The first book I ever purchased for myself was Alberto Fuguet's "The Movies of My Life." I was fifteen, it was in a Borders. This was before chain bookstores became dinosaur skeletons collecting the dust of stale croissants and half priced hardcovers, this was before I was allowed to buy books that had nothing to do with Jesus. I paid for the book in singles, slipped it under my jacket, and didn't dare read it until the cover of night promised my pastor father wouldn't find me awake in my bedroom, closet light on like a flashlight and me still nine years old.
I liked the main character, Beltran. Beltran is from Chile and knows what it is like to be from a place in constant motion. His mother is an anxious woman and he could never trust her to not suddenly erupt from beneath his feet, send him trembling into some wide chasm. This is why he turned to art I bet. This is why he explained his life according to the films he’d seen. It is easier to be known by our relationships to external nouns- California, son- than internal ones. Bitterness and childhood. The pain of our own tectonics.
I brushed up against this old book when cleaning out my basement, that place we bury all our old selves under the lie that we’ll be able to return to them someday, will want to. We so love the falseness in the act of holding on, marinate in it’s ability to convince us we may receive talents and characteristics of former selves if only we turn on this old lamp, open this album, touch this abandoned keychain like a talisman. “Oh, here, a photograph. I am freckle kneed in the canoe I flipped. I wriggled our from under it, I was so brave, so happy to swim up towards the sun.” And those soft nouns again; courage, joy.
Mine brush up against one another like plates in the Ring of Fire, lust and loss colliding, rain and selfishness and laughter peeling like an orange, perhaps ringing like a bell over daughter, mother, desire, and grief, all accidentally running into one another like the last lines of Fuguet’s book, where Beltran turns to a stranger he’s known forever and says, “We’ve been neighbours for years, and we never found each other.”
It has been more than ten years since I’ve read that book, since I seriously asked myself what a book could mean. In the spirit of celebrating the end of a decade—indeed to surviving yet another one, indeed this one—I’ve compiled a list of my top books of this last decade. There aren’t ten; I’m not a perfectionist and I only wished to include the ones that came to mind immediately. I mean, I guess there are technically ten, but one I threw in last minute and the other two work as a pair, so I’m calling it a true seven with a few asterisks.
This list is not high art. No poetry is even featured. If I had featured poetry it would’ve just been a list of all of Poland’s literary exports since 1937 and honestly, I know you’re all tired of me beating that particular dead horse. These are simply the books that got under my skin, that grew onto me like new appendages. These are the books that made me work, that made me feel safe and lost and broken and these are the books that made me feel returned. These are, for more and for less, The Books of My Life.
I wavered on whether to list these chronologically because order or to list them by genre because logic but time is a flat circle and this list has like, one book in each genre, so I went and listed them in the order that they came to mind. And so we begin.
My Berlin Kitchen: Luisa Weiss
In 2013 I was living between Toronto and New York and wearing a headscarf all the time. I had just been accepted into seminary to study the history of the Orthodox Church, and I was praying the hours while teaching ESL to non verbal autistic elementary students while raising a five year old and driving back to Toronto on the weekends in the hopes that my Muslim boyfriend’s mother would see my devotion and deem me worthy of his love (she did). My life was full and richer than it had ever been before and I felt crushed by the beauty and overwhelming ache of it. I felt torn between the New York of my heart and past and the Toronto I wanted to be my future. I recoiled at the patriarchal institutions with the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox institutions while simultaneously falling passionately in love with the artistic traditions. I came across Luisa Weiss’ My Berlin Kitchen after following Tara Austin Weaver at Genevieve Jenner’s recommendation. (Both women write incredible commentary on food and singlehandedly taught me that food can and does matter, something my Italian heart knew but that I never fully understood until they prompted me to read more food criticism.)
Weiss is the author of The Wednesday Chef blog, The German Baking Book, and a home chef. My Berlin Kitchen details the taste of her childhood in West Berlin, the summer visits to her father in Boston, her publishing jobs in Paris and New York, and her subsequent return to the Berlin of her youth. In the tradition of food memoir each chapter is accompanied by at least one recipe, none of which I particularly like. I found myself reaching for her book repeatedly throughout 2013 and 2014 simply because of her voice. She made the distance between New York and Toronto feel like the flight between Boston and Berlin. The immense loneliness experienced during her year of cataloguing recipes in Paris was felt by me in my New York kitchen on the edge of Lake Ontario, the -35 degree wind screaming through the two hundred year old windows I taped shut. She made pasta sauce and endives, I baked potato kugel and roasted beets. The carrying on that happens when we prepare food slowly and with purpose has stayed with me since reading her book, comforts me with every reread. I was able to reset myself in each home—both Toronto on a Friday evening and New York on a Sunday one—with a bowl of borscht, the recipe prepared the same way, the pink earthiness present in either location’s snow. Now that I am far from either place, deep in the heady swamp of Washington D.C, I still return to her Berlin Kitchen, reread her story of traveling the checkpoint between East and West Berlin in the backseat of a station wagon, every time I throw Brussels sprouts on the stove.
This is the book that taught me to nurture.
East of Eden: John Steinbeck
I once drove entirely the wrong direction to Philadelphia to see RENT, ending up in a Virginia suburb in the days before map apps existed. I, exasperated and with only four hours to go before the play started, went into a Starbucks for directions. The gangly barista’s mohawk lay limp atop his head like the dorsal fin of a captive orca. “I can print you new directions at my place around the corner. Or I can just come with you.”
I freshened up the shave around his mohawk while he printed seven sheets of paper from Mapquest and then we were off. I wouldn’t ordinarily condone getting in cars with strangers except it’s always worked out incredibly well for me. In this case the barista was a fellow vegan-raised-in-a-fundamentalist-church-who-escaped-but-not-really-because-straightedge and this sealed our bond immediately. A month after meeting I would ghost him because I did not want to love him and he would show up on my porch with a copy of Chasing Amy, a move that would cause me to slap him in the face and then invite him inside. A month after that I would receive an anonymous letter in the mail that stated in block letters “I love you” and it would be mailed from the barista’s town. A town that, oddly enough, was also the town my ex boyfriend was from, and postmarked from the one day that entire year he was home to visit. I never assumed the barista sent it, and I became transfixed on what this message from my ex meant, convincing myself I wanted him back and moving on from the barista since he clearly did not have feelings for me. This cycle of halfhearted expressions of affection between the two of us continued for several years until the barista informed me he would be relocating to Texas unless I, for some reason, would object to such a move. I, furious that he would even consider abandoning me, said that of course a move was fine! A move is exciting! What fun! And promptly helped him pack. The day before he left he came over with a book. This book, he said, was his favorite of all time. This book contained the only story ever told, that of Cain and Abel, which is to say of Good and Evil and Wrong and Right and what it means to be banished and what it means to come home. In it, he said, I would see what love looked like. I thanked him and when he left I put it on a shelf and did not touch it, or speak to him, for a year. When I finally opened it on a lazy June afternoon I saw that he had underlined every line that he thought I would like. I read it in twenty four hours just so I could see them all.
This is the book that taught me what love is.
Habibi: Craig Thompson
I bought this book when I was broke-broke, teaching in New York with a toddler and using the thirty or so dollars I had left at the end of the week on either farmer’s market apple donuts or books. I distinctly remember handing the clerk at our local bookshop forty-five dollars and grimacing as it left my hand, wishing I could bow to the devil Bezos because Amazon sold it for twenty four. When I opened it I realized I would have happily paid twice as much.
Habibi is the most beautiful book I own. I want to frame every page.
Thompson makes a few mistakes to be sure—sex as a plot device is something of which I am always a bit wary—but attempts to examine Western stereotypes of Arab men and Islam. How well a white American man can discuss such issues without falling prey to Orientalism is worth discussing, and Thompson has attempted to do this in several interviews. Nadim Damluji does a wonderful job detailing how, even in making something knowingly racist, the final product can still be read as racist, stating in his review, “Although Thompson set out to play with these stereotypes, he never does a good enough job distinguishing what separates play from belief.”
Habibi is imperfect, but the fable built into the calligraphy is truly dazzling and worth a peek.
This is the book I skipped meals and bathroom breaks to finish in one sitting.
Kristin Lavransdatter: Sigrid Undset
I read this book because Haley Stewart told me to. I do just about everything Haley suggests (and I suggest her Patreon book club). I read it while my life was falling apart. I laid in bed all of September 2015 eating plums by the fistful and letting diet coke cans pile up on the nightstand until my neighbour came over to check on me. When I finally did get up it was to drive south to DC, leaving my New York house and my New York life behind, water still in glasses on the counter, plants still in pots on the porch. When I finally finished it in December I sobbed like a girl losing a dear friend to an intercontinental move. The loss was tremendous somehow, a trembling animal being beneath my skin. I had come to Orthodoxy from my evangelical upbringing and through Islam, but this book was likely the catalyst for finally coming fully into the Church. The person you are when you begin this book will no longer exist once you’ve finished it.
This is the book that saved my faith.
The Return, In the Country of Men: Hisham Matar
These are the the book whose lines I think of every single day. Lines like “And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.” and lines like, ““Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.” and “Had the pain not been so precise I would have asked to which of my sorrows should I yield.” and entire paragraphs that make you bring your hand to your mouth like a shaken eighteenth century damsel. Paragraphs like this one:
“They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently, perhaps with a reassuring smile and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder. And the fathers must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their hand will remain throughout the years, to the end of time, and that no matter what burdens are laid on that shoulder or the number of kisses a lover plants there, perhaps knowingly driven by the secret wish to erase the claim of another, the shoulder will remain forever faithful, remembering that good man’s hand that had ushered them into the world. To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.”
Matar is a soft force. He writes of heat with a sensuality I have never known with lovers and he writes of loss as one who has known the weight of Atlas and each words answers the central question of all of his works: What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?
These are the books I carry everywhere and read like poetry.
Interpreter of Maladies: Jhumpa Lahiri
It took me weeks to read Interpreter of Maladies even though it’s only 198 pages. I listened to it on audiobook—Matilda Novak is *chefs kiss*—and would have to pause to savor the beauty of almost every other sentence. Interpreter of Maladies, despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999 and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2000 and selling 15 million copies worldwide, feels like the kind of book only you know, could appreciate. I imagine this accidental vanity is the product of Lahiri’s ability to make each character deeply human and relatable, despite the short stories detailing the specific immigration experiences of particular South Asian families. These nine short stories are baby bears, perfect in length and lyric. Lahiri is whimsical with her phrasing in that way that makes me green with envy and desirous of crawling inside her actual brain with a glowing gaslight and an apple to munch while I poke around and see everything that’s hanging out there. I read Interpreter of Maladies after reading In Other Words, Lahiri’s love story to Italian, a language she learned because it, “had nothing to do with my life.” I have re-read that one countless times as well, as it reminds me to embrace the absurd and not-very-useful interests that bring me joy. Learn a language spoken in but one country. Spend a semester studying flower arrangements. Read all of the books of two authors you love over and over again. Become obsessed with ecological regions of foreign lands precisely because they have nothing to do with your life. What fun.
This is the book that made me believe I could be an author, but never as good as this one.
Mornings in Jenin: Susan Abulhawa
I also read this book because of a boy I loved, or rather a man, for he was twenty five then, though a boy in all the ways that matter to girls who became women at twelve. We both promised to read one another’s suggestions, though I would bet the whole of my wild heart he still hasn’t read mine. (It was Habibi.) He recommended it to me and I could tell it was the book he recommended to all the women he bedded; it told the Palestinian story—his story—unflinchingly, with the added benefit of making known that he read living female authors. I read it despite knowing this, desperately wanted him to love me despite knowing I could never respect him for all of this.
I read it the summer of 2015, on a beach, a full bowl of blueberries within arms reach. I read it at two in the morning with the windows open, the Carolina breeze tickling my face. I finished it and immediately went on a long run. I remember how humid it was, how the dampness was all around me, inside of me, and I stopped into a bakery to pick up doughnuts for my family to eat upon my return. I could not outrun how I hated the ending, and oh how I hated it. I hated the whole damned thing, suffering upon suffering, and I hated that I could open the newspaper and see there was still no reprieve. I did love the descriptions of communal pain, though. The waxing of a new bride by the women in her life, that joint preparation for the impending penetration of man. My palms still itch when I think of what it means to be punished. My palms still itch every time I’m not sorry.
I stole Mornings in Jenin from the Oswego Library, on accident, as I took it on vacation and then never returned to the state of New York. My house still sits on the edge of the lake, all my belongings one Nor’easter away from tumbling into that saltless sea. I eventually mailed the book back years later, with a poem written across the last page. “I never meant for this to happen. I thought I knew the way,” scrawled in black ink.
This is the book that made me support armed struggle.
Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass
I can’t remember if this book was part of a syllabus given to me by a professor I took countless times or if I came across it after falling down a rabbit hole of my own making, something I often did after consuming the whole of her listed additional reading. Anne Leblans was the most important educator I ever had, having schooled me in courses on European history, contemporary European literary culture, Polish history, poetry, post-war cinema, and a random half semester of German I didn’t technically enroll in but to which she allowed me to continue showing up until the day I didn’t. She was a seemingly severe Flemish single mother, wearing a low grey bun and fantastical knit bolero sweaters every day, but with an absurdly dry sense of humour. I continued emailing her after my graduation, indeed I still email her, asking how her daughter is or for the titles of books I can only vaguely remember but whose story bones keep me up at night. She always remembers which ones I mean. One of my most vain dreams is to have a student who harbors deep within them a love for me similar to the one I have for her, which is to say so all encompassing as to be embarrassing and never spoken of.
I began this book while living in my friend’s spare room and sleeping on her futon during the summer of 2009. It was a strange summer. I had an eating disorder marked by extreme exercise and I ate only tuna sandwiches and coffee. I looked truly fantastic. I stayed busy fucking someone I despised and working at a sushi restaurant where from 3-11pm I pretended I was Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation and hoped one of the perfectly cheekboned chefs from Tokyo would look at me in a way that signaled they wanted more than for me to bring them extra ginger.
I gave my first copy of this book to the boy I despised, and we talked excitedly about it for a few days until one of us got bored with the other and then we never spoke of it again. But I reread it two years ago, after I moved back to DC and needed something that felt familiar but still unknown. In it the Nobel Prize-winning Grass is at his most lyrical remembering his early life in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. GoodReads write, “During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous. Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion -- which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany -- reveals Grass at his most intimate.”
The audiobook is fantastic, and I reread it when I struggle to tell my own story precisely as a was; honesty and truth too often find themselves muddled. To quote Peeling the Onion directly, “Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.”
This is the audiobook that makes me pull over and cry on the highway shoulder; possibly my favorite memoir.
Swann’s Way/Anna Karenina: Marcel Proust and Leo Tolstoy
I need to preface my inclusion of Swann’s Way by stating that I purchased it on accident. I cannot imagine being the type of person who reads Swann’s Way on purpose. People who read Swann’s Way on purpose are either Parisian twenty-somethings who have already finished their inherited books on Simone Weil and Camus, or literature professors in the middle of messy divorces who are trying to impress leggy undergrads. No one else reads Proust I am convinced, except me that winter I accidentally picked him up off the shelf at Bay Books because I am a sucker for a gold inlay and a deckled edge. I have never finished it. Has anyone? I’ve never made it past page thirty, though I have repeatedly highlighted on page five:
“when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; I had only, in its original simplicity, the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more destitute than a cave dweller; but then the memory—not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been-would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have gotten out on my own; I crossed centuries of civilizations in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collared shirts, gradually composed my self’s original features.”
I don’t even know how to read this. I have considered myself a writer since I was eight years old, a reader since even before, and I can still only barely understand that sentence. But I feel it. In the depth of my personhood I feel Prout’s destitution here, ache to shine an oil lamp upon my own voids, the lot of them too numerous to mention, and I sense the purity of his intention. It is almost lost on me (or perhaps it is, if I cannot get beyond the thirty-third page) but the magic here is that I return to it, again and again and again, like some heartsick lover hell bent on allowing what I know is no good to destroy me yet again, because of how good it feels when I let it. At a less base level Swann’s Way reminds me that I can write whatever the fuck I want, that a pen in my hand gives me the right to create language willy-nilly, re-writing definitions as I see fit. Anna Karenina does not do this in quite the same way, but it is another I have not yet been able to finish because the moral feels so heavy handed. What is to happen is so immediately obvious, so glinting-atop-the-Moscow-snow that waiting eight hundred pages to get to it seems heavy handed. Why do I need to read 381 times that Anna has a quick and light step? The answer is that I do not. But still.
These are the books I pick up when I need to relearn a lesson I’ve learned countless times before.
I lied, there’s actually twelve books.
Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race: Lara Prior-Palmer
I read this book six months ago and hesitated to include it on this list for that reason alone. Is six months enough time to really marinate in whether a book deserves to be on one’s decade list? Is it fair to the rest of the list that Lara eked her way in last minute in the way one might a high stakes horse race? Who knows. But I included it because this is the only book I have ever read and immediately started again. Not only did I re-read it once more, I read it a third time. Then, I brought it with me to New York, then Berlin, across Poland, across France, then back to New York, then home, allowing it to take up precious space in the one bag I packed. I flagged perfect passages until I noticed that each page had a sticky note and gave up. I copied quotes into my Bear app so I could turn them over in the moments when the book was not actively in my hand. This book is a wonder. Lara Prior-Palmer is a delight to read. I was on the edge of my seat while reading this book even though I knew how it ended. I remarked to myself often during the first reading how much fun I was actively having reading it. Prior-Palmer is as whimsical in her prose as she is in her life; she signed up for the Mongol Derby a few weeks before it began and barely trained. Her remarks on the race illustrate her keen and peculiar was of observing the world."Riding is a dance that demands each muscle in your body answer to an ever-shifting floor.” Critics of the book often state that her writing style, as well as approach to the race itself, are juvinile. This is a vapid and rather stupid complaint; at only nineteen Prior-Palmer is young. I imagine if she or her editor had made any attempt to imbue the book with philosophical musings or some such shit the same critics would have labeled her a try hard. In conclusion, her book is a wonder and you should read it. Alternatively, you can watch her TEDTalk on quiet bravery here.
This is the book that made me want to lie in far away grass.
If you’ve made it this far, bravo you. And thank you.
