15 Books

The rules of this meme are:
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.

My reaction: (stunned silence and then whispered) Too many to count. (Standing in front of bookshelf) How can I pick 15? You're all important to me. I mean, there's you, and you; you, and oh yeah.. I remember you.. Cheeky Mr. Lawrence.. Hmmm.

SO, in no order other than I love them, here are some books that were written especially for me to read (at least it feels that way), some with excerpts because I am bad at following directions, and revisiting my darlings makes me very nostalgic. Read just the big print if you don't have the time:

1. The Portable Dorothy Parker - Dorothy Parker (You know you're my favorite.)
"There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living,
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle,
and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is a province of cattle,
And the rest's for a clam in the shell.
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle -
Would you kindly direct me to hell?"

2. Candide - Voltaire
Go and work in the garden.

3. Cunt - Inga Musico
“In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke says, ‘The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.’ That’s what I want. For other people to love each other without having to partake in them, to possess them, to allow them to be their own inside their solitude, to protect that. I wish people respected each other’s aloneness” (Kristen Kosmas, from Cunt 153).

4. Middlesex - Jefferey Eugenides

5. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

6. No God But God, The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam - Reza Aslan

7. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
[Billy] came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes...When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

8. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

9. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris

10. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
We're prisoners of war...Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.'

11. The Miracle of Mindfulness - Thich Nhat Hanh

12. The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither, but the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a [moth] would alight near the spot where the lotus had bloomed, and its essence was released again, momentary but undeniable.

13. The Awakening - Kate Chopin and The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (What? They're small, so they count as one entry.)

14. Operating Instructions - Anne Lamott
She's tiptoeing into the very beginning of some sort of relationship with God, or with a higher power, or something, but it is very hard for her to believe...I recommended that she think of all of the women who have most adored her in her life and to come up with a sense of God based on that kind of love, on the same protectedness that it gives you to be loved by a really fine woman, a sense of some mysterious regenerative force at the center of things that is maybe just love. She said with great surprise, "I didn't know you could DO that," and I said, "Oh yeah, you can do anything you want, " and by this morning, she'd found a picture of a big cat licking a little cat. She's a great cat lover, and it stuck. So at the hospital this morning, as she sat in the doctor's office getting the chemo IV, and then as she sat around at home all day waiting to become Linda Blair, she said she'd picture this big cat licking her gently and carrying her in its mouth to safer places.

15. Beloved - Toni Morrison (especially the fixing ceremony)
"after fixing herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down.. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her.'Let your mothers hear your laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.'Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. ' For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose.

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced , women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing, damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them that they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

'Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick them out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people, they do not love your hands... Love your hands! Love them! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face... You got to love it, you!...

This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved... and the beat, the beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air...hear me now, love your heart.' Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.[She] wanted to be there now. At least to listen to the spaces that long-ago singing had left behind."

If you read this (especially you who tagged me first: P-ta, Fougs, and Russell); TAG! You're it!