challenge: most influential books of my life

One of my dear friends, Shaina, challenged me to come up with a top ten list of the best/most influential books in my life, and I can't help but make an attempt. It's really hard, though. First of all, I've got to figure out what "influential" means in this context. I'm thinking of books that have evoked the strongest emotions, books that have really stayed with me, that were revolutionary in some way. Books I think about a lot. Also, books that have influenced my own writing.

Also, I'm finding it impossible to come up with only ten, so I've broken it up into two lists: most groundbreaking FICTION and most groundbreaking NONFICTION (sorry, poetry and drama. you haven't made it yet).

Here goes:

Top Ten Fiction (in no particular order):

1. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
2. Persuasion, Jane Austen
3. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
4. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
5. Fairy Tales of the Brother Grimm
6. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
7. Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
8. The Princess Bride, William Goldman
9. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
10. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Bonus: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Top Ten Nonfiction (in no particular order):

1. The Art of the Personal Essay, ed. Phillip Lopate
2. Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb
3. Dreamthorp, Alexander Smith
4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
5. Leaping, Brian Doyle
6. Words of the Grey Wind, Chris Arthur
7. Quotidiana, Patrick Madden
8. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
9. On Tremendous Trifles, GK Chesterton
10. The Wet Collection, Joni Tevis
Bonus: At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays, Anne Fadiman


(I know, I know, I totally cheated with the bonuses. So, combining the lists and including the bonuses, this is the Top 22 Most Influential Books of My Life. Ah well.)

2013 in retrospect: overview and books

Rather than feeling the typical celebratory, forward-thinking attitude that a new year brings, I find myself feeling reflective. I find myself wanting to look back before I look forward (perhaps this is inspired by Charles Lamb's marvelous essay, "New Year's Eve," which you should absolutely read if you haven't already).

2013 was a big year for me, in more ways than one. It was thrilling, fulfilling, frustrating, and depressing in turn. I experienced some of my highest highs and lowest lows, and I think it would be wrong of me to close the door on everything I experienced without some recorded meditation. So, I've decided to devote the month of January to looking back at 2013. Usually, the beginning of January is spent making goals; instead, I want to spend January internalizing the previous year, and then I will move forward at the beginning of February with resolutions and the like. My only goal for January is to blog. I start teaching at SUU next week (still haven't written a syllabus), and I expect that the first month of teaching will be busy, finding my way around and getting used to a new campus, new students, and mostly getting back into a teaching mode. BUT I'd like to blog my way through, here a little and there a little, despite being busy.

Anyway, my first item of reflection is books. I read around fifty books in 2013 (a number that I'd like to increase this year, but I'll make that goal later), some of them fantastic and life altering, others disappointing and dull. Here are my favorites:

Best Books I Read in 2013 (in no particular order):

1. At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays, Anne Fadiman: This collection embodies so much of what I love about essays: they meander, reflect, inform and transform. She inspects ordinary topics and makes them fascinating. She is also witty and so much more intelligent than I could ever be.

2. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver: This book broke my heart, then broke it again and again. It was tragic and haunting and beautiful all at the same time. Oh, and Kingsolver's prose is TO DIE FOR GORGEOUS.

3. The Fault in Our Stars, John Green: There are so many YA books that are absolute trash (I suppose that's true of most genres), but I love a good YA novel. I wept in this book. Shamelessly.

4. The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Lee Stewart (the second YA novel on this list): You know the feeling of reading a book with ideas and characters that are utterly tired and predictable? Like a painfully derivative RomCom? This book was the exact opposite, and it was refreshing. The concept, plot, and characters of this novel are unique and fresh, and it was so much fun to read. The second book in the series is less successful, but still fun, and I have yet to read the third.

5. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), Jerome K. Jerome: Hilarious. Jerome's essays are delightful, so much so that I was apprehensive about reading his fiction (I didn't want to be disappointed), but this book was laughoutloud funny from the very first page.

6. Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh: Some may not see the purpose of buying the book, because most of the chapters also appear on Allie's blog, but after reading it, I did not regret buying it one bit. I laughed (harder and more frequently than I did in #5) because it is so darn funny, and I cried because parts of it are so fetching tragic. Allie Brosh is relatable and outlandish and incredibly talented.

7. Things That Are, Amy Leach: This collection of essays makes the natural world seem magical and fantastical. I had the privilege of hearing Leach read from this book and also workshopping one of my essays with her, and it was wonderful. Check out her bluegrass readings online, and you will see how delightful and quirky she is. Love love love.

8. Moby Dick, Herman Melville: This novel is a dream. I love essays, and I love fiction, and this book manages to be both. I took my merry time reading it because I didn't want to rush––I wanted to relish in Melville's seductive prose. I admit, at times I wanted more narrative, but in the end, I was won over. Take a gander at mobydickbigread.com, and listen to Tilda Swinton's reading of Chapter One and Benedict Cumberbatch's reading of Chapter 58.

9. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys: Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favorites, so it's surprising that I hadn't heard about Wide Sargasso Sea before this year. I love how fragmented and imaginative this novel is, and I love the idea of fleshing out a character that is so little explored in the original text. I'm looking forward to reading Jane Eyre again to see how this book affects my reading of it.

10: Birdology, Sy Montgomery: A collection of personal essays about Montgomery's interactions with birds. What could be more delightful? Both informative and charming. Read it.

11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: I reveled in how deliciously depressing this book is. Give me a great melancholy book with doomed characters and I'm a happy girl (weird, I know––don't judge).


BONUS: Most Disappointing Books I Read in 2013:

1. The Haunted Mesa, Louis L'Amour: I really REALLY did not want this book to turn sci-fi/fantasy halfway through. I wanted it to stay a creepy ghost story steeped in Native American legend and myth, not a gateway to a different dimension. I felt like it was such a cop-out. Blech.

2. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson: I feel blasphemous putting RL Stevenson anywhere near a Most Disappointing list, because I love his essays with all my heart, and I love Treasure Island. But this book just did not do it for me. I was bored through the entire second half. Maybe I wasn't in the mood?

3. Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, Willard Spiegelman: I really wanted this book to be great. That title! Taking pleasure in the ordinary! It sounded so wonderful. But I found Spiegelman's essays dull and a bit lackluster. Also, as a narrator he came off as pompous and a bit too self-satisfied. Alas.


(Note: I really love even numbers, and I am uncomfortable with the fact that both of my lists end in odd numbers. Should I indulge in my obsessive compulsive tendencies and add one more book to each list? Yes, yes I should. Without further ado:

Another Best Book:

12. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons: Witty, charming, cheeky.

Another Disappointing Book:

4. A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle: What's with the weird Utah tangent? Seemed so out of place. I love Doyle's other Sherlock stories, but this one wasn't his best.

The end.)

*deep sigh of relief* and folk music

I must say, it feels nice to have passed my thesis defense.

I worried about it for so long (perhaps worried too much), but it ended up being grand. In the middle of my defense, I had a very clear realization: I was enjoying it. And then I remembered that I'm in a master's program because I love writing and I love studying writing. I love reading good books and learning from my brilliant professors and fellow students (who are also brilliant). So it wasn't that strange that I enjoyed my defense. I'm always worried because sometimes I have a hard time articulating my thoughts, but I must have made at least a small measure of sense, and for that I was grateful. 

Now if I can take another deep breath, I'll make it through the rest of my revisions and grading and be done with this semester. Which will be great. Except...

I'm actually really sad that this chapter of my life is coming to a close. Maybe it's just that I don't know what in the world I'm going to do next, or maybe it's because I'm sad to say goodbye to so many wonderful people that I'm blessed to see almost every day. I'm thankful for writing workshops and lunch dates having so many people around who sympathize with my plight because they are going through the same exact thing. That camaraderie is so difficult to find. So for all of those reasons, it will be hard to say goodbye when I leave Provo.

I guess I'm not leaving just yet, so I shouldn't get too choked up here. 

And now that I've waxed (super) cheesy, I'll end by saying that I've rediscovered my love of folk music/bluegrass. Here are a few samples from The Wailin' Jennys: 

speaking to the dead

I had a nice conversation with Charles Lamb yesterday. Well, to be honest, it was with his gravestone, but his remains were there, so it might as well have been true.

Let's see. Allow me to back up for a mo ("mo" being "moment," a Britishism that I fully intend to incorporate into my daily vocabulary. Moving on). For those of you who don't know, I'm in England this summer, not to be an annoying tourist, but to be an annoying student researcher. I'm reading my way through the canonical writers of my genre––the personal essay. I've covered quite a bit of ground so far, but all the way back in May I started with Charles Lamb, who is considered by many to be the father of the English personal essay (with Michel de Montaigne as the father of the essay in general. But he was French, so of course we needed an English forefather as well). Anyway, because of his reputation, I started off my British adventure by reading a couple of his essay collections, Essays of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia (Elia being his pseudonym), and although I've moved through nearly a dozen essayists this summer since Lamb, I keep coming back to him.

Quite literally, in fact. Last week I visited one of Lamb's former homes in London, which happily still stands today. Steeling my courage and suppressing my shy nature, I knocked on the door to see if I could persuade the current resident to show me around. Luckily, a nice woman named Julia opened the door and happily obliged. The house was tall and narrow with fantastically creaky staircases, and the view from the very top floor, as Julia informed me, still looked similar to what Lamb would have seen as he and his spinster sister Mary looked out the window, because the architecture at the street level had changed more than the top levels of the homes on the street. Yesterday I traveled to Edmonton Green, which is in North London, and is also where Lamb lived until he died. Lamb's Cottage, which also still stands, had a lovely exterior, but unfortunately the locked front iron gates stopped me from accosting the current residents. Oh, bother. So I moved on to St. Anne's church, just right up the street, where Lamb and his sister Mary were buried.

It took me awhile to find the gravestone, as it was a pretty well-occupied churchyard cemetery and many of the gravestones were worn enough to make the text indistinguishable. After a few goings-over, I found it, and sat down to have a small chat. At first I felt odd talking to a gravestone, but after eating a granola bar and chatting for a minute, we were old friends. You see, his writing is so endearing––not that he was singularly good natured, because he definitely had a crotchety streak (although not as much as his pal Hazlitt), but because his essays portray both the amiable and crotchety sides of his character so well that the reader (at least this reader) instantly feels like a friend and confidant. His faults, those that he frankly exposed to the reader, make him infinitely more real and interesting. Because we humans aren't really attracted to people who are perfect––we want to be friends with those people who are as messy and moody as we are.

Anyway, we had a good talk. I even picked a few flowers around the churchyard to set on his grave (I'm not sure if it's unlucky to pick flowers off another man's grave, but for crying out loud, one guy had an entire lilac bush growing around his tomb. I just took one).

I think that the best literature, whether it be nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, whatever, is the kind of literature that makes us want to know the writer (even if it's just because he/she is so wildly crazy that you can't help but imagine what a riot he/she would be in person). I don't know if anyone has thought, after reading a really lame, trashy book, "I really want to meet [insert name of trashy romance novelist]." When I read something truly fascinating or strange or witty, I really just want to sit down with the writers and ask them what in the world was going through their brains when they wrote said story/essay/poem. So the reason why I wanted to sit down and have a chat with Charles Lamb is that I was wishing I really could sit down with him and see if he was as great as I think he is, and see what kind of a brain produced writing that people still love.

And that's my two cents for the day.

Pictures to follow.