Someone left a question on my Tumblr and what she asked of me was a very hard thing to do: list down my favorite books. To begin with, I think it is rather impossible to limit one’s preference to a specific number. I’ve been into books for a long time and I like certain books for many varied reasons: the state of mind I was in when I read it, how my heart is doing and how long my attention span was.
The last reason is a given: I do have those times when I’d grab a book, leaf through the first ten pages and then throw it to the side if it doesn’t grab my fullest attention. The first two reasons, however, are interesting. My state of mind plays a huge role in picking what to read next. For example, during the time I was heavily burdened by a whole lot of things all at the same time, I grabbed Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet. It was a particularly slim volume but that book outweighs many 900-page hardbound bullies I’ve finished. Read it when you feel everything is not making sense because that book will illuminate aspects in your life that you thought were lost or gone. Now, my heart’s health is a very tricky category to deal with. With all these years of reading and books piled on top of the other as proof, I guess I can say that I have authority (the littlest possible authority in the world) to say that the presence or absence of love plays a role in how we read. This is coming from someone who clutched a dog-eared copy of Norwegian Wood, crying at its heartbreaking prose while on a bus. Someone who sent a copy of Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman all the way to Japan because physically being there wasn’t a possibility. Someone who read Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dream and dreamed of all the possibilities its fiction has to offer which reality was clearly denying me. I could go on and on about how much books helped me make sense of all the emotions I wasn’t articulate enough to express.
These books that I chose fall under one of those categories. My choices may not be very impressive to book snobs or those with highbrow tendencies but I don’t give a fuck about all that. I loved these books at certain times of my life and in case I may once again encounter a bump along the way, it is comforting to know that all I have to do is open a book and be understood.
- Einstein’s Dreams – Alan Lightman
“Time, like space, has three dimensions.
A young man was sitting in his balcony, wondering whether he should visit the woman he loves. How does he decide?
- 1. He knows she will make him miserable so he doesn’t go and eventually marries someone who doesn’t make him miserable.
- 2. He decides he cannot live without her, so he goes. She throws things at him and makes him miserable but he is madly in love and perfectly happy in his misery.
- 3. He knows he must see her, so he goes. They have a polite conversation. Afterwards, they shake hands, he goes home and they never see each other again.”
I rest my case.
- Franny and Zooey and Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Of course, J.D. Salinger is a must. What made these two books relevant to me was that I could see pieces of myself in Salinger’s characters. Both books are all about finding your place and identity amidst the whole confusion, the difficulty of growing up and deciding who you want to be. Isn’t that a universal dilemma among people our age?
“Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.” – Franny and Zooey
And also, Catcher in the Rye provided me the best possible way to describe what I feel after reading a particularly good book:
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you feel like it.”
I would definitely give you a call, Mr. Salinger.
- Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke
I read this book at a time when I felt people were slowly drifting away from each other. Or, when you begin to reassess the people you surround yourself with. I was in a phase where some people didn’t make sense anymore, didn’t do anything to my growth as a better person and was just dragging me down to a place I didn’t want to be. I’d rather be alone with few trusted friends than be with a crowd of people who didn’t really care for me.
“Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.”
- Life of Pi – Yann Martel
I was never a religious person and though I may have issues with it, I always have respect to those who doesn’t have qualms talking about their faith. It is a courageous thing to discuss beliefs and try to enlighten people like me who are leaning towards the other side of the spectrum. Someone I knew and was important to me was very religious and it was a topic we’d always discuss in passing but never really gotten around it. It may be due to apprehension on his part and fear on my side. When we like someone, we try our best to understand them – not change entirely for them. Reading this book was a way of trying to understand him and religion better. I urge you to read this book not because of some guy but read this book because it presents how faith works in a completely hopeless situation. Faith is how you clutch and don’t let go of something you strongly believe in and how complex it is even for words:
“There is Brahman nirguna, without qualities, which lies beyond understanding, beyond description, beyond approach; with our poor words we sew a suit for it – One, Truth, Unity, Absolute, Ultimate Reality, Ground of Being – and try to make it fit, but Brahman nirguna always bursts the seams. We are left speechless.”
- High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
Ah, this book and the movie. Intelligence, wit, honesty all rolled into one. People could go on and on; quoting line after line from the movie but you should read the book, too. There are always those little hesitations, subtle resignations and sheer jubilations that an actor cannot convey that words do.
“It seems to me if you add music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.”
- The Hours – Michael Cunningham
With this one, I didn’t have the need to watch the movie to cement this book’s place in my list. Its’ like literary Inception ala-Virginia Woolf and all the wisdom in this book is magnified threefold and that makes it more moving. I remember riding the jeepney one hot Saturday noon and I was reading this while in transit. I was crammed in the corner and I was trying my best to steady the book in my hands so I can highlight one beautiful line after the next. In case you borrow this book from me, please excuse the elementary, squiggly lines you’ll find all throughout my copy. The jeepney was rather fast.
”It’s stores, it’s the whole thing, all that shit everywhere, ‘scuse me, that merchandise, all those goods, and ads screaming at you from all over the place, buy buy buy buy buy, and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, ‘Can I help you,’ it’s all I can do not to scream, ‘Bitch, you can’t even help yourself.”
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac
This book has filled generations with wanderlust, all yearning to drop everything and hit the road. If I was asked to choose a life from any book, I would love to be pals with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. What isn’t there to love? The occasional drugs, hop from city to city, work to afford the basics of a life free from the traps of consumerism, end up in some shithole and spew a magnificent literary piece in the process.
“…and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
- Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
“Once the plane was on the ground, soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood. The melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever.”
Simply put, this is the book I’m most emotionally attached to. The reasons are like ingredients to a cocktail mix: a tad too personal, a bit shameful, swirls of regrets and more parts hurtful. (And I also wrote something about the movie adaptation here.)
- Into The Wild – Jon Krakauer
Everyone should learn a thing or two from Christopher McCandless/Alexander Supertramp. First, it is one thing to believe in something and actually doing it an entirely different thing. Here was a man who was straight out of college, wealthy and with his entire life waiting for him. Yet, he chose to donate his entire college fund to charity, burn his remaining money, travel across the country in a beat-up car, enjoy the wilderness and basically live, in the truest sense of the word. This book broke my heart and it took me weeks before I recovered. I printed out a picture of him and pasted it on my Moleskine to serve as a reminder of his amazing story. It was like carrying Alexander Supertramp’s spirit in me and made me wish I was as brave as he was in real life.
“Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.”
- We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
This book is scary; this book is scarily good. After reading this, I couldn’t stop talking about it. I would try to re-tell the story to friends who are willing to listen but I know that my attempts at trying to convey to them how amazing this book are nothing compared to the experience of actually reading it. It terrified me to the point where I have to put down the book, let out an expletive or two and start the torture all over again. Needless to say, I was a willing victim. Things I learned from this book: sure, motherhood is scary but nothing is more beautiful than a mother’s love for her child.
“What we talk about is what we think about, is what our lives are about. I’m not sure I want to spend mine looking over my shoulder at a generation whose lineage I’m personally helping to truncate. There’s something nihilistic about not having children, Franklin. As if you don’t believe in the whole human thing. If everyone followed our lead, the species would disappear in a hundred years.”
- Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
My tattoo of a line from the book sums up how much I am indebted to the series, how much of a fan I am and how long I will keep these stories in my heart: Through and through.
- One Hundred Years Of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
It took me a hundred years to finish the book, which is an obvious exaggeration, but books like these are meant to be taken in slowly, like slow cooked food that takes hours to come up with a culinary masterpiece. Hurrying through the book would be doing a great injustice to Marquez’s beautifully complex storyline. I remember going back and forth the illustration of the Buendia family tree at the beginning of the book just so I can keep track of which Arcadio or Amaranta was I reading about. It is a magical and mystical story of an ever enduring family that built a history that only a genius like Gabriel Garcia Marquez can do.
“He [Aureliano II] had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
- The Unbearable Lightness Of Being -Milan Kundera
A single metaphor can give birth to love.
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
