10 of My Favorite Novels

Reading is how I explore. It lets me see impossible places, meet dissidents and wizards, and uncover new ideas. I never felt stifled in my small town childhood, because I could always leave home and come back again through books. So for World Book Day, I wanted to trace my way through some of the novels that have influenced my life and changed how I read. These are the books that brought me to new frontiers of the written words and the ones that bring me back home.

The Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis)

Narnia is my literary homeland. I don’t remember a time before I knew Lucy, Edmund, Susan, Peter, Eustace, and Jill. They grew up alongside me, making mistakes and learning through adventures, and coming to know the Christ-like Lion, Aslan. Because of Narnia, books became my own enchanted wardrobe. I could always slip through the door, and find something more than I expected inside.

The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)

And Middle Earth is where I most often found myself. I’ve read the Lord of the Rings trilogy more times than I remember. I’ve read the Silmarillion and the Books of both Lost and Unfinished Tales. Middle Earth is wide and sprawling, and there are relics and legends to be excavated out of every phrase. And I know that whatever I look in Tolkien’s work, at the heart is the confidence that there is good in the world, and that good is worth fighting for.

The Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan)

This fourteen tome behemoth was the epic fantasy that dominated my late high-school years. Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, the Wheel of Time made me a participant in a book. For the Wheel of Time, I was reading the series as the last books were being published, and spending my free time pouring over the forums where people wildly speculated (with some success) on how it would end. Through this more participatory style of reading, reading became like writing. I learned to make my own connections and predictions about what would happen next, and I got to see those guesses and hopes confirmed or upended in new and exciting ways. The Wheel of Time wasn’t static in the way that Tolkien and Lewis were, and my reading journeys became more dynamic.

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

When I read Of Mice and Men in tenth grade, it completely blew the doors off of what I thought the emotional content of a book could be. I was used to tension and the soaring feeling of adventure and victory. I was not used to sobbing for hours after finishing a book. And I still think about the ending. Whenever I think about my life changing, I think about George and Lenny. What are the costs of my hopes and dreams, and what’s the cost of giving them up?

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

And then I found myself in Russia. The fantasy genre had burned me out by the time I was a college freshman. I couldn’t find a groove of books I consistently liked. For inspiration, I turned to the lists of best books of all time. Those lists brought me to Russian literature, and I’ve stayed there a long time. I’ve talked about Dostoevsky a lot because he made reading immediate to me. Books weren’t just about adventures and fantasy. Books were for here and now. They were about Good and Evil, Truth and Lies, Life and Death, and none expresses these themes so well as Crime and Punishment.

War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

War and Peace changed how ‘real’ I thought books could be. As I’ve expressed before, because War and Peace is incredibly long. But that length allows its characters to grow and fail in cycles. In life, change isn’t static. Sometimes we regress. Sometimes we redefine the basis of or lives. Sometimes we re-redefine it. And sometimes life goes on without much thought or notice. So it is with the characters of War and Peace.

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

I picked up Pride and Prejudice because the internet kept saying it was good. When I put it down, I understood why romantic comedies exist. It’s because Pride and Prejudice is great. It interrogates what a good life is, while being maybe the funniest book I’ve read, and proving once again that dramatic irony always makes a story better. While Dostoevsky taught me that novels can be portentous, Jane Austen reminded me that sometimes it’s good for them to be fun, too.  

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I listened to Never Let Me Go in one sitting, driving between my parents house and where I live now. I couldn’t stop. Ishiguro is his own genre, his own hazy and obscure literary continent. His mood and style turn this sci-fi story of a school for clones and makes it a meditation on memory and the power and urgency of life. Never Let Me Go slowly draws you into a realization of something you half knew the whole time. Even though we’re dying, for now we get to live. 

I AM SOVEREIGN (Nicola Barker)

Nicola Barker is chaos. I didn’t know how many rules there were about writing until she ignored all of them. Her text is unbelievably expressive. She can say more with a tab than lots of authors can say in an entire paragraph. She treats books like actual physical objects, not just a collection of words. And the way she utilizes the visual experience of books through typography and color says things I couldn’t realize were possible in writing.

The Last Unicorn (Peter S Beagle)      

Finally, the Last Unicorn brings me home again, to the land of fantasy. Instead of the wild frontiers of language, the Last Unicorn is a fairy tale. Beagle takes the simple story of a Unicorn trying to free her people from an evil king, and pulls it apart. It’s deconstruction that doesn’t try to tear things down to naught. Rather, the deconstruction in the Last Unicorn has the goal of showing that deep down, there is something real and vital, something about Good and Evil, and Life and Death at the core of this and every fantasy.