My Personal Book Posse

There have been lots of recommended reading lists going around lately. It's summer and people like to read or at least talk about reading. Experience in books is highly personal. Whenever anyone asks for a book recommendation, I always give the titles my friends or teachers wrote. It's too hard to say to someone looking for something to read on the beach or on the plane: Go grab One Hundred Years of Solitude.  It will rock you under the redwoods and the entire world will never be the same again.

Doesn't everyone have a personal book posse? A set of titles that rocked them under the redwoods at exactly the moments in time when they became who they were? These books are your foundation of personhood.  They have your back.  They get you.  Well, here is my personal book posse, in case you were wondering:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  All of us freshmen at Porter College in UC Santa Cruz in the late eighties read this for our core course.  It peeled off the surface of the world for me.  Then it peeled off my skin and left me to walk around in my bones.  It was painful and glorious and too much.  Just too much.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.  I read this when I was seventeen and it was exactly everything I was feeling at seventeen. I moped around for weeks after reading that novel, because poor Tess.  That Angel Clare was so cold.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Holden Caulfield shouldn't have been such a revelation to a teenager in the eighties.  But he was.  Sometimes he was the only one who understood.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.  This gets a reread at least once a year.  I carry it around with me in my purse half the time.  Quoyle with his chin, Aunt with her strong fingers.  These are good, ferocious people.

Sula by Toni Morrison.  For that scene when Sula cuts off the tip of her own finger to keep that group of boys away. The mushroom cap, the cherry blood. I guess Ms. Morrison and I both speak and write in the English language, but sometimes I doubt it. She's a most powerful magician. The most powerful I've ever read.

The Weetzie Bat Books by Francesca Lia Block. These were published in 1989, but I didn't come across them until I was in my thirties when they promptly made everything possible. I knew all along there were fairies.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch. If you read this, it will be difficult to believe that the characters aren't people you've actually known.  Evocative and alive in some of the same ways Block's writing is.  Those Los Angeles girls are a sensual lot.

Speed of Light by Elizabeth Rosner. I've never looked at a Gingko tree the same way since. It's about some of the ways genocide and torture haunt the human heart, and how love rules anyway. One of the best endings of a book ever.

Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Victoria will open your eyes to a whole population of young people dumped onto the streets once they age out of the foster system. Beautiful writing.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. My introduction into zombie literature, and I didn't even know it was about zombies at first.  Apocalyptic horror fiction for young adults. I loved it so much I order 75 copies for the school where I worked at the time. 

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? a short story by Joyce Carol Oates.  Killed me when I was sixteen and made me write my first short story that wasn't about drunk drivers and vampires.

Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver. I read this on the dirty carpet on the floor of the studio I lived in with my husband. I was 23 and I had a marriage, a full time career, and a feeling of possibility.  I read these stories and rolled around on the carpet in amazement and then I stopped rolling and looked at the ceiling and thought, I'm going to be a writer.

The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds.  These poems are impossible to take in all at once.  Each one is a devastating, impossibly rich chocolate in a golden box of pain.

What is in your book posse?