Favorite Books (Today)

A friend recently challenged me to post my ten favorite books on Facebook, one a day, for the next ten days.  I've decided to post them all in one fell swoop here so I can try to articulate my thinking a bit.  Choosing ten favorite books is just about impossible for me.  It's akin to choosing a favorite child.  So instead, I tried to think about the ten books that are really speaking to me today as ones that changed me as a person and a writer. My list of favorites is constantly changing.  So, this is my list of ten favorites today.  It might be different tomorrow.

As you'll see if you keep reading, sometimes I've chosen one book by a favorite author simply as a placeholder for many books.

I'm listing these in no real particular order but my two favorite writers are Willa Cather and Thomas Hardy, so I'll talk about them first.

I absolutely love Cather's My Antonia, O Pioneers!, My Mortal Enemy, and Death Comes For the Archbishop. They are all simultaneously very different and singular while all being singularly Catheresque.  But when I think about the one that was most transformative for me, I have to choose My Antonia.  To me, it is a book about pining--one of my favorite themes--and it is in particular a book about that perhaps most common pining:  homesickness, which is something I know  well.  I also think that it is probably the most autobiographical of Cather's books.  I believe she is revealing herself in a way she never did before or again.  Having read everything I can about Cather, no other character she ever wrote is more like her than Jim Burden, the narrator who tells us of the way he has pined for Antonia--and ultimately, Nebraska, and the West, and America--his whole life.  It's a nostalgic book, but never sentimental.  It's an elegy, but it's never maudlin.  To me, it is one of the essential novels of the American experience, and I think it's meditations on immigration make it more relevant than ever before.  Most of all, I love those characters, especially strong, determined, obstacle-laden Antonia, whom I always picture standing in a field with her fists on her hips, the red sun behind her.

One of the best days of my entire life was when I got to spend hours roaming the bluebell-decorated woods where Thomas Hardy grew up in Dorset, England.  We got to see his birthplace, the church he attended as a child, and the elegant estate he lived in as an older man.  We got to see handwritten manuscripts and his mother dress and his very own writing desk.  But nothing moved me as much as those woods.  I'll think about them for the rest of my life.  The way the breeze stirred through them not much stronger than a breath, the wild ponies running free there, the still pond, the glow of beech leaves above me when there was sunshine, and the mist on my face when there was rain.  I could go on and on.  So, when I was forced to pick just one of Hardy's books for this list, I chose The Woodlanders, mostly because they conjure up those woods so perfectly.  But also because at its heart is a story of longing that is hard to equal in literature. It's the major novel of his that doesn't get talked about nearly enough.  The others of his that I adore are Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and either of them could have easily filled this slot, too.  Lots of people tell me they can't read Hardy because he's too dark.  That's why I love him.  He was so ahead of his time, especially in the way he looked at marriage and religion, often with ideas that wouldn't become mainstream until after World War II, although he died in 1928.  No other writer can conjure place like him, and no other writer has had so great an influence on me.

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence is an epic that I think about all the time.  It's such a complex look at the way parental love shapes our entire lives.  But it's also about the joys and sorrows of being an artist.  The way he captures the coal mining region of England is unparalleled.  The way he writes about trees and meadows and the people who populate his novel--all of it is pretty perfect.  It is also sensual in every way a book can be: not only sexual relationships, but also the weather, the food, the art, the music.  Sons and Lovers is a big, dense book, and I am a slow, lumbering reader.  But I devoured it nonetheless.  It is by far my favorite of his.  Lawrence is actually hit or miss for me.  But the other book of his that is among my favorites is a perfect novella called The Fox.

Probably no other book had such an impact on me as The Color Purple by Alice Walker.  I was raised in a strict fundamentalist home and community and our idea of God was very small.  Reading this novel made my idea of God very large.  It completely changed who I was not only spiritually but in just about every way.  I saw the world in a different light, especially issues of race and gender.  Once, when I was teaching a Southern Lit class at a university I won't name, I assigned all of the students to read this novel, mostly because I think everyone should read it.  One of the students complained, saying that it was pornographic and unbelievable.  Her disbelief was tied up in the fact that she believed "no woman has ever had it this hard."  I told her that that kind of thinking was exactly why we should be reading it.  That student never got on board during that semester but I hope that one day she returned to it and gave it another chance.  The reason she was so opposed to it was because that it challenged everything she believed in.  That's why I loved it.  I also love it because I think of those characters as real people.  I will never forget them, especially Celie.

When I was in ninth grade, I somehow stumbled upon a copy of Black Mountain Breakdown by Lee Smith, who was raised not far from me, just over the Virginia state line, in Grundy.  For the first time ever I encountered characters in a book who were like me and my family.  They ate what we ate (pinto beans, sauerkraut, fried cabbage, fried potatoes, etc.), talked the way we did, went to towns where I had actually been, listened to the songs that people sang in my church and on my porch.  For the first in my life, I saw myself in a book.  And few things are more life-changing.  After that, I read everything I could by Lee Smith, but no other book of hers is as masterful, devastating, and remarkable as Fair and Tender Ladies.  It not only gives you the entire history of Appalachia over the course of the twentieth century through one woman's point of view, it also draws you fully into that woman's life.  Ivy Rowe is one of the great creations of American literature and the only reason she isn't celebrated as such is because most of those who hold the reins of American literature cannot handle such a complex Appalachian woman.  My other favorite books by Lee Smith are Saving Grace and Live Bottomless (included in the collection News of the Spirit) the latter a novella that had a huge influence on my newest book, Southernmost.

There's a line in Gilead I will never forget:  "For me, writing has always felt like praying...you feel you are with someone."  That line sums up what I love about Gilead.  It was a spiritual awakening for me in much the same way The Color Purple was. I think that Gilead is a sort of praise song to everything and everybody.  Lots of people have trouble getting through it.  It is slow and introspective.  That's why I love it.   This is one of the harder ones for me to pick because I love every novel that Robinson has ever written.  Housekeeping, Lila, and Home, are all favorites of mine, and I think they are all three more accessible. But I am choosing Gilead because it's the first one of hers to really light a fire under me, and because I think it's the most brilliant of hers.

John Irving is another writer who is hit-or-miss for me.  Some of his books I just cannot get through.  Others, I couldn't put down.  No other book of his hit me so hard as A Prayer for Owen Meany.  I will never, ever forget it and its amazing cast of characters.  As the child of a Vietnam veteran, the book helped me to understand that war better than anything else has.  Perhaps that's one reason I love it so much, but even more I think it's the first book that completely reached its arms out, drew me in, and swallowed me whole.  When I was reading A Prayer for Owen Meany, the world around me completely shut down and I was transported into the heart of the book.  Irving created a world and characters so real that I could hardly snap out of reading it to get back to real life.  That's a real accomplishment and few books have done it as well. Whenever I see the cover, I am filled up with a good kind of sadness for the characters that live within.

A few years ago I was about to go to Ireland for the first time, to teach for three weeks in a class that would take me all over the island.  I did lots of research on what I should read to prepare.  Someone told me that I had to read Bernard MacLaverty, and I can't thank them enough for that because he is now one of my all-time favorite writers.  I have loved every single book of his, including his most recent, Midwinter Break, which came out just last year.  If you want to understand the Troubles, there is no better source than his very short novel Cal.  His novel Lamb had a tremendous influence on my forthcoming book, Southernmost.  But Grace Notes is the one I have to choose as my favorite of his because it articulates so many of the emotions I have as a person and so many of the emotions that I know to be hard to articulate as a novelist.  Yet he does it so well.  MacLaverty is interested in the specifics of everyday life, the big drama of normal lives.  That's what I care about as a writer and a reader, too.  I can't think of another book that has so expertly been able to capture the power of music,  the complexities of the parent-child relationship, and, most of all, what it means to be an artist.  MacLaverty is from Ireland but has lived in Scotland for the past thirty years or so...this book perfectly bridges those two cultures and that's another reason I love it.

I love Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter because of the way it plays with form, mixing disciplines (poetry, fiction, nonfiction), conjuring music on the page, and creative cinematic images I can not get out of my head.  An absolute masterpiece that I will never get over.

Everyone loves Their Eyes Were Watching God, and so do I, but my favorite book by Zora Neale Hurston (one of the five or six authors I worship) is Jonah's Gourd Vine.  It's another one that had a huge impact on my new novel because it looks at the way a man can be torn between God and his own mind--or in Jonah's case, his own body.  I love the way it examines the way that religion and being human are so often at odds with one another.  And I love the way Hurston takes me completely into that world.  I love everything about this novel and it seems like one that not that many people know about, so I especially like passing it onto others.

The last book I'm listing today is Conrad Richter's The Light in the Forest.  It's the only book on the list that could be classified as young adult.  It wasn't marketed that way at the time of its publication in 1953.  The plot might seem cliched now just because it's been ripped off so much since it first arrived:  a white boy in Revolutionary War times is kidnapped by Indians, assimilates, and when he is taken back to his white family, cannot assimilate with them.  What I love most about it is that it, too, was ahead of its time in the way it thought about the erasure of Native Americans, but most of all the reason it's one of my favorite books is because of the way Richter writes about the forest, and specifically "the light in the forest", which I think about every single time I'm in the woods.  I won't give away what that phrase means, but it is pretty profound, and it's the reason I tell so many people to read this book.  I also love Richter's The Trees, the first of a trilogy of books about the settling of America (the other two titles are The Fields and The Town).

Now that I've written the above, I'm thinking of so many other current favorites of mine, a few of which I will list below.  In choosing these ten my top ten has already shifted and changed, as it is constantly doing, just as I said at the outset.  Any of the books listed below could have also easily been on my top ten list.  I hope some of these are books you love, too, or that you will read.  Let me know any thoughts or concerns.  Happy Reading.

Other favorites (today, no particular order):

Life After Life and A God in Ruins-Kate Atkinson
Days Without End-Sebastian Barry
The Lacuna and The Bean Trees-Barbara Kingsolver
The Dollmaker-Harriette Arnow
River of Earth-James Still
Jayber Crow-Wendell Berry
The Outsiders-SE Hinton
Alias Grace-Margaret Atwood
Bastard Out of Carolina-Dorothy Allison
The Grass Dancer-Susan Power
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse-Louise Erdrich
Father and Son-Larry Brown
The Power and the Glory-Graham Greene
Exiles-Ron Hansen
Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth-Denise Giardina
True Grit-Charles Portis
Benediction-Kent Haruf
The Evening Chorus and Coventry-Helen Humphreys
Brooklyn-Colm Toibin
Feather Crowns-Bobbie Ann Mason
Beloved-Toni Morrison
The Essex Serpent-Sarah Perry
Angle of Repose-Wallace Stegner
Mothering Sunday-Graham Swift
Abide With Me-Elizabeth Strout
A Spool of Blue Thread-Anne Tyler
Transatlantic and Let the Great World Spin-Colum McCann
News of the World-Paulette Jiles