Pondering the FB game of rapidly choosing 10 titles that marked you, I noticed that it isn’t necessarily the great classics that leave an impression. Sometimes a less ambitious novel drops into your empty pocket at just the right moment. Books serve a variety of purposes. I’ve tried to define why particular books flipped through my brain when I was tagged in the game.
Share the Scandal: When I was a junior in high school my good friend M. placed this book in my hand with a knowing grin. The surprising source was her mother, Mrs. K. She liked to bridge the gap from time to time by exposing a piece of adult life to us teenage girls. The book came out in 1969 and it chronicled the lives of working class women in Detroit. The book was racy and magnetic. It featured a bold, carnal and broken adult world with shiny, jagged edges. My innocent eyes were glued in a heartbeat. My girlfriend and I cackled and gasped over lurid bits for weeks, months thereafter. A warm memory has overlaid this dark narrative. Recently, The New Yorker podcast featured JOC’s short story, Mastiff, read by Louise Erdrich. Let’s say it isn’t the kind of story that evaporates discreetly in the hours that follow. Them by Joyce Carol Oates
Drink the antidote: A book can be an instrument of comfort and escape when life renders those 2 things synonymous. I read Colette’s short stories in the days after my father’s death. Days where the past and the future broke apart and I wandered from task to rite in a dull fog of uncertainty. Colette’s stories overflow with earthly pleasures and predicaments. There are bright colors, fragrant flowers, impromptu meals and sensual escapades. The siren song of France plays softly in the background. I reread a few stories this weekend and was struck more by the melancholic themes among the French bibelots. Nevertheless, at the time, it offered a benign alternate world; Turn two pages with a glass of water 3x a day. The Collected Stories of Colette
Widen your empathic horizons: a book can open a door to a more enlightened you. In 2002, Jeffrey Eugenides blazed a trail into the dark thicket of of hormonal and sexual identity problems with Middlesex. This large, baggy novel shadows the lives of a Greek immigrant family in the American Middle West . However, the main character’s rare condition, hermaphroditism, dominates the story once it emerges. The protagonist Cal/Calliope becomes a very specific individual over the course of the novel, as opposed to a statistic. The reader journeys from uneasy observer to sympathetic insider regarding gender identity issues. It is a modern classic. The Marriage Plot is his latest novel. The author looks back at youthful expectations and the then less-understood symptoms of mental illness. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Gain perspective: My friend L handed me this tome at the precise moment I needed it: early middle age. The Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy traces the arc of a woman’s life in medieval Norway. It’s a cradle to casket saga. Lavran’s extraordinary daughter, Kristin, survives every trial of life with a fierce will and intelligence. The climate is extreme and living conditions are spartan. Society is a treacherous place -its margins even more so. Nevertheless, there is ample joy and sensual pleasure in Kristin’s life. I was amazed by the modernity of the tale. Worlds separate Kristin and me. Yet, her trials were instructive. I recently bought a used copy of the first book on Abe books. I’m determined to reread it this year. Undset won the Nobel Priize in literature in 1928. Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
Doze off, vaguely terrified: I don’t know why murder mysteries relax me. I used to keep a mystery tucked under a spare mattress for insomnia bouts. Is it because they wrestle your mind away from that dark-thought spiral? You are wrenched into an imaginary place- dark, threatening and best of all, make-believe. I’ve read everything PD James has written, including her autobiography. The woman is a genius! A more recent read was The Lake in the Woods by Tim O’Brien. It began as one kind of book, an unsolved murder mystery, but ended as another thing entirely. It concerns the marriage between a charismatic, politically ambitious Vietnam War veteran and his college sweetheart, Kathy. The book begins with Kathy’s disappearance from a cottage on a lake, which they’ve retreated to after his election defeat. It is a profile of John Wade’s psychology. An examination of America’s relationship with this unpopular war is embedded there. Notwithstanding all that, what happened to Kathy? Indeed. The Lake in the Woods by Tim O’Brien
Get guidance between the covers: (:-D not that kind) In fact, it took me a long time to recover from my youth: to cease to see myself as the sole victim of something singularly tragic. Finding the stairs out of that narcissistic cellar may be entitled, ‘achieving maturity’. I needed books to SHOW ME THE WAY. Although Rose Aubrey is a contemporary of my grandmother, lives in a crumbling villa in England, teeters on a narrow ledge of upper class respectability, and embodies large parts of her inventor, the great Rebecca West, I still identified with her in The Fountain Overflows. Her untidy family life felt familiar. The wolf is frequently at the door of the feckless Piers’ and the harried Clare’s ménage. Their four children scramble to adapt to the changing seasons of their circumstances. West‘s entertaining narrative proves that one can weather hardship without being diminished by it. She helped me realize that you can and ought to invent your adult life. I would put Anywhere but Here by Mona Simpson in the same category. Her book concerns a mother-daughter story in which the daughter travels towards the awareness that her adored mother (and closest ally) is mentally ill. Mona Simpson described a fragment of her own compelling story on TEDtalks recently. Gossip tidbit: she discovered rather late in life that she is the half-sister of the late Steve Jobs. The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
Anywhere but here by Mona Simpson