A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

Whoever did the cover art for Madeleine L’Engle books must have had an awesome (terrifying) time of it, this book included. How best to capture a children’s novel about the fifth dimension, ultimate evil, and an alien planet called Camazotz? Oh, of course: three faceless children riding a floating bald marble centaur with a rainbow emanating from his shoulderblades. Wait, too weird? Best balance it out by adding a nice big flower at the bottom of the illustration.

But what would you have done? This book, revolving around travel both in time and outer space, kind of defies any sort of literal visualization. A lot of teachers at my school were incredibly skeptical of Madeleine L’Engle–displaying the unfortunately common Christian aversion to science, or at the very least, refusing to believe that a book that asks this many questions could have any root in faith–and it’s upsetting to me that anyone would ever be discouraged from reading this book. It’s so good. Twelve years after first reading A Wrinkle in Time, I am still scared by the thunderstorm that begins the book, still freaked out by the bodiless brain called IT which controls all the Stepfordy people on Camazotz, still chilled by the scene where Meg saves her brother. And I still have a big crush on Calvin O’Keefe.

March, by Geraldine Brooks

I picked this book up because it won the Pulitzer, but I had serious misgivings. Generally I hate books about the Civil War, with the exceptions of Gone With the Wind and Cold Mountain (this distaste is directly proportional to the affection that many wealthy, degenerate Texans feel towards Confederate dress, traditions, flags, etc); I don’t like historical fiction in general, I didn’t like that it was a gimmick (telling the other side of Little Women, as in Mr. March Goes To War) and I’ve never read anything else by Geraldine Brooks. Then I opened it up, read the first paragraph and said “HELL NO.”

This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky. A dipping sun gilded and brazed each raveling edge as if the firmament were threaded through with precious filaments. I pause there to mop my aching eye, which will not stop tearing. The line I have set down is, perhaps, on the florid side of fine, but no matter: she is a gentle critic. My hand, which I note is flecked with traces of dried phlegm, has the tremor of exhaustion. Forgive my unlovely script, for an army on the march (NICE ONE GERALDINE BROOKS) provides no tranquil place for reflection and correspondence.

So yeah, that is ridiculous. Did people ever really think like that? So formal and flowery. But I powered through and very quickly got used to it, and it’s kind of nice how opposite it is to fiction that comes out these days littered with brand names and technology. So check this book out, because it’s GOOD! Of course it’s good, it won the Pulitzer. But if I could like it, and it’s so not my thing, if it is anything close to your thing you will like it.

The Horse and His Boy, by C.S. Lewis

Was this your least favorite of the series? I think it was most people’s, for reasonable reasons: it’s the only one where the Pevensie children are absent from the action, and the only one where the main character is actually from Narnia. So, as natural-born xenophobia would have it, we find it hard to transition from neatly pressed, tea-and-biscuits Henry and Lucy to ambiguously ethnic, barbarian horse-lovers Shasta (hahaha) and Aravis. And it doesn’t help that The Horse and His Boy is awkwardly sandwiched between the big hitters, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.

And then, when you grow up, there’s a lot more to dislike about this book. C.S. Lewis has gotten a lot of criticism for the prejudices that came naturally with the old-British-man territory. Philip Pullman once stated that C.S. Lewis’s world runs as such: “Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.” There is a lot of truth in this–and if you’re thinking, wait, Lucy was the best character of all, remember how much of a tomboy she was, and how much C.S. Lewis made fun of Susan for wanting to wear makeup. And The Horse and His Boy is full of the “lead the dark people to the Anglo-Saxon God” spirit, for sure.

But. In the end, this book may be the best one of all, as a book in itself. As the title suggests, it’s just about a boy and a (talking) horse, trying to find their way to the North across the desert–bravest thing ever. The fact that it alienates you by putting you outside of castley, fairytale Narnia is exactly what C.S. Lewis needs to even out the rest of the series, and it also reminds you why it’s so important that the horse and his boy find their home. And through twelve years at a Baptist school and church, I’ve never found an expression of God more lovely and pure than the “I was the lion” passage in this book.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis

Good children’s book series are common. But great ones–hmm. I was trying to pinpoint exactly what makes up my (admittedly very subjective) criteria for a great series, and I think it’s pretty simple. First, it should be a finite and manageable number of books, unlike Nancy Drew, Babysitter’s Club, Hardy Boys, Redwall, etc. Those are terrific, but you lose so much with series that go on and on: you lose manageability, character arcs, symmetry, and most importantly, you lose the feeling that each book is a piece of a puzzle and therefore something to be treasured. Second, the series should be interesting to adults: to me, this leaves only the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, and of course, Harry Potter. (Funny how everything is about God or magic.) Third, and most importantly, the series should be about bravery. Bravery is the best. It makes for the best everything. Think about it.

So, before I look at any other of the Narnia books, I want to bring attention to this one, in which the characters literally sail to the end of the world. Lucy, Edmund and Eustace ride the Dawn Treader east to a series of terrifying islands, which all have increasingly eerie and haunting psychosomatic effects on the traveler. Despite the fact that they repeatedly come close to losing it (Eustace turns into a dragon, they almost fall into a pool that will turn them into gold, Lucy almost loses her mind, morals and childhood reading the magician’s book, and when they go to the Island Where Dreams Come True, the entire ship feels their hearts slipping away)–it only ever feels pleasantly dark, because C.S. Lewis reminds you that they are all brave, and none of these ills are permanent.

Like Reepicheep, the bravest character ever! He says, towards the end: “While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek shall be head of the talking mice in Narnia.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Despite the fact that this is one of my favorite books ever, I never talk about it, and thus far I’ve deliberately avoided Safran Foer and his wife Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) in this blog. Because the thing about the two of them is that they make their books so twee and lovable and perfectly engineered to fit the tastes of ponderous young readers and writers that it’s just like: there is nothing left to say. It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Garden State when it first came out. Everyone loves these books and if they don’t, the reason is usually that they think the books are too precious and lovable. And yes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close may get a little precious–the main character is a tambourine-playing, liberal, thoughtful, vegan Manhattan boy named Oskar who speaks several languages and whose father was killed in 9/11–but throughout, it is legitimately creative and innovative and easy and fun. And hey, if someone didn’t like me because I was too precious and lovable, I’d be happy as shit.

Basically what distinguishes Safran Foer’s (and his wife’s) books for me is an earnest excess of feeling. There’s a part where a character thinks, “I worried about her [his mother], putting all of her life into her story, no, I was so happy for her, I remembered the feeling she was feeling, the exhilaration of building the world anew.” This is the adorable vulnerability that runs through this book. More restrained than with Dave Eggers, but kind of the same thing. It’s impossible to resist the charm.

In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan

The famous message–sorry, “Eater’s Manifesto”–of this book is really, really simple: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Terrific. Half a year at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for that revolutionary statement, which is one hundred percent preaching to the choir. Michael Pollan spends a lot of time dissing Go-Gurt and stuff like that, and I just kept thinking: are you kidding? People who read Michael Pollan shop at Whole Foods and would never eat Go-Gurt.

Something about the local/slow food “revolution” is incredibly funny to me. Partly because going from Charlottesville (where everyone is like “Duh, even Chipotle is locally sourced”) to meaty, greasy Houston (where a friend of mine recently slammed down his can of beer and said “What the fuck does organic even mean?”) has reminded me that, while sustainable eating may be all over the map in certain circles, there are some people who simply will not ever choose to give a shit. Partly also because these food advocates are calling America out on “orthorexia”–an eating disorder revolving around the obsession with eating healthy–but then they lay their foodie pronouncements down so solemnly that a million more people with too much time on their hands will fall into the trap of Taking Food Too Seriously and Not Doing Anything About It Except Bitching. A few weeks ago, I heard some dude saying, “Yeah, I’m a lacto-ovo, occasionally pesca-terian, but I try to stay away from too much dairy because I get a lot of mucus, and when I have a lot of mucus I have to blow my nose, and then that’s just more paper I’m wasting.” I just wanted to punch him and ask if he regulated his veggie-induced shits in the same way.

If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino is a genius who writes as if he were ordinary, which is a fantastic quality in a person doing you the service of writing fiction. (His stuff is also literally fantastic: like this amazing story about the moon growing old and dimming and the rest of the world’s consequent obsession with shiny objects.) But yeah–on this book, Amazon’s little “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” thing suggests Midnight’s Children, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Tom Stoppard, Virginia Woolf, and several books on Las Vegas architecture)–and I think that that variety is telling, don’t you? It means that all kinds of people can love Italo Calvino: you could find one of his stories crumpled in a trash can and you would pick it up and read it and know within a few seconds that you were reading something luminous and brilliant, and best of all you would be able to understand it. Even when it’s constructed as a sort of puzzley mind-fuck.

This book is addressed to “you,” as if you were in the story, and the plot is about you trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler but not being able to. Every other chapter is a first chapter in a book you end up reading instead (you end up with ten different books that don’t make sense until the end), and the other chapters are about your pseudo-detective hunt. Simple, right? Like a more directed Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, or that part in The Neverending Story with the crazy book where everything gets written as it happens. Although this book could hit you over the head with its games about textuality and subjectivity and the death of the author and whatever, it doesn’t.

My favorite line is from the opening chapter, which starts, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler,” and then proceeds to give you tips about a comfortable reading experience. “Cigarettes within reach if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.”

Come on, Italo, I think you know best!

Gossip Girl, by Cecily von Ziegesar

With my low-level anxiety about Hilary Duff becoming a regular on Gossip Girl (yuck but true: she’s going to be Vanessa’s roommate), Leighton Meester all over “Good Girls Go Bad,” and tabloid coverage of whether Chuck is getting fat or not, sometimes I forget that the whole headbandy jumpsuity gloss-fest television series was spawned from this series. I used to read them on cheerleading trips in high school as sort of a shallowness insurance–I could never resent anyone around me while reading books in which every other sentence mentions a brand name, a dollar amount, Jenny’s double-D’s, or someone losing their virginity. The show is definitely better, but the books are way more ridiculous (but still unworthy of being acknowledged separately). For example, in the books, Vanessa has a shaved head, Jenny has an embarrassingly large chest, Dan moonlights as the lead singer in a rock band, Blair moves in with Vanessa and learns how to make tempeh lasagna, Dan and Vanessa have tantric sex on their Brooklyn rooftops, Nate hooks up with trashy Virginia Slims-smoking girls in the Hamptons–etc.

I don’t know what I did with these books, because I could only find one on my bookshelf. Still, I opened it to a random page and I leave you with this as a sample of the insanity:

“Nate began to cry as soon as it was over. The Viagra had worn off just in time. Serena let her head fall back, closing her enormous dark blue eyes as Nate pressed his soggy cheek into her hair. It was sweet and sort of feminine of him to cry after they’d done it, and she suddenly realized she was the stronger, more masculine one in their relationship. At least they’d finally done it. Now they were authentically a couple.”

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Well, okay. I love this book so much. I don’t know what it is I love about Jhumpa Lahiri so much, but I’ve read her books over and over, fifty times or more, and I’m not sick of them; I spent thirty pages of my thesis on her and it never made me bored. Although it often made me feel like I was going to die before ever being able to write anything that could contain the peculiar quality that makes her so brilliant and also so popular–she is so elusively, simply good. As soon as it was released, this book went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, which no other collection of short stories has done, and where few legitimately crafted works of fiction stay for long: for example, The Shack is enjoying a dismayingly long run. But besides selling crazy amounts of itself, Unaccustomed Earth made pretty much every critic’s top list, and most importantly, it makes for a reading experience that is something close to perfect. The balance and weight of this collection is as good as Raymond Carver’s Cathedral.

Who does she resemble as a writer? Thomas Hardy or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Hemingway. What is the book about? It’s about families, loneliness, New England, confusion, love. Maybe more than anything it’s about trying to feel at home. In this one it’s as if Lahiri has learned to flawlessly shape the lives of her second- or third-generation Indian characters so that they stand in thematically for anyone who has ever felt torn between anything at all, which is everyone. So so so so good.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Apparently a film version of this book is forthcoming, with Keira Knightley. Interesting. Since this is a hazy British science fiction book about boarding school and clones, I would not have expected that name to pop up. I was looking it up on IMDB and saw that “Never Let Me Go” was also the title of a recent episode of True Blood, which I am almost sure is a reference to this book: the writers of True Blood, with all their stuff about Makers and telepaths and strange people fitting barely under the surface of normal society, are totes down with Never Let Me Go.

The premise is that, in a future Britain, people are cloned so that their clones can provide organs and bone marrow and anything they might need, ever. This idea sounds kind of predictably sci-fi, but Kazuo Ishiguro has a clear combination of both British and Japanese influence in the way he writes and thinks, and as a result everything is wonderfully understated and simple: the whole novel feels like a misty, ominous day in an English garden. The book is about a trio of clones who go to a boarding school called Hailsham, serving (although they don’t know it) as test subjects, clones who are given as human a life as possible. And Ishiguro raises these heavy (and admittedly predictable: does loving make us human? who or what determines the value of a life? etc) issues in a new and delicate way. Strongly recommend.