I think it’s safe to say that, in the course of my life so far, I’ve read hundreds of books. Not all of them were of the best quality…especially in my tween years, I had quite an appetite for The Saddle Club and Sweet Valley Twins. This is unfortunate, b/c it appears I wasted some valuable memory space. It seems like I used to retain almost every word I read, which is why I can still relate the salient plot points of any of Tamora Pierce’s novels, but I can’t recall any of the arguments I found so compelling in The Looming Tower, which I read far more recently. I’ll regularly see books I know I’ve read already (I recognize the title), but I can’t really remember what happened or how they ended.
Still, some things manage to stick in my increasingly senescent brain, and it is these books that I want to tell you about; these are the books that have stayed w/ me through the years, that I refer to again and again, who appear in my thoughts, unlooked for and unbidden. They are not necessarily the most elegantly written of books, or even what I would call my “favorites” (although I certainly enjoyed them), but all of them are remarkable (to me at least) for their powerful stories.
1. The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa
2. Not her real name by Emily Perkins (actually a short story collection, but I loved them all)
3. L’hygiène de l’assassin by Amélie Nothomb
4. The Inivisible Circus by Jennifer Egan
5. Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
7. Le parfum by Patrick Süskind
8. Animal Farm by George Orwell
9. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
10. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Honorable Mentions: The Wandering Unicorn by Manuel Mujica Lainez, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
