15 Books

Here are the rules (as per a friend on Facebook): Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends value.

1. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville). This book is like the movie Casablanca. I can reread it and find something new and interesting each time. I can watch Casablanca over and over again and never tire of it either.
2. Sure of You (Armistead Maupin). The first book I purchased in the Tales of the City series. I now own all seven of them, and whenever I want to have a fun reading experience, I go back to Maupin's novels.
3. Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens). My favorite novel from one of my favorite novelists.
4. Beloved (Toni Morrison). I must have read this book a dozen times now. It was one of the works I discussed in my dissertation. Breathtaking stuff.
5. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner). I could put down any number of Faulkner novels, but after reading The Sound and the Fury, I could never read fiction the same way again (and, yes, I think that's a good thing).
6. The Lord Won't Mind (Gordon Merrick). Trashy, fun stuff. The first in a trilogy of novels about this gay couple. Hilarious, profane at times, serious-minded, groundbreaking.
7. The Borrowers (Mary Norton). The first book I ever sought out to read after watching a TV show or movie adaptation. It was the TV movie from the 1970s, by the way, not the stupid adaptation of recent years with John Goodman.
8. Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren). My mother bought me three of these books after we saw those wonderfully campy movies in the 1970s. I reread them about a year ago, and I had a blast. It was just like being a kid again.
9. Any of the Peanuts books by Charles Schulz. I owned a lot of them over the years. I loved that strip and its world view. I, naturally, always fancied myself to be like Linus. Minus the blanket.
10. The Rain God (Arturo Islas). This and Migrant Souls are two of my favorite books from my graduate school years in California. I had never heard of his before taking a seminar in Chicano/a literature, and I was devastated when I found out he had died after completing them. No more masterpieces from such a gifted writer.
11. The New Confessions (William Boyd). Victorian in its size and scope, this novel is about the life of a film director. It spans much of the Twentieth Century, and it has one of the best opening sequences I've ever read. Comparable to the shock value of reading the opening sentences of Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues.
12. The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell). I've read all of three of his books, but this was the first for me. He finds the oddest things fascinating, the most minute of issues and moments to discuss.
13. America's Faces (Rheta Grimsley Johnson). Johnson was a columnist for the Memphis newspaper for many years. This is a collection of her columns, and it made me want to be a better writer. Any budding journalist would benefit from reading her work, but sadly, it's out of print.
14. Collected Poems (Frank O'Hara). I'd also recommend reading Brad Gooch's biography of O'Hara, City Poet. O'Hara is one of my favorite poets, right up there with William Carlos Williams and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'd recommend this collection for the poem "Joe's Jacket" if for no other reason.
15. Passage to India (E.M. Forster). Just brilliant.

I've left off too many people. Where's Jane Austen? Where's Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse? Why isn't there more poetry? This is such a difficult task, but I went with the first ones that popped into my head.