Current mood:	historical
Current music:	Little Big Sky, "Feels Like Rain"
Entry tags:	about me, books

ten most important books
A while back, truepenny and Mirrorthaw and I were talking about books over dinner (...yeah, there's a surprise) and Mirrorthaw brought up the notion of one's own Ten Most Important Books. Not favorite books, or best books, but the most important. Truepenny pointed out that such a list requires not only picking the most important books but deciding what "most important" means in one's own case. I said that in her case I would imagine there would be some books that are most important to her as a writer, and others most important as a reader. And then she noted that of course there are those books that are important because they got us through difficult times (middle school, anyone?). And so on and so forth.

I've listed mine in the order I first read them:

1. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
2. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
4. Naomi Shihab Nye, Yellow Glove
5. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
6. George Eliot, Middlemarch
7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment
8. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
9. Keri Hulme, The Bone People
10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

My parents gave me this book for Christmas the year I was six. It was the first chapter book I owned. I adored it. I read it at least three times the first week I had it. I begged for the rest of the series. I identified heavily with Lucy, wanted very much to grow up to be Peter, and disliked Susan (which is possibly all that needs to be said about why I felt so out-of-sync with my environment for the next decade). My parents were reluctant to let me read the rest of the books; I'm still not sure why. But they did give me the next two for my birthday, and the rest were rationed out one at a time over the next few months, culminating with The Last Battle during the move to Texas that August.

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was also the first book that I re-read obsessively over a period of years. When I first read it, it was simply the only book I'd ever read that stood up to repeated re-readings. As I got older, the idea of being able to escape one's own world got more and more important. (One of the reasons why Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favorite of the series is that the opening scenes highlight that contrast between real school life and Narnia with such precision.) I had such an advanced case of bring-your-own-thematics that I didn't notice the Christian allegory stuff for years. For a basically smart person, I can be spectacularly unobservant.

Little Women

Another of the few books I owned in childhood. I think this one was a gift from my aunt; it was a very nice unabridged children's edition, bound in blue paper, with some good line-drawing illustrations and a few beautiful color plates. It was large enough that the covers got pretty battered; I remember carefully folding scotch tape over the edges so they wouldn't get any more mangled.

I loved this book because of Jo, which makes me just like every other girl in the world who has ever loved this book. I have a hard time explaining why it was so important to me. I think it's partly that I read it so often and so much of it lodged in my head that I find myself using its phrases to describe parts of my life. I quite clearly remember thinking, when I decided not to pursue a creative writing major, "Talent isn't genius, and you can't make it so." Poor Jo.

I think this may also be the first book in which I seriously objected to the heroine's fate. I did love Jo & Laurie's relationship, and if Jo was going to marry anyone I kind of wanted it to be him, but I didn't want her to get married at all. I was delighted when, years later, I read somewhere that Alcott didn't want to marry her off either.

The Lord of the Rings

In sixth grade, the other geeky outcast in my social studies class was reading these and I borrowed them. I'd read The Hobbit in third or fourth grade and loved it, but didn't know there were other books by the same author. When I read The Lord of the Rings, I loved it more. I loved it like I'd never loved anything else I'd read. I loved it so much that I pestered my parents into starting to give me an allowance so I could save it to buy my own copies. They were the first books I ever bought for myself: really crappy early-'80s mass market box set with dreadful cover art. By the time I got to college they were literally falling apart.

The reason the trilogy rates as important rather than merely beloved is that these were the first books over which I bonded with other people. At nerd camp (see below), a large group of us discovered within about a day that we had all read and loved these books. We assembled after curfew to geek about them until three or four in the morning, talked about them at meals, discussed them before evening check-in, nicknamed each other after characters. It was the first time I'd ever met people who not only loved reading the way I did but also wanted to talk about books as much as I did.

Talking about books changed the way I read books; I started to try to think about books, rather than just passively absorbing them, so that I would have better things to say about them afterwards. The letters I exchanged with this group of friends largely consisted of accounts of recent reading, exhortations to read certain books, reports on books that had been recommended by someone else in the group. Our discussions were emotional and evaluative rather than analytical, but they got me hooked on the notion and practice of talking about books. Years later, I decided to try to get into college partly because a teacher made a chance remark that suggested that talking about books with other people who liked books was part of what went on in college. It was the first thing I'd heard about college that made it sound appealing; before that, I'd assumed it was just like high school except bigger.

Yellow Glove

The summer I was twelve, I spent three weeks at nerd camp. I had already begun what was to be a long and successful career as an academic underachiever, and my parents were desperate to get me interested in school again. Didn't work, but I did get to read this book: it was the primary assigned text for the creative writing class I took. It was also the first book of contemporary poetry I ever read (and was the only such book for many years). I didn't like it much that first time I read it. It was too... quiet, or something. I had early-adolescent angst. I wanted to read, and write, about Big Dramatic Emotions, particularly Terrible Pain and Being Misunderstood. (Hey, cut me some slack. I mentioned I was twelve, right?) But I kept it, because I couldn't imagine giving up a book that I actually owned.

When I read it again a couple of years later, I liked it much more. And when I came back to it many years after that, when I was starting to write poetry again, I found in it a model for the kinds of poems I wanted to try to write: poems in which we get at big things by talking about little things. I love all of Nye's work, but this book (now out of print, though many of the poems are collected in Words Under The Words) is by far my favorite.

The Mists of Avalon

When I reread this book a few years ago, a small part of my brain recognized flaws and problems that I'd never noticed before. Most of my brain didn't care, so anyone attempting to explicate its deficiencies will be summarily ignored.

I first read Mists of Avalon on the recommendation of a brilliant and much-loved friend from nerd camp (see above) — so, autumn of the year I was twelve, as soon as I could find it. I loved the book for its own sake, but reading it had wide-ranging effects as well: It launched me on a full-scale pursuit of every version of the Arthurian legends I could get my hands on, including a lot of crap but also including T.H. White's The Once and Future King, which I adore and on the basis of which, in 9th grade, I fell into a friendship with someone I might not have survived high school without. Plus, The Mists of Avalon cemented my fondness for retold stories, which had been developing since I'd read "Oh, That Awful Cinderella!" (from the point of view of one of the stepsisters) in first grade, and which has more recently manifested in my dissertation.

Middlemarch

Read three times over winter break in 10th grade. My English teacher, whom I adored, was assigning each of us a Victorian novel to read over the holidays. She'd provided a list and asked us to see what our parents had at home (the school didn't have textbook copies). Mine didn't have any. She asked me if there were any I particularly wanted to read. The only ones I'd heard of were Wuthering Heights, which I'd read and (to my current shame) disliked; the books by Dickens, whom I loathed on the basis of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations; and Jane Eyre, which I'd already read three times. I said she should pick for me, but I wanted it to be something long. She said I should read Middlemarch, and she brought her own copy for me to borrow because the school library didn't have it. I loved it.

Crime & Punishment

Read over spring break of 10th grade on the recommendation of the same English teacher, who was steadily feeding me every nineteenth-century novel she owned, which sadly wasn't many. (Not surprisingly, this teacher was one of the two who convinced me that I should apply to college.) First Russian novel I ever read. Led to my application to a school program that was going on a trip to the U.S.S.R. that summer and to my subsequent involvement in Model U.N., thus contributing significantly to my transition into the world of legal extra-curricular activities. Also sparked an untutored interest in Russian literature generally and, once I got to college, a short-lived attempt to major in Russian (which rather spectacularly failed to work out; but I did take a fantastic Dostoevsky-in-translation class with my favorite Russian professor).

Now that I think about it, reading this book led, albeit circuitously, to my ill-conceived application to Middlebury College, which fortunately I did *not* end up attending; but that's really too long a story to get into here.

Rubyfruit Jungle

This book is only one of the reasons I loved my first college English class, but it's a big one. I suppose that, considered objectively, it's not a particularly good book. But it was the first overtly queer novel I ever read, and for that matter the first upfront exploration of sexuality and sexual identity (as distinct from mere description of sexual activity). My roommate and a couple of our friends on our hallway were in this class (though they were all in the other section), so we were all reading it at the same time and discussing it and then lending it to our other friends and making them read it and discuss it with us. The conversations that I had about this book are pretty much what enabled me to be loving and supportive and not a complete freak when people I knew started coming out that semester and in subsequent semesters. In a less direct way, those conversations are also what enabled me to deal with my own several-years-later realization/decision that I was queer myself.

Lo these many years later, I find that I wouldn't teach Rubyfruit Jungle in an Intro to Narrative Fiction course, but I'd probably teach Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine to serve much the same function.

The Bone People

The following fall, in a different intro English class, several of my friends were reading The Bone People and making everyone they knew read it. I loved it so much that when I became a writing consultant my junior year I asked to be assigned to the intro lit course in which it was taught. As I re-read the book for that course, I was able for the first time to imagine writing a really long paper on a book. And as I helped students plan and write and revise their papers on it, I realized that teaching writing and leading discussion on books — things I'd never considered doing before — were things I really, really liked and could imagine being pretty good at.

I like to think that I would have identified my talents and found my calling without this book, but in my mind they're inextricably interconnected. This is the book that made me want to be a professor and that made graduate school feel like a possible thing, although in fact grad school wasn't really on my radar until some months later.

Epistemology of the Closet

If you didn't already know that I'm a complete geek, the inclusion of this book on this list would, I hope, pretty much clinch the deal. This is the first book of literary criticism that I read all the way through. It's the book that made me understand what literary criticism could be, that showed me just how different the real thing was from the papers I'd been writing, and that made me aspire to do critical work at that level. It was also the book that showed me I had the stubbornness and the nerve to make it through both the academic work and the politics of graduate school.

I read Epistemology of the Closet early on in my first attempt at grad school. The paper that I wrote under its influence displeased the professor so much that he threatened to give me a failing grade on it if I didn't revise it significantly (i.e. write it on Whitman rather than Henry James, whom the professor didn't want tainted with the brush of queer theory). I had good reason to believe that the paper, though derivative and clumsy in a whole host of ways, was probably the smartest and best-written paper in the class. I told him that if he failed the paper, I would have his homophobic ass up in front of the dean so fast he wouldn't know what hit him. He gave me an A on the paper and in the course. I finished out the year and then left for a better school.