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My Seven Favorite Books
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My Seven Favorite Books
Disgrace
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This is my favorite novel. It’s an unhappy and bleak examination of masculinity and male violence with post-apartheid South Africa as its backdrop. In someone else’s words, the book is “pitiless and errorless.” The prose is incredible, and the book has lived with me in the 17 years since I read it.
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My Seven Favorite Books
The Last Unicorn
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As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits. The Last Unicorn is, in a sense, an inversion of a fantasy novel. The book has no map in its opening pages; there are no epic battles; a butterfly quotes Shakespeare. In a world of trilogies and octalogies, though, it's nice to have one short novel that tells one story. This book found me at the right time in my adult life, and is part of the furniture of my mind's living room. The prose is haunting ("Take me with you, for laughs, for luck, for the unknown") and also very funny ("The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock."). The book is easily read but uneasily considered; it haunts me, in a way that I promise is good. You gotta read this book, is what I'm saying. This is my second-favorite book, but it might be my favorite on a different day. There are no happy endings, or final lists of recommendations, because nothing ever ends.
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My Seven Favorite Books
The Phantom Tollbooth
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My third-favorite book is a book for children, because I was once a child. I didn’t grow up around books, but for whatever reason a copy of this book made its way into my life. The Phantom Tollbooth is a cute educational romp through a fantasyland designed to teach the importance of imagination and industriousness, but it was my fantasyland. I have no doubt that some portion of my love of wordplay and whimsy comes directly from this book. To quote Juster: For kids, there are no difficult words, only words they haven’t met yet.
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My Seven Favorite Books
Manhattan Transfer
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I’ll quote Sinclair Lewis: I regard “Manhattan Transfer” as more important in every way than anything by Gertrude Stein or Marcel Proust or even the great white boar, Mr. Joyce’s “Ulysses.” For Mr. Dos Passos can use, and deftly does use, all their experimental psychology and style, all their revolt against the molds of classic fiction. But the difference! Dos Passos is interesting! Manhattan Transfer, my fourth-favorite book, is the first and last thing I’ve ever read that makes me think “yes, this is what living in a city is like.” It’s Nighthawks on the page. It’s good.
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My Seven Favorite Books
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
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What do George Washington and Karl Marx have in common? That's right: They both loved Tristram Shandy, my fifth-favorite book. (Scorpion and Felix, A Humoristic Novel, Marx's try at a humoristic novel, is inspired by Tristram Shandy). Simply put--Tristram Shandy is very, very funny. The first chapter of the book is entirely about how the titular character had a bad start because his mother asked his father a question about household chores at his moment of conception. It should be impossible for a book written in the 1760s to be postmodern, and yet. (One last tidbit: You know that line from Hamilton, where Burr says "The world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me"? That's a direct allusion to Tristram Shandy. Burr wrote in real life "Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me.")
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My Seven Favorite Books
The End of the Road
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In this postmodern lark, a depressed nihilist becomes friends with a hyper-agentic rationalist; hilarity does not ensue. John Barth was once a household name. As I understand it, you couldn't walk around a college campus in the early 1960s without running into someone reading his most notable work, The Sot-Weed Factor. This is my sixth-favorite book specifically because, in the book's opening pages, our protagonist is paralyzed by indecision, and is told by his unconventional doctor to do the following: When indecisive, pick the thing that comes first alphabetically. If that test is inapplicable, pick the first thing on the list, or the thing on the left. This is a technique I still use multiple times a week to quickly resolve unimportant decisions (and why I own so many aardvarks and abacuses).
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My Seven Favorite Books
The Dispossessed
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You've heard of plenty of books that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula (e.g., Dune, Ender's Game, Ringworld, American Gods). Now you've heard of another: My seventh-favorite book, The Dispossessed, Le Guin's exploration of what an anarchist utopia might look like.
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