made me sad, thinking somehow I just don’t absorb depth through literature. And then I understood: it wasn’t that I don’t pick up important things through reading, it was that all books have wisdom to impart. It’s like they taught me in church. God is in everything. You just have to learn how to recognize the divinity without the stained glass window lighting.
Every book has something to teach you. Some just manage to do it without fifty pages of details on Napoleon.
Zoe wants you to know I left the best books off the list. She agrees about The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, though.
Kimberly discussed the list with Zoe before publication. It was ugly there for awhile, but now they have agreed to disagree.
This is irresistible! I have to try to make my own list now, though I’d rather not share it on FB. Definitely can’t try to list them in any order of importance, just sharing as they come to mind.
I guess the Bible must in my list too, for it has had such an enormous role in some periods of my life, and I continue to turn to it often today. Imagine I always will.
Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion and sequels were a really big deal to me and I re-read them a lot, even as an adult. Whenever I moved to a new city, which I did several times in my twenties, I would get a library card and go looking for Black Stallion books. Fantasized about owning a horse like him, and I don’t even ride!
Also re-read Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and The Promise umpteen times. I think I had a crush on Danny, the tzaddik’s son.
Charlotte Bronte really pulled me into Jane Eyre’s life and world, more than once, her sad childhood and stubbornly independent adulthood.
Orwell and Huxley, 1984 and Brave New World, both are seared into my brain too from repeated readings. (Seems like everything on this list are books I read more than once.) First encountered Orwell in grade school, the 60’s, and wondered for decades what our society would really be like when that year arrived. I was actually kind of startled to see the number appear in lights when the big ball dropped.
As a kid, I knew Gone With the Wind so well, I would challenge people to open to any part, read a little and I could tell them what came next. When I first read Farenheit 451, I thought the people preserving books by choosing one to memorize and “become” was so cool, I decided I would do it with GWTW. Actually managed the first long paragraph and gave up. Can barely remember the first sentence now, but a bad paraphrase would be, “Scarlett O’hara was not beautiful by conventional standard, but men seldom realized this when caught by her charms as the Tarleton twins were.” I will have to go check now, and see how I did.
Have to say, about GWTW, I realized later in life how troubling the romanticizing of slavery – and the disturbing depiction of former slaves after the Civil War – are in that book. Not to mention the heroic depiction of what was probably the birth of something akin to the KKK.
Actually, I guess Farenheit 451 could be on this list too.
I include all the Harry Potter books as one item – cheating, I know! And I decline to say how many times I have re-read that whole series. It is my indulgence, my guilty pleasure, when I want a vacation. I have to wait until I forget a lot of the details to really enjoy it all again, but there are so many details and my memory is getting so bad, I don’t have to wait all that long, lol!
I guess that’s 10, but I think there were more that should have been on this list… I just can’t remember which ones.
There is probably some protocol I am ignoring here, about not blogging on someone else’s blog, so I apologize Kimberley! But I just thought of a couple I left out that must be named!
Can’t believe I left out Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Delving into it led to my best paper as an English Lit major at Columbia and the themes in it, expressed so poetically in the the way she constructed the story and the motifs she weaves through it, meant so much to me, it became a kind of personal manifesto. Even named my first business for it, and used the colors green and grey for my business card.
Almost the same goes for Melville’s Moby Dick. Again, the theme I saw in it (the folly of thinking we have identified God, Truth, The Ineffable, with absolute certainty and need not keep searching) and the way he wrote that extremely unconventional, way-ahead-of-its-time novel spoke to me and for me almost as much at Mrs. D.
Never got completely sucked into Ayn Rand’s supremely ego-centric “the individual is everything” philosophy in Atlas Shrugged, but was deeply challenged by it a long time ago, which led to the formation of counter values.
Did I say “a couple?” Guess I meant three. Okay, I will stop now. Thanks for the wonderful blog Kimberley, and I will not keep using your comments space for my own!
Kimberly, if I were more of a Facebook junkie, I would have probably seen the first list and not challenged you again. Coming up with ten wasn’t difficult for me because I don’t read for the sake of reading. I have to 1) have lots of time on my hands, 2) be in the mood for some alone time, and 3) be absolutely compelled to read something. I know I’m missing out and that if I read more, I’d be a better writer, but alas.
This was a wonderful, and there are definitely things I want to take from this list (The Westing Game is chief among them). I like your take-away from the Bible, too. That’s the best summary of the most used and abused set of books in history.
What you said about Les Miserables makes sense. I never read it, but it sounds like once you remove the irrelevant details, you have a nice and understandable? plot – the stage version is not an easy one to follow. It also sounds like Moby Dick, which I did read, and came away thinking that I knew much more about whaling than I did about how skilled Herman Melville was with plot points. The recent opera by Jake Heggie was televised (still on the PBS on demand channel, I think) and is fantastic. Focuses solely on the story, and it’s great.
My first experience with Shakespeare was ruined. My 9th grade teacher showed us the Zeffirelli (speaking of opera) film from 1968. I remember being distracted from the plot because I was trying to decide who was more beautiful: Olivia Hussey or Leonard Whiting. By the time we had to actually read the book, I Cliff-noted my way through it. Sad. I made up for my Shakespeare years later by scoring several PCPA productions, however, and feel I’ve redeemed myself.
Thanks again for this wonderful read. As always, your personality comes through in your writing: insightful, deep, funny, and with just enough self-depracation and judgement to remind me that we’re all human beings in this together.
Much love…
Kevin
Wow… your comments on each book was SO much more delightful than a simple list. Thanks for taking time to reveal something of the book, why it touched you.
PS: I love all the kids’ book recommendations too!
You’re so welcome, Jackie! It’s great to know people enjoyed reading this column as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Kevin, I am never sorry to have to think about books! Plus, revisiting the idea reminded me that the list will be different each time, because what I remember depends on where my life is now. I’ve actually never read Moby Dick. We read Billy Budd and stopped there. Perhaps I will correct that – or not. Even Napoleon was better than whaling.
Interesting list, Theresa! It’s fascinating to see what sticks with people and why. I haven’t read much Virginia Woolf. May have to correct that, based on your recommendation!
I love Zilpha Keatley Snyder, though I have not read Black and Blue Magic. And the Bible has had quite the influence on my life as well, my mother being a minister and all . . . I’m not sure at which point I stopped just accepting what I was being told and taught at church and started thinking objectively (and critically) about it. Probably when I learned the history and began putting everything into historical context. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is another inspired pick. And Anne of Green Gables was on my list, too.
I just checked out your list, Manda. I haven’t read The Changeling. Must check that out! (Everyone else can find her list, too, at pepperwords.com.)
Gosh, you write so well. I just loved reading your article. I could never list only five books (which was the question I was posed (posed to? To which I was posed? Asked?) on FB, but I must say that “A Wrinkle In Time” really blew my mind as a kid – not so much when I re-read it as an adult, though.
After reading your list, I immediately clicked on one of my favorite websites (paperbackswap.com) and ordered a copy of Jennifer Crusie’s “Tell Me Lies” from a fellow swapper. It will be added to the 2-ft. stack of books on my nightstand. No, that is not an exaggeration.
Terry
You’ll have to let me know what you think of it, Terry! And I will definitely check out paperbackswap.com. Plenty of those around my house to trade!