Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Fucking Facebook. Anyway, some member of EMS tagged me for a book meme and of course I will bore you to death with my answers.

The instructions:
Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. I chose these not because they are my favourite book necessarily but because they have stuck with me. Tag 15 friends, including me because I’m interested in seeing what books my friends choose.

Commentary is not a requirement, a plain list is fine.

(note: I’m not tagging anyone except the person who originally did the quiz)

1. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man
I love the character of Stephen Dedalus. This book has passages of sheer poetry that make me swoon. And let’s face it, you know you want to be the one responsible for Stephen’s ‘Catholic’ fall (that is, the prostitute that deflowers Stephen. So. Fucking. Hot.). One of the few books I’ve reread and one of my copies is dog-eared to death because I have so many favourite passages.

2. James Joyce, Ulysses
Took me two and a half weeks to read this – that was my sole occupation, along with being an exam invigilator. I once knew a guy called Jason Maletic who told me I was too dumb to understand it and not to read it. He was wrong. Favourite episode: ‘Oxen of the Sun’. I wrote a paper on it, silly me.

3. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
For a book about a dude who ends up having to go to a sanitorium and stay there, this novel is fucking epic – brilliant showcase of some of the ideas that have utmost importance in Western thought. It’s not an easy read, as a result but so damn worth it.

4. Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
I have a very soft spot for this book and enjoyed it so much I finished it in one day. It pains me that some think de Botton is a hack but hey, I’m a philosophy layperson so of course I don’t.

5. Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
An attempt to rationalise love in novel form. Hilarity (of a most British fashion) ensues.

6. Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate
Novel written in verse. Seth is just…ace.

7. Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
This woman can write historical fiction like no other.

8. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell
Modernist slut’s wet dream. Not for the faint-hearted but just a work of genius. Moore’s research gets me hard. A graphic novel retelling and exploration of the Jack the Ripper murders.

9. Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford
Deptford, London, is not far from where I used to live in London. It’s also where Christopher Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl – hardcore. Burgess writes a novel from the point of view of said Marlowe who I think is a rockstar compared to Shakespeare.

10. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
A man’s cat goes missing and thus begins an epistemological quest. I was scarred for weeks after upon reading some of the accounts of torture that occurred as a result of the war between the Russians and the Japanese.

11. Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book
Heian Japan was a poetic, sensual time. I find this book inspiring for so many reasons. Hey, I even wrote a poem about Sei Shonagon (and even better, it got published).

12. Liza Dalby, The Tale of Murasaki
Dalby is the only Western woman to have supposedly trained as a geisha (which, thank you very much is much more than being an escort). This novel features a lot of the tanka Murasaki wrote and weaves in fragments from Murasaki’s epic The Tale of Genji.

13. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
I know, I know, it’s set as a text for first-year lit students but for damned good reasons. Marco Polo tells stories about his travels to an ageing Kubla Khan. Calvino is such a beautiful writer and so wonderfully human. If you’ve never read any of his work, this is a stellar starting point.

14. Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons
I studied this play in high school and it still hasn’t left me. Props to my old English teacher Mr Paul Ryan for the English lurve.

15. Natsume Soseki, I Am A Cat
A cat who never gets a name but who makes astute societal observations. It’s also a fantastic book because Western modernism was introduced to Japan (the Meiji era) at the time Soseki was writing so he is basically recounting Japanese feudalism’s death.