words, words, words ...
Books. Vonnegut in his cynical yet trenchant musings called them something like ink on mashed tree pulp, and that's pretty much all they are, except for the smell ... old paper, perhaps it's the glue they use too, and the smell of compressed universes writhing between covers. The smell of my grandmother's library, of our house, of a library. Of a good bookstore. I can sit and smell a book for hours, absolutely lost to the present, inhaling the pungence of a completely alternate reality. When I come out I am almost depressed to find I don't actually inhabit it.
This is not a comprehensive list of the best books in the world, or even those I consider to be the best. It grows and changes and I'm sure I've forgotten something. There is no way to sort out what makes a book good, what kind of category it falls into, so I lump The Fermata (pretty much just porn) in with Wuthering Heights (i just like to make the diarisis on the ë of Brontë--plus it's a good read) in with nonfiction. Pardon my literary taste.
At the bottom are links to my friends'
booklists, which you should visit and soak up. We've all read
different things and I love profiting from their recommendations.
|
Catch-22, Joseph Heller The Mists of Avalon (& its sequels), Marion Zimmer Bradley Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card 1984, George Orwell Brave New World, Aldous Huxley 
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail BulgakovIshmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë 
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García-Márquez, trans. RabassaThe World according to Garp, John Irving Hamlet & Macbeth, Shakespeare Antigone, both by Sophocles and esp. Jean Anouilh The War of the Saints, Jorge Amado (trans. Rabassa) 
The Passion, Jeanette WintersonThe Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen The Fermata, Nicholson Baker 
Orlando, Virginia WoolfLe Premier Jardin, Anne Hébert A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman Flatland, Edward Abbott The Alanna Books, Tamora Pierce 
The God of Small Things, Arundhati RoyThe Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom StoppardThe Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë |
BAD:
libraries of trusted others:
anna's
alyssa's
anni's
hollis's
laurel's
melanie's