After a summer of immersing myself in literature and journaling almost everyday, I have found that my thoughts and literary tendencies tend to settle on a few topics: family, locating oneself geographically, and more than anything the magical and inexplicable moments of joy in a world unwilling to accommodate you. Even if I haven't read them in years or have forgotten details, these are the books that have stayed with me all summer, miraculously appearing in conversations and visiting many late-night thoughts just before sleep.
Wuthering Heights
What happened in this novel? Can anyone distinctly remember each character's intricate relations with a plurality of others, all with ridiculous permutations of a handful of given names among an even smaller handful of families in Northern England? Yet I remember passion, I remember Heathcliff, I can feel the moor around me. Some of the more shocking lines stay with you and the intensity of feeling is what makes me think often to what this book said of graves and dust (hint: it was a lot, but a glorious much). Just as the characters haunt each other's families and bloodlines, so too does this book haunt you.
Mrs. Dalloway
Each of these novels, in a way, has a strong tie to its setting: the moor sustains the wilderness of its inhabitants' souls and it is the departure from her native Caribbean that creates the madwoman of Jane Eyre. But in Mrs. Dalloway the words are the traffic of London and in reading it you cannot escape being transported to the beating heart of London. While I was reading, I was drawn to listening to the Downton Abbey theme and I found this text and that song were united in their attempts to define an era. But a song is meant to have rhythm so that strong characteristic of Woolf's greatest novel makes it all the more unique.
Grapes of Wrath
Suffering with dignity is what I most recall about this American epic. Acknowledging our nation's dark moments, this text takes us to the personal hurt that is replicated on a regional scale by alternating chapters between an anonymous vignette of life in the Western states during the Dust Bowl and an incredibly close-up, microscopic account of what one family does to survive. A huge bonus is the stunning religious imagery that periodically appears in this novel, ultimately one of hope and American resilience.
My Name is Red
What can be said about a novel that explains the way red tastes other than that it is the most thrilling examination of art I've ever read? Set during the thousandth year of Islam, mysteries surround a group of miniaturists who work on art that some say challenges the faith. Any lover of manuscripts (as I am) will adore the attention to detail that Orhan Pamuk gives to each traditional story and illumination his characters retell and examine over the course of the novel. Though dense with morals sprung from mythologies and legends, the text pulls you through it as you attempt to resolve the murder established in the first chapter, "I am a Corpse." The wit and hilarity of postmodern writers like Calvino tells a tale of East meets West, one that will resonate with anyone familiar with the inbetweenness of Balkan cultures.
A Clockwork Orange
My favorite feature of this book is the language it is written in, precisely because it unites Slavic roots, Germanic grammar, and British slang which is dizzying even for a native speaker of both language families. A spiritual, violent chaos with a limited few constants like, oh, say, morality is at the center of this novella which feels like a series of blows and jabs as it takes you through a violent tour of our future.
On a personal note, this is a book that made an appearance in my best essay for the application to the life-changing Telluride Association Summer Program, in a lack-luster essay on my SAT exam, in a decent essay for Columbia, and was the basis for what was probably my most successful college app answer: "What matters to you and why? Govoreeting."
Beloved
Toni Morrison uses the word "haunting" to get at what her works do to readers and this word refers to more than just the actual haunting in this stunning magical realistic work about love within (and without) the institution of slavery. Few words have haunted me like "your love is too thick" a phrase I think about in my dealings with men, best friends, and fraught family relations.
The power of Morrison's words lay in their universality because this ultra-specific, hyper-realistic, yet supernatural situation her characters find themselves in applies to my life constantly as I negotiate friendships, my love life, and, most importantly, the histories we can and cannot choose. Legacies of violence pervade her work and the experience of black Americans and it is this that resonates across time and space because institutions that hurt us reproduce themselves consciously and unconsciously in even our most intimate environments. Family is at the heart of this novel and if you ever want to feel the dark parts of our nation's past, read like an intimate personal narrative, read this.
Wide Sargasso Sea
If you loved Jane Eyre but hate the madwoman trope in fiction, this novel is for you as long as you're also okay with fuzzy memories, vivid imagery, and a plot that also reads like a love letter to the islands that raised author Jean Rhys? I remember flashes of color and screams and squawks which is precisely the way Rhys tells this story of a woman's relationship to the lands she gets torn away from through decisions men make for her. By the end, you're left to process fading sentences and dim ideas which is a perfect tribute to the shell of a person Jane Eyre describes, yet we do not feel pity as the resoluteness of our creole protagonist maintains itself as her situation grows more dire. It's short and stunning, but leaves you indignant at the world, which perhaps is good as we face modern challenges to our identities?
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Another Steinbeck because few other authors can relay the story of a scientific voyage in which they oscillate between minute details of the specific colors at the specific time of death of a specific fish and all-out musings on why boats matter to the human race. It's the sort of work that reads like a philosophical treatise, save for the moments on shore that structure the "narrative" of the book. Turn to any page to hear Steinbeck's infinite wisdom on topics like naming and chance encounters (or you may learn the way a turtle's heart beats on after death, who knows?).
Dune
Unfortunately, this novel is totally Orientalizing, borrowing words from Arabic and Slavic languages to help depict an indigenous people on a desert planet mixing in Middle Eastern mythology at its will, however the universe created in the work is commendable for its scale and there is still a thrill reading about the politics of this future world. Not only is the political intrigue interstellar, but the actors in the drama are not just people—from lowly peasants to emperors—but a planetary ecosystem as well.
The Satanic Verses
Beyond the controversy of this novel which clearly targets figures like the Ayatollah Khomeini in not-so-veiled ways and asserts that the so-called Satanic Verses in the Koran were part of the Prophet's political maneuvering (all of which culminated in a fatwa being issued against former Muslim Salman Rushdie). It's hard to say "all that aside" because this novel clearly strikes a nerve with people's religious beliefs, but it's worth the critical look since it ultimately is a novel about immigration and a multicultural world. Angels and tropical rain come to London in this novel which clearly yearns and demands for more from a London that, again today with Europe's migrant crisis, seems unwilling to adapt to its changing demographics.