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shadowkatBooks read and actually remember from the age of 14-21.
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - must have read it in High School. But I've never forgotten it. Of the books written in that era...it remains amongst the best. Still resonates today. About a man who tries to change himself, become someone he's not, all image, to win the girl, the world of his dreams - only to find out it is hollow. The writing is...beyond brilliant. It sends chills. And it is tight. Subtle.
2. Brave New World by Adolus Huxley - similar to the Great Gatsby, it's about people who care about nothing. Who live for pleasure, escape pain, either through drugs or other means, and do routine tasks. When a stranger comes into their midst who believes in something greater than this, who cares about others, who doesn't just want to escape - he shakes them up, and ends up losing himself in their world. It's an odd book, because it's about reaching what you think is utopia...but it's hollow. A world with no love, where you care only for yourself is much as Fitzgerald realized a hollow one.
3. Animal Farm and 1984 (I actually read 1984 in 1984). by George Orwell - both deft political satires of the dire results of fascism. Perhaps amongst the best political satires ever written. Short and to the point. The characters resonate long afterwards.
They are allegorical, but I still vividly remember the world's they painted. And who can forget the torture by rats in 1984 - a concept borrowed by the filmmaker of Brazil and by the original USA tv series La Femme Nikita.
4. Thomas Covenant - White Gold Wielder - an old fantasy series, three books total, if I recall, about a man dying of leprosy who travels into another world and becomes a healer - his wedding ring the source of his power, from the world of Appalachia. The Fantasy World is populated by characters from American Folk Legend. Covenant himself is a bit of an anti-hero, neither good nor bad. A subversion in many ways of the classic hero trope popularized by Star Wars and other Fantasy stories.
5. Ulysses by James Joyce - I read this book four times. Took two courses on it. And wrote a thesis comparing Molly Bloom's character and her final monologue to the character of Caddy Thompson in Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. I read the book because my mother had written a paper on why it was censored while she was in school, and I was deeply curious as to why anyone would censor it. I remember asking her what it was about - and she told me it was a 400-600 page book that took place in one day, in one man's life, in Dublin.
How insane, I thought. And so I took the class, then became obsessed with it. Reading it was like deciphering another language. True story - Ulysses has been translated and edited in English numerous times, even though it was written in English - the reason? Joyce couldn't type. So he sent his long-hand writings to French nuns to type. The Nuns couldn't understand English. We got the result. I remember that story vividly...because it amused me.
6. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez....the book that inspired me to read Ulysess...I was insanely in love with it. I can barely remember the plot now. But the language was poetry. One of the most beautifully written books that I've read. As was the story - which was one about love, ghosts, and belief.
7. The Color Purple by Alice Walker - blew me away. A novel written in diary format by a lesbian black woman, being abused by her husband. It said so many things about being "other" and how people treat you. I identified with the main character, even though I was neither lesbian nor black. And it was suggested by my drama teacher at the time.
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee....to this day, I'm not sure which I prefer the film or the book. Perhaps both. The book is in a way a memoir of Harper Lee's childhood, and is dedicated to her father. The title refers to something her father states - that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because the mockingbird is harmless, it hurts no one. He is referring to Boo, a mentally challenged man who lives next door and the kids, Scout and her brother and a young Truman Capote tease. The book much like the Color Purple is about racism, prejudice, and privilege and haunts me to this day.
9. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers - a story about a young girl who is attending her sister's wedding, I think, and her own experiences with racism and prejudice.
I only vaguely remember it.
10. Neuromancer - by William Gibson, I remember falling in love with this book when I read it back in the 1980s, before the internet, before cyberspace. It did a rather decent job of predicting many advancements of the new age.
11. Ethan From...by Edith Wharton - a painful book, just painful. Wharton is hard to read, her characters are so repressed and so self-destructive and painfully un-self-aware. You want to run screaming from the book. But you can't...it's like you are mesmerized by the train wreck.
12. The Prince by Machiavelli - taught me everything I ever needed to know about corporate politics.
13. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury - about the nomination process of controversial Secretary of State. It dealt with homophobia and the insane politics of government. Written in 1959, yet oddly resonant today.
14. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830) - I read it in English, not French, and I remember it better than Candide which I read in French, and later saw the musical of (poorly done). A historical political drama that is as gut wrenching as Ethan From. It's about an ambitious young man (I think his name is Julian) who climbs upwards through affairs. Haunting book. A french pen-pal, and foreign exchange student talked me into reading it. I read it in high school.
15. Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson (1748) ...not a book I can forget, may be amongst the few in my class who actually read all of it. It's not a small book. About 1800 or so pages, if I recall. It's about a young woman who gets seduced by a rogue, she thinks she can change him, he marries her, rapes her, and ruins her, after she is disowned by her family. It's horrific. The rape scene is amongst the worst I've read. The book was written entirely in letters. And Richardson was in a way commenting on the "bad boy romances of the day". At the same time, I read the far more entertaining Les Liasons Dangereux - but Richardson's book sticks in the memory.
16. Curtain by Agatha Christie - possibly the best mystery in that specific genre that I've read. It's never been done as a film. It's the book in which Christie kills Hercule Poirot and not how you'd think. The book is astonishing in how ambiguous it is regarding morality. The villain perhaps the best in fiction...an Iago sort. Amazing novel and by far the best she wrote. My favorite Christie novels and I've literally read all of them, are
Sleeping Murder (Miss Marple) and Curtain (Hercule Poirot).
17. The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman...it may always haunt me. It's the story of two school teachers who are lesbians. They get outted by a student, who accuses them of unwanted sexual attentions. The play delves into sex, repressed sexuality and homophobia from a female perspective.
18. Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams - a disturbing play about an abusive relationship and a monsterously seductive anti-hero. Stanley Kowinski may be one of Williams best characters. But I also adore the poor deranged, sister of Stella's who is slowly losing her mind and finally does after Stanley brutally rapes her. I performed both Stella and the sister whose name I can't recall...on stage in high school.
19. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll - an absurd series of stories, that are haunting and disturbing at the same time. Like falling into a twisted dream that is mostly nightmare. I've never been quite clear - is Alice a dark fantasy or horror tale?
20. Beloved by Toni Morrison...a ghost story about slavery told in wandering yet haunting prose. The characters are pictures in my mind. But their names don't resonate. Morrison writes like a poet ...with flowing stream of consciousness prose. But who can forget the story of an angry ghost, the aborted child of a mother who survived slavery. Barely. It's a brutal depiction of the post-slavery United States. Showing exactly what slavery does to a person. How deeply it scares you, and scares the human race.
I'm stopping at 20. Because it's getting late and I'm tired and I want to go back to reading my smutty book.
Honorable mention - The Joy of Sex, given to me on my 21st birthday, by college boyfriend, first love, who I still wink at from time to time on Facebook. He's married now.
I don't envy his wife. Better her than me. ;-)
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - must have read it in High School. But I've never forgotten it. Of the books written in that era...it remains amongst the best. Still resonates today. About a man who tries to change himself, become someone he's not, all image, to win the girl, the world of his dreams - only to find out it is hollow. The writing is...beyond brilliant. It sends chills. And it is tight. Subtle.
2. Brave New World by Adolus Huxley - similar to the Great Gatsby, it's about people who care about nothing. Who live for pleasure, escape pain, either through drugs or other means, and do routine tasks. When a stranger comes into their midst who believes in something greater than this, who cares about others, who doesn't just want to escape - he shakes them up, and ends up losing himself in their world. It's an odd book, because it's about reaching what you think is utopia...but it's hollow. A world with no love, where you care only for yourself is much as Fitzgerald realized a hollow one.
3. Animal Farm and 1984 (I actually read 1984 in 1984). by George Orwell - both deft political satires of the dire results of fascism. Perhaps amongst the best political satires ever written. Short and to the point. The characters resonate long afterwards.
They are allegorical, but I still vividly remember the world's they painted. And who can forget the torture by rats in 1984 - a concept borrowed by the filmmaker of Brazil and by the original USA tv series La Femme Nikita.
4. Thomas Covenant - White Gold Wielder - an old fantasy series, three books total, if I recall, about a man dying of leprosy who travels into another world and becomes a healer - his wedding ring the source of his power, from the world of Appalachia. The Fantasy World is populated by characters from American Folk Legend. Covenant himself is a bit of an anti-hero, neither good nor bad. A subversion in many ways of the classic hero trope popularized by Star Wars and other Fantasy stories.
5. Ulysses by James Joyce - I read this book four times. Took two courses on it. And wrote a thesis comparing Molly Bloom's character and her final monologue to the character of Caddy Thompson in Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. I read the book because my mother had written a paper on why it was censored while she was in school, and I was deeply curious as to why anyone would censor it. I remember asking her what it was about - and she told me it was a 400-600 page book that took place in one day, in one man's life, in Dublin.
How insane, I thought. And so I took the class, then became obsessed with it. Reading it was like deciphering another language. True story - Ulysses has been translated and edited in English numerous times, even though it was written in English - the reason? Joyce couldn't type. So he sent his long-hand writings to French nuns to type. The Nuns couldn't understand English. We got the result. I remember that story vividly...because it amused me.
6. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez....the book that inspired me to read Ulysess...I was insanely in love with it. I can barely remember the plot now. But the language was poetry. One of the most beautifully written books that I've read. As was the story - which was one about love, ghosts, and belief.
7. The Color Purple by Alice Walker - blew me away. A novel written in diary format by a lesbian black woman, being abused by her husband. It said so many things about being "other" and how people treat you. I identified with the main character, even though I was neither lesbian nor black. And it was suggested by my drama teacher at the time.
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee....to this day, I'm not sure which I prefer the film or the book. Perhaps both. The book is in a way a memoir of Harper Lee's childhood, and is dedicated to her father. The title refers to something her father states - that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because the mockingbird is harmless, it hurts no one. He is referring to Boo, a mentally challenged man who lives next door and the kids, Scout and her brother and a young Truman Capote tease. The book much like the Color Purple is about racism, prejudice, and privilege and haunts me to this day.
9. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers - a story about a young girl who is attending her sister's wedding, I think, and her own experiences with racism and prejudice.
I only vaguely remember it.
10. Neuromancer - by William Gibson, I remember falling in love with this book when I read it back in the 1980s, before the internet, before cyberspace. It did a rather decent job of predicting many advancements of the new age.
11. Ethan From...by Edith Wharton - a painful book, just painful. Wharton is hard to read, her characters are so repressed and so self-destructive and painfully un-self-aware. You want to run screaming from the book. But you can't...it's like you are mesmerized by the train wreck.
12. The Prince by Machiavelli - taught me everything I ever needed to know about corporate politics.
13. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury - about the nomination process of controversial Secretary of State. It dealt with homophobia and the insane politics of government. Written in 1959, yet oddly resonant today.
14. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830) - I read it in English, not French, and I remember it better than Candide which I read in French, and later saw the musical of (poorly done). A historical political drama that is as gut wrenching as Ethan From. It's about an ambitious young man (I think his name is Julian) who climbs upwards through affairs. Haunting book. A french pen-pal, and foreign exchange student talked me into reading it. I read it in high school.
15. Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson (1748) ...not a book I can forget, may be amongst the few in my class who actually read all of it. It's not a small book. About 1800 or so pages, if I recall. It's about a young woman who gets seduced by a rogue, she thinks she can change him, he marries her, rapes her, and ruins her, after she is disowned by her family. It's horrific. The rape scene is amongst the worst I've read. The book was written entirely in letters. And Richardson was in a way commenting on the "bad boy romances of the day". At the same time, I read the far more entertaining Les Liasons Dangereux - but Richardson's book sticks in the memory.
16. Curtain by Agatha Christie - possibly the best mystery in that specific genre that I've read. It's never been done as a film. It's the book in which Christie kills Hercule Poirot and not how you'd think. The book is astonishing in how ambiguous it is regarding morality. The villain perhaps the best in fiction...an Iago sort. Amazing novel and by far the best she wrote. My favorite Christie novels and I've literally read all of them, are
Sleeping Murder (Miss Marple) and Curtain (Hercule Poirot).
17. The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman...it may always haunt me. It's the story of two school teachers who are lesbians. They get outted by a student, who accuses them of unwanted sexual attentions. The play delves into sex, repressed sexuality and homophobia from a female perspective.
18. Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams - a disturbing play about an abusive relationship and a monsterously seductive anti-hero. Stanley Kowinski may be one of Williams best characters. But I also adore the poor deranged, sister of Stella's who is slowly losing her mind and finally does after Stanley brutally rapes her. I performed both Stella and the sister whose name I can't recall...on stage in high school.
19. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll - an absurd series of stories, that are haunting and disturbing at the same time. Like falling into a twisted dream that is mostly nightmare. I've never been quite clear - is Alice a dark fantasy or horror tale?
20. Beloved by Toni Morrison...a ghost story about slavery told in wandering yet haunting prose. The characters are pictures in my mind. But their names don't resonate. Morrison writes like a poet ...with flowing stream of consciousness prose. But who can forget the story of an angry ghost, the aborted child of a mother who survived slavery. Barely. It's a brutal depiction of the post-slavery United States. Showing exactly what slavery does to a person. How deeply it scares you, and scares the human race.
I'm stopping at 20. Because it's getting late and I'm tired and I want to go back to reading my smutty book.
Honorable mention - The Joy of Sex, given to me on my 21st birthday, by college boyfriend, first love, who I still wink at from time to time on Facebook. He's married now.
I don't envy his wife. Better her than me. ;-)