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| Foto: Wes Stitt |
I find that books have very different
effects on me at different times in my life. A book I list as a favorite at age
20 I might have no taste for at all by age 40. I loved Dostoyevsky's Crime
and Punishment and Salinger's Franny & Zooey in college, but
when I took them with me to Europe five years later, thinking to reread them
and enjoy them all over again, I found that I no longer cared about
Raskalnikov's moral dilemmas or Franny's religious angst. In a few short years
I went from worshipping those books to not being able to finish them.
Many books have come and gone from my top
five list, but those that remain meant something to me the first time I read
them, and still mean something to me now.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. I almost never
reread books, but this is one I pull out every few years to read again, and I
love it each and every time. L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe investigates two
inter-connected cases: the disappearance and apparent suicide of an Englishman
named Terry Lennox, and the disappearance of Roger Wade, an alcoholic writer
with a dark past. The plot's great, but it's Chandler's prose that shines: “He
was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel,” Marlowe says of one
character. Amazing stuff.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier
and Clay by Michael Chabon. What can I say? Kavalier and Clay has so many things I love
in one book: The Golem of Prague, Harry Houdini, stage magic, Golden Age comic
books, World War II history. I read this one when I was thirty, and it
immediately went into my top five list and hasn't budged. Chabon's prose is a
wonder too: “In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided
to lie down for a while and waste time.”
Dune by
Frank Herbert. The book so wonderful I could never
read any of its seventeen sequels for fear they would be anything less than the
transcendent experience of the first. I particularly love the idea of a
space-faring religious order seeding mythology and prophecy throughout the
planets of the galaxy with the express purpose of using it to their advantage
later if they need it. “He who controls the spice controls the universe.”
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. Published when I
was a child, but I read it as an adult, then immediately read it aloud to my
daughter. I think I might even like the sequel/companion novel Castle in the
Air a little bit better, but it's hard not to list the book that introduced
Sophie Hatter, The Wizard Howl, and literature's greatest fire demon, Calcifer.
“It is quite a risk to spank a wizard for getting hysterical about his hair.”
Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. I list Master
and Commander because it is the first of O'Brian's masterful series of
historical nautical novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon and secret
agent Stephen Maturin, but I love each and every one of these books dearly. I
read the first of these just three years ago, and I've read six more since. I'm
deliberately spacing them out and savoring them, knowing that I have far more years
than Aubrey-Maturin books left. (Or so I hope.) “[I]n the Navy you must always
choose the lesser of two weevils.”
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