50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Page 16 of 33

November 20, 2017 /

“Ordinarily a man on the streets of Gion wouldn’t notice a girl like me . . . yet not only had this man bothered to speak to me, he’d actually spoken kindly. He’d addressed me in a way that suggested I might be a young woman of standing—the daughter of a good friend, perhaps. For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I’d always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness—a world in which fathers didn’t sell their daughters. The noise and hubbub of so many people living their lives of purpose around me seemed to stop; or at least, I ceased to be aware of it. And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

November 16, 2017 /

“I couldn’t help feeling, the more I looked at her, that she was like a tree that has begun to lose its leaves. I was so shocked by the whole effect that I think I must have taken a step back, or let out a gasp, or in some way given her some hint of my feelings, for all at once she said to me, in that raspy voice of hers:

‘What are you looking at!’

‘I’m very sorry, ma’am. I was looking at your kimono,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.’

This must have been the right answer—if there was a right answer—because she let out something of a laugh, though it sounded like a cough.

‘So you like it, do you?’ she said, continuing to cough, or laugh, I couldn’t tell which. ‘Do you have any idea what it cost?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘More than you did, that’s for certain.'”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

November 13, 2017 /

“As a historian, I have always regarded memoirs as source material. A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world. It must differ from biography in that a memoirist can never achieve the perspective that a biographer possesses as a matter of course. Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us—so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.”

—from the “Translator’s Note” prefacing Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

His Dark Materials Trilogy

November 9, 2017 /

Hello again, class.

I started The Golden Compass, the first book in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, months ago. Within a few chapters, though I barely knew the characters or the world Pullman had built, his writing drew me in—in a way that hasn’t happened with me since I read Harry Potter. Pullman’s teenage fiction novels are written like poetry.

I finished The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the trilogy, a few days ago. The series as a whole is controversial, intoxicating, and jaw-dropping in all the ways sci-fi and fantasy should be—it completely surpassed my expectations. I can think of hundreds of reasons why this book series made the list.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

The story follows Lyra Belacqua, a young girl with a propensity for lying and storytelling. She lives in a world a lot like ours, with a few key differences—one being that every person is born with a daemon, a spirit-like animal that acts as a conscience. Lyra, with her daemon Pantalaimon and her friend Will Parry, gets caught up in a peculiar adventure, involving a kingdom of armored bears, a clan of witches hundreds of years old, a mystical truth-telling compass, a series of otherworldly portals, and a cast of characters with dangerous and obscure motives.

For all the plot over three heart-pounding novels—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—Pullman never forgets the carefully structured theme of innocence in the face of corruption. Of all the enemies Lyra faces, the corrupt Church is probably the most intimidating. The Church of Pullman’s universe is overbearing, manipulative, and full of subservient agents who will do anything in the name of the Authority.

But for Pullman, it wasn’t enough to point out the corruption of religious institutions—his novels attempt to reveal corruption in the existence of God. He writes about the ongoing battle of humanity, between those who humbly submit to a greater power and those who seek wisdom and refute oppression. His novels point out the inherent immorality of a Kingdom of Heaven, like the immorality of any dictatorship in the modern age. The overarching plot of the trilogy goes so far as to use Christian theology (and mythology) to dismantle the Christian story of God—portraying God as the villain of humanity’s ongoing battle.

Naturally, the His Dark Materials Trilogy was met with controversy. Pullman’s story isn’t just atheistic (which can be controversial by nature)—it is also mature, saturated in sci-fi violence, and marketed for a younger audience. It’s probably still banned across the globe.

The trilogy makes a strong case for atheism, which was hard for me to read, but also helpful in my understanding of life outside of religion. I grew up with religion in my life, and I’ve come to accept those that don’t have religion in theirs—it’s simply not for everyone, and that’s a hard lesson to learn. I started reading The Golden Compass with something like a religious bias, and it made me read everything Pullman wrote with a grain of salt.

Author Philip Pullman

That doesn’t stop me from agreeing with most, if not all, of Pullman’s criticisms of the corrupt church he is familiar with. Religion has a history of abuse that cannot be dismissed, and those that choose to live with religion must always be aware of the power, and therefore the corruption, that religious institutions have a tendency toward. Aware of that corruption, Pullman pushes back against religious institutions through these novels—through literature, popular culture, and the education of young minds. Children will eventually have to make their own theological decisions in the real world, and books like the His Dark Materials trilogy can be a healthy part of making those decisions.

Like I said, these books were hard to read at times (I work at a church, for crying out loud!) but it certainly helped that these books were well written. It always impresses me when books have strong messages delivered by strong characters, and a fantastic fantasy world to back up big ideas. For a novel to work, all of the separate puzzle pieces have to fit together well, and the completed puzzle has to leave an impression. These three novels did both.

My next read is Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, and I’m diving into this one cold. I can only hope it’s good!

Have a good week!

Prof. Jeffrey

November 6, 2017 /

“”When you stopped believing in God . . . did you stop believing in good and evil?’
‘No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.'”

—from The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

November 2, 2017 /

“Will considered what to do. When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.”

—from The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

Off-Topic: My Want-To-Read List

October 30, 2017 /

Happy almost-Halloween, class!

Let me be honest with you. I’m only 23 years old. 23 years is not enough time to read all of the best books ever written, no matter what the other 23-year-olds tell you. I’ve read a lot of ’em, but my Want-To-Read List is longer than my Already-Read List.

All of those posts I’ve made about books that are missing from the list are my way of filling in the gaps of the list itself; but then there are those amazing books that I haven’t read yet. You’ve probably heard of them too—they pop up on lists and blog posts, or in English classes for all ages. You may have even read some of them yourself, but I’ve never gotten around to them.

So below is a list of the literary greats I’ve heard about. Some were recommended to me by friends or teachers (or both), and others have been praised by critics for decades. Some are centuries old, and others barely a decade young. It’s a rather arbitrarily made list, but they’re all books I’ll be excited to finish one day.

If you’ve read any of them, feel free to tell me why you think they’re great! And if I need to add to my list, tell me what I’m missing. If your recommendations are flowing, I may begin reading something new sooner rather than later. 

  1. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
  2. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
  3. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
  4. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  5. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  6. Atonement by Ian McEwan
  7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  8. Blindness by José Saramago
  9. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  10. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
  11. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  12. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  13. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  14. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  15. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
  16. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  17. Emma by Jane Austen
  18. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
  19. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
  20. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  21. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
  22. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
  23. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  24. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  25. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
  26. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  27. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
  28. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
  29. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  30. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  31. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  32. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  33. Madame Bovary by Gustave Floubert
  34. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  35. Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie
  36. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  37. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  38. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  39. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
  40. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
  41. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  42. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  44. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  45. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian
  46. The Time Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle
  47. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  48. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  49. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
  50. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
October 26, 2017 /

“‘There are two great powers . . . and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

—from The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Quite Quotable #30.2

October 23, 2017 /

“‘Dark matter is what my research team is looking for. No one knows what it is. There’s more stuff out there in the universe than we can see, that’s the point. We can see the stars and the galaxies and the things that shine, but for it all to hang together and not fly apart, there needs to be a lot more of it—to make gravity work, you see. But no one can detect it. So there are lots of different research projects trying to find out what it is, and this is one of them. . . . We think it’s some kind of elementary particle. Something quite different from anything discovered so far. But the particles are very hard to detect.'”

—from The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Missing From the List: The Outsiders

October 19, 2017 /

Hello again, class.

The Outsiders reminds me a little of The Catcher in the Rye. Both are told from the angst-y teenage minds of mid-20th Century boys, and both support much more realistic depictions of teenage life than most novels ever have, then or since. But there are two simple differences between them: 1) Salinger wrote Catcher for adults, while S. E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders for teenagers; and 2) Hinton was a teenager when she wrote it.

So this book—of teenagers, by a teenager, and for teenagers—was one of the first of its kind, and remains the embodiment of young adult literature even today. It clearly should be on the list.

The story of the gang war between the Greasers and the Socs is by now a classic. Ponyboy Curtis, our protagonist, is young, clever, misguided, and heroic, and he lives with his two brothers on the Greaser side of the war. After Ponyboy and his friend Johnny murder a member of the Socs in self-defense, they go on the run, upsetting the dynamic of both gangs and the war between them.

But more important than the story and even the colorful characters is the spark that started the novel. S. E. Hinton was unimpressed by the stories written for teenagers of her day—she found nothing but stories about mindless high school drama and cheesy romantic relationships, none of which reflected her own experiences. She did what any creative person would do—she wrote her own novel to fill in the gaps. The result was a competent story that changed the game for teenage fiction.

Image from the movie adaptation, The Outsiders (1983)

The Outsiders was controversial, and still is. No one wanted their children or their students reading about gang violence, and as a result, the novel has appeared on lists of banned books for decades. You all know by this point that I believe no book deserves to be banned, though it’s particularly strange that this book ever belonged to that category—the violence featured is tame, and it isn’t even the point of the story. Hinton’s intentions were about realism; she wanted people her age to read a novel and see themselves reflected in the characters. The Outsiders was meant to connect with young readers, who want a story that doesn’t patronize and actually means something.

I don’t imagine much of the young adult genre would exist today without The Outsiders. The controversy probably helped make it more famous, and the power of the work itself helped keep it there, but its value extends beyond itself. Without The Outsiders, there’s no Harry Potter Series, no Hunger Games Trilogy, Giver Series . . . and the list goes on. For that, The Outsiders deserves recognition. For being a good story, it deserves a spot on the list.

I’m still finishing up The Amber Spyglass, the third novel in the His Dark Materials Trilogy—another series that wouldn’t have made it in the young adult genre without The Outsiders paving the way first. It also happens to be one of the more controversial book series in the entire genre, and for much better reasons than The Outsiders was.

We’ll discuss it more next class!

Prof. Jeffrey

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