(some) favorite books
melymbrosia brought up favorite books.
My current core list:
Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
A. S. Byatt, Possession
George Eliot, Middlemarch
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems & Plays
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Naomi Shihab Nye, Yellow Glove
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
I'm amazed that I could keep my list this short. Misleadingly short, really; but it's true that these are all books that inspire in me approximately the same amount of passion, though vastly different sorts of passion. If I broadened my filter even the littlest bit, I'd have another 20 or 30 books on here, easy.
The desert-island book list would be different; it would include, for one thing, more variety (more nonfiction, for instance). The list of Books I Frequently Recommend To Others would also be rather (though not entirely) different. I don't, as a rule, go around recommending books that are Very Literary, partly because it's obnoxious but also because I mostly hang out with English PhD students who have read the same Very Literary stuff that I have and either like it or don't.
Mely noted that her list is heavily slanted towards college-or-earlier. Mine is too (4 pre-college, 5 college, 2 post-college), and I can think of three major reasons why.
The first is emotional: I don't need books in the same way that I used to. I still love the act of reading, love books themselves, acquire them greedily, treasure them thoroughly; but my life outside books is much more fulfilling now than it was when I first fell in love with many of these books. That commitment to books lasted through college, fueled less by desperation and more by sheer giddiness about learning and reading and being around other people who were also giddy about these things.
The second is purely pragmatic: I'm not comfortable callling a book a Favorite until I've re-read it multiple times and still want to go back to it; since coming to grad school, I have not prioritized re-reading. My list of second-stringers or almost-favorites would be at least 50 books long: books that I very much want to re-read but haven't, or books that I'd read many times before college (e.g. The Once and Future King, Watership Down) but have not re-read since and am thus reluctant to place on this list because I'm not sure how I'd feel about them now.
The third has to do with access. I didn't have many books growing up, I didn't have access to any good libraries, and I wouldn't have known what to do with a good library if I'd had one because my exposure to books (especially good books) was so painfully limited. I'm still bitter about this, and especially about the fact that my few book-finding efforts were usually stymied by a lack of resources. I read a lot of trash and one-step-above-trash, much of which I liked, because I'm undiscriminating like that, but little of which rewarded re-reading; when I did find something worth re-reading I re-read it a lot. And that's circular, of course: I reread books because I loved them, but I loved them more because I reread them. My love for The Lord of the Rings and Middlemarch has to do with the books themselves, but it also has to do, quite separately, with my relationship with the books. In the years since college, I've had access to vast quantities of books I've never read before (friends' books, good bookstores, good libraries), and I have a list of books to read that's really, really long. I never had a list before; I just gobbled up whatever was in front of me, and when there wasn't anything new on hand I would re-read. Now, I own dozens of books I haven't read yet, and go on cheerfully accumulating more. Re-reading's something I enjoy sometimes, but I am also powerfully conscious of how much new stuff there is, and I want that too -- want it more.
So if we were to look at all the books I've read since graduating from college, I could point to lots of books I like, but very few that I've had a special relationship with -- and that lack of relationship is only partly a function of the books themselves. It's also because I finally know what I want to be reading, and I just can't keep up. I'm so far behind! Reading Trollope has made me spectacularly conscious of this: with the time I had on my hands in high school, I could have read Trollope's entire ouvre twice over; ditto Faulkner, Austen, and a dozen other writers I'd never heard of at the time -- and let's not even get into all the SFF I should have been reading, and maybe even could have been reading, but didn't know to look for.
Now I'm sitting here all torn between finding something to re-read or curling up with The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. May my life always be exactly this difficult.
My current core list:
Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
A. S. Byatt, Possession
George Eliot, Middlemarch
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems & Plays
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Naomi Shihab Nye, Yellow Glove
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
I'm amazed that I could keep my list this short. Misleadingly short, really; but it's true that these are all books that inspire in me approximately the same amount of passion, though vastly different sorts of passion. If I broadened my filter even the littlest bit, I'd have another 20 or 30 books on here, easy.
The desert-island book list would be different; it would include, for one thing, more variety (more nonfiction, for instance). The list of Books I Frequently Recommend To Others would also be rather (though not entirely) different. I don't, as a rule, go around recommending books that are Very Literary, partly because it's obnoxious but also because I mostly hang out with English PhD students who have read the same Very Literary stuff that I have and either like it or don't.
Mely noted that her list is heavily slanted towards college-or-earlier. Mine is too (4 pre-college, 5 college, 2 post-college), and I can think of three major reasons why.
The first is emotional: I don't need books in the same way that I used to. I still love the act of reading, love books themselves, acquire them greedily, treasure them thoroughly; but my life outside books is much more fulfilling now than it was when I first fell in love with many of these books. That commitment to books lasted through college, fueled less by desperation and more by sheer giddiness about learning and reading and being around other people who were also giddy about these things.
The second is purely pragmatic: I'm not comfortable callling a book a Favorite until I've re-read it multiple times and still want to go back to it; since coming to grad school, I have not prioritized re-reading. My list of second-stringers or almost-favorites would be at least 50 books long: books that I very much want to re-read but haven't, or books that I'd read many times before college (e.g. The Once and Future King, Watership Down) but have not re-read since and am thus reluctant to place on this list because I'm not sure how I'd feel about them now.
The third has to do with access. I didn't have many books growing up, I didn't have access to any good libraries, and I wouldn't have known what to do with a good library if I'd had one because my exposure to books (especially good books) was so painfully limited. I'm still bitter about this, and especially about the fact that my few book-finding efforts were usually stymied by a lack of resources. I read a lot of trash and one-step-above-trash, much of which I liked, because I'm undiscriminating like that, but little of which rewarded re-reading; when I did find something worth re-reading I re-read it a lot. And that's circular, of course: I reread books because I loved them, but I loved them more because I reread them. My love for The Lord of the Rings and Middlemarch has to do with the books themselves, but it also has to do, quite separately, with my relationship with the books. In the years since college, I've had access to vast quantities of books I've never read before (friends' books, good bookstores, good libraries), and I have a list of books to read that's really, really long. I never had a list before; I just gobbled up whatever was in front of me, and when there wasn't anything new on hand I would re-read. Now, I own dozens of books I haven't read yet, and go on cheerfully accumulating more. Re-reading's something I enjoy sometimes, but I am also powerfully conscious of how much new stuff there is, and I want that too -- want it more.
So if we were to look at all the books I've read since graduating from college, I could point to lots of books I like, but very few that I've had a special relationship with -- and that lack of relationship is only partly a function of the books themselves. It's also because I finally know what I want to be reading, and I just can't keep up. I'm so far behind! Reading Trollope has made me spectacularly conscious of this: with the time I had on my hands in high school, I could have read Trollope's entire ouvre twice over; ditto Faulkner, Austen, and a dozen other writers I'd never heard of at the time -- and let's not even get into all the SFF I should have been reading, and maybe even could have been reading, but didn't know to look for.
Now I'm sitting here all torn between finding something to re-read or curling up with The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. May my life always be exactly this difficult.