wordsorcerer asked:

What are your favorite books. Top 5 at least.

I really like your photos. :)

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, an Australian who’s not very well known in the United States, which is a sad shame because she’s one of the best novelists of our time. It’s very studied prose and you sense she pays attention to every syllable, but it’s never rigid; all that affect comes across like it’s the most natural thing in the world, gracefully and dancingly and so perfectly.

White Noise by Don DeLillo. I think he captures the post-existential ethos of contemporary culture better than any 21st century writer (even better than David Foster Wallace). A lot of people complain that he rambles, but I love his weird tangents and babbling ellipses. They mirror so well the severe ADHD of our time.

The Collected Works of Franz Kafka. Especially the short story “In the Penal Colony”. It’s amazing how, despite all the horror and surrealism of his crazy dystopic worlds, you can still feel the warmth and humanism of the author. And humor, the guy was funny. He definitely wrote “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” with a grin on his face and yet, the end result’s still miles better than anything his more ‘serious’ contemporaries were able to pull off (cough, Thomas Mann).

Madame Bovary. It’s kind of scary how good Flaubert is at giving voice to the horrible and petty and cruel thoughts that all of us have on occasion, but for which Emma Bovary is the single perfect vessel. Yet, how can you not like her? Flaubert fleshes her out so beautifully, you naturally sympathize (similarly, Humpert Humpert in Lolita earns sympathy with his “fancy prose style” despite being an absolute monster; Flaubert was a profound influence on Nabokov). And in the end her death just rips you to pieces. I can’t read the thing without crying.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I like it for selfish reasons, because I sympathize and identify with the main character, especially because, like me, she’s a young woman trying to ‘make it’ in a scary, uncertain world without compromising her principles. She’s just out of school, and she gets a job as a governess, and she’s all on her own, and she puts all this pressure on herself to succeed but part of her also wants to break free of that and just live and be carefree and give into her impulses. Throw in the I-love-him-but-he’s-so-bad-for-me older guy, the emotionally-scarred one with the checkered past and lunatic ex, no wonder the poor thing’s so stressed all the time!