Abandoned by Booklikes

Well if everyone else is going to add on, here I go. Keeping with Moonlight's extra criteria of making sure that these are books we read, here are 20 books that I think are going to be classics someday or could be already. I also picked books that I did not see on the list so far. Forgive me if they are there and I just overlooked them. 

1. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Seriously this book blew my mind. Also I will forever loathe the fact that a bunch of authors put out books with the word "girl" and tried to mimic Flynn. Stop it.

2. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. We get Atwood telling us about Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. You get a new perspective on these characters and how messed up the The Odyssey was when you focus on the women in the story.

3. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat. I honestly don't know that much about Haiti as a country or a culture. Reading this book let me glimpse upon the inner workings of a family that had only women left to usher in the new generation. The character of Sophie will break your heart again and again throughout this book. Told in the first person in four parts, we follow Sophie from the age of 12 until she I think based on the timeline of the story is 20 possibly 21.

4. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou was not just a poet and writer. She was an artist with words. Just the way that she write things evokes memories of a place and time I have never been to in my life.

5. For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. I have to say that I loved this play. It was a bit weird to read the stage directions along with the poetry that was being said by these characters, but it was quite easy to read and follow. For colored girls is considered a choreopoem (i.e. there are monologues that also include dance and music) with seven women in different colors speaking to the audience. The seven women are the lady in red, lady in orange, lady in yellow, lady in green, lady in blue, lady in brown, and lady in purple. Some of the poems really spoke to me a lot and the play tackles so many different subjects such as rape, abortion, domestic violence. 

6. The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. So I have to say that I found this book to be from top to bottom absolutely wonderful. Potential readers should realize going in that this is a steampunk science fiction book taking a look at John Milton's Paradise Lost, Inferno, and also C.S. Lewis's The Chronicle of Narnia series. I read both Paradise Lost and Inferno in high school.

7. Night by Elie Wiesel. 

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

 

8. A Wind in the Door by Madeline L'Engle. So this series is one of the books that I love reading again and again. Reading as a kid is definitely different than one reads a child. To me when I was a child, it seemed highly plausible that one could travel within one's brother and heal them. As an adult, it took a little more getting use to.

9. Joyland by Stephen King. Man when Stephen King is "on" he is "on". I loved everything about this book. I am not going to lie, you have to get past the first few chapters because things kind of drag. When the main character goes back to his time before returning to college and his experiences at Joyland (amusement park in North Carolina) the book really starts to hum at that point. I see this in King's top ten works someday and yes will go down as a horror classic. 

10. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. I think in school I may have possibly read one of the first scenes from this play and that was it. Reading the entire play in one sitting was fantastic. Tennessee Williams doesn't just focus on the characters, he focuses on the music being played in the scenes, how the music changes based on what characters are saying, how they should look, how set pieces should look, etc. This was like getting a behind the scene notes on how a play is written. 

11. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. This book has left me thinking over certain themes for days. I think the best thing I can say about any book is that I can't stop thinking about it. "The Bluest Eye" was so hard to read in parts that I honestly was surprised when I got to the ending because even though it was hard to read, I wanted it to keep going and going. I wanted to read my happy ending damn it, and sadly there was no happy ending at all, just reality. 

12. Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery. When I first started reading the Anne of Green Gables series I was a pre-teen. I had never left my hometown at that point, and knew that Canada lay north. I imagined that Canada was just the Niagara Falls because that's all I ever saw about it on television. To read a story about an orphaned girl that comes to live with a brother and sister and slowly worms her way into the hearts of them and her neighbors living on Prince Edward Island in the 1900s. Book #3 in the series is still my favorite.

13. Dawn by Octavia Butler. This book focuses on race, consent, rape, and so many other things it can make your head spin. I know heard this is going to be turned into a tv series by Amazon.

14. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I cared about this family that started off so poor, but the father (Wang Lung) who keeps his faith in the land (or Good Earth) is able to become a wealthy landowner over time. This of course leaves to a rift with him and his faithful wife (O-lan). 

15. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a collection of essays that Coates wrote to his son about his experiences growing up black in America and his thoughts of a lot of the police violence that surrounds being a black teen in America. And he describes how scared many black parents are when raising their children and doing what they can to ensure that they "get" how things are in this world. He segues back and forth into many pivotal points during the U.S.'s history (Civil War, Civil Rights, 9/11). This will make you uncomfortable. This will make you think. This will make you realize that in a hundred thousand different ways in America we do our best to tell everyone the American dream is for you, but than we hard pause and say it's not for you (if you are black, if you are Muslim, if you are Asian, if you are Hispanic) if you don't fit what the America true ideal is which is to be white and Christian.

16. Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 

First Suggestion: Be a full person.
Second Suggestion: Do it together.
Third Suggestion: Teach her that the idea of "gender roles" is absolute nonsense.
Fourth Suggestion: Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite.
Fifth Suggestion: Teach Chizalum to read. 
Sixth Suggestion: Teach her to question language.
Seventh Suggestion: Never speak of marriage as an achievement.
Eighth Suggestion: Teach her to reject likability. 
Ninth Suggestion: Give Chizalum a sense of identity.
Tenth Suggestion: Be deliberate about how you engage with her and her appearance.
Eleventh Suggestion: Teach her to question our culture's selective use of biology as "reasons" for social norms. 
Twelfth Suggestion: Talk to her about sex, and start early.
Thirteenth Suggestion: Romance will happen, so be on board.
Fourteenth Suggestion: In teaching her about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints.
Fifteenth Suggestion: Teach her about difference.

17. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I read this book back in 2003. I remember buying the hardcover from a random book shop in D.C. (can't recall the name of the store) and started to read this book while on a bus heading back from the Pentagon metro stop. Within an hour I was in tears and just read it until I finished it sometime before dawn. This book grabbed me back when I was 23 and it still grabbed me more than a decade and a half later at 38. Sebold wrote this book in response to being raped and she takes all of that pain and anger and wrote something that I believe will eventually be considered a classic. That said there are some nits here and there in the book that don't work, she has the main character at one point inhabit someone's body and I don't even want to discuss it anymore cause it was weird and off-putting. The only really false step I got while reading this.

18. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. If Beale Street Could Talk is sublime. For those who saw the movie, not everything in the novel stays the same, there are some scenes that I assume were cut for time. I thought that the way this ended was pretty perfect though.

19. We Should All be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I loved how Adichie breaks down stereotypes between what is expected of boys and girls and then what is expected between men and women. She provides insights into what she has seen and experienced as a woman that makes no bones about being a feminist. She gets a bit into race, but does not deep dive on that. This is a very good essay if you want to just dip your toe into Adiche's writing.

20. Kristy's Great Idea by Ann M. Martin. The book that launched a series that had me reading it until I got in my mid-teens. All of my friends loved these books and we could not wait until the super adventure books came out as well. I see these books being read and re-read by a new generation when I am a little old lady sitting on my front porch.