10 books.

I've never been able to pick favorites. It's not for lack of strong opinions (go on, ask me whether nuts belong in brownie sundaes: they don't); it's that I'm reluctant to declare one thing unquestionably "better" than another without any context. My favorites are circumstantial: favorite food can depend on the season, its availability, whether or not I have to cook it myself, the last thing I ate, and how hungry I am at any given moment; favorite band can depend on the definition of "band," what mood I'm in, who's asking, and whether or not I'm trying to impress them; favorite scarf depends on the weather; favorite book is impossible. To a reader, being asked to choose a single favorite book is an outrage akin to being asked to choose a favorite...well, nothing else, really. Film fans might disagree, but books are arguably a category unto their own, so infinitely diverse and carrying such a range of implications about the readers who choose them that being asked to decide on just one feels like an insult.

When well-meaning and/or nosy adults asked bookish little me what my "favorite book of all" was, I used to lie and name the last thing I'd finished simply to get them to leave me to whatever current thing I was reading, or if I was feeling particularly annoyed at the intrusion, I would name a great classic that I knew would both impress them and get them to abruptly end the conversation themselves. It was particularly effective if the title sounded bleak: Crime and Punishment and The Plague worked well. As I've gotten older and even more impatient with the impertinence of the favorite book question, I've resorted to bluntness: "I don't have a favorite book." It's true enough that I don't make many friends with that answer, but then I wouldn't be likely to enjoy the company of anyone who asked me that anyway.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I was horrified to see that my friend Molly had tagged me in one of those "answer these questions and pass it on to someone else" posts about books. I felt betrayed, because Molly is one of those people who I believed would know better, would understand that a person can't simply list their 10 favorite books at the drop of a hat and move on as if the decision were final. Sorry I doubted you, Molly, because the "rules" of this game turned out to be more nuanced than that:

List ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.

Oh. Okay. I can do that.

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
2. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
3. The Catcher in the Rye/Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
4. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
5. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
6. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
7. I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere by Anna Gavalda
8. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
9. The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
10. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

My list skews heavily towards books I first read years ago, some of which are considered children's/young adult titles. I did think twice about publicly laying claim to some of them, but what is more touching than the book that all my friends passed around to each other when boyfriends were nothing more than fictional devices, or the ones whose screen adaptations lured us to midnight premieres where we clutched each other's hands when our emotions got to be too much? What has stayed with me more than the book I packed first of all when I left for college, or the one I read alone in bed after I'd arrived at school when no other words made sense? I don't even feel the need to justify the three that made me seriously consider my own mortality.

If you want to ask me about books, don't ask me about favorites. Ask me which ones made me feel a certain way; which ones changed my mind or shaped my beliefs; which ones I'd recommend to a friend and which ones a friend recommended to me; ask me what I was doing when I read a book and what I did after. Then tell me about your books.

My matching set of Salingers.

A happy surprise.

Hello, blog. It's 1:20 a.m. on a Friday night/Saturday morning, and I'm sprawled across the bed still fully dressed with a book, my laptop, and a full tub of cheese balls that I won in a guess-how-many-cheese-balls-are-in-the-tub contest (it was for charity, okay?). It feels like a good time to come back to you.

Over the past few years of my undergrad education, I've become more accustomed to telling people that I'm an English major and expecting that knowledge to immediately help them fill in some details about me, my educational goals an easy heuristic for my other skills and interests. Yes, I'm a words person, and if you know what I mean by that, so are you: I read (novels and the New York Times, food blogs and style blogs, political analysis, poetry that doesn't always rhyme, and tweets upon tweets) and I write (mostly papers, sometimes blogs, occasional opinion articles, and tweets upon tweets) and I give a fuck about Oxford commas (maybe too much). My freshman year, I brought a dozen books to school with me, and came home with over seventy, and a sore back from carrying them down the stairs in my residence hall. I find it appalling that in a fire, paperbacks would be the first casualties. I also wear glasses that make me look like a junior librarian, because surprise: reading under the covers with a flashlight as a child tends to make you nearsighted.

Unsurprisingly, I'm also a library person. I remember, in those halcyon childhood days of near-endless time to read, amassing piles of Babysitter's Club books from my town library's used book sales in the dusty, airless basement. When Sweet Valley High and the Boxcar Children ceased to satisfy me, I went upstairs and checked out stacks of Nancy Drew books and anything by Paula Danziger from the Young Adult shelf (unfortunately, singular) before exhausting the supply and moving on to J. D. Salinger and Oscar Wilde, all the while totally disinterested in the dog-eared copies of mass-market romance and sci-fi novels that comprised the remainder of the basement book room. It took about ten years and an electrical explosion to get me back down there, but it was ultimately worth the time in between.

I got a job when I was 15, scooping Italian ice for the odd customer or two who wandered in almost by accident during my four-hour shifts, and predictably exhausted my meager paychecks on book binges. Barnes & Noble's bargain book bin sales were cause for excited emails (hellooo, early 2000s) with my best friend about exactly which titles sounded promising, and my bank account and the U.S. Postal Service both rue the day I realized how cheap and easy it was to buy used books on Amazon. Still, I spent more than I care to admit on clean, fresh paperbacks in those days, savoring the experience of making an untouched novel really and truly mine, slightly (only ever slightly!) bent cover and all. I remember where my books came from better than I remember where I buy my clothes, and for good reason: they were bankrupting me.

In May 2010, the Morristown & Morris Township Library blew up -- literally. Some sort of major electrical mishap underneath the foundation of the building caused approximately $1 million worth of structural damage, and the library was forced to temporarily move its operations elsewhere. The weekly book sale, which I'd entirely forgotten about in the decade of my maturation from children's literature to existentialist philosophers, relocated to an unoccupied corner storefront a full half-block closer to my house. I can't remember whether I or my best friend was the first to (re)discover its ill-advertised magnificence, but during that summer immediately following, we both certainly did our part to keep the library's restoration efforts afloat. A far cry from the stifling, asthma-inducing conditions of the library basement, the new space was small enough to feel intimate, but airy enough to let books and their potential buyers breathe. For prices ranging from $0.25 to $2, I bought copies of books I'd read but didn't own, and books I'd judged by their covers and with which I only later read and loved: Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty trilogy, Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Stephen Dubner & Stephen D. Levitt's Freakonomics. In the past two years alone, my personal collection has probably grown by half, thanks to the people crazy enough to donate perfectly intact copies of great books to the sale.

 Now that I've filled out most of my collection, I have a tendency to stock up on contemporary literary fiction in near-mint condition whenever I make a book sale pilgrimage, always thinking I'll get around to reading whatever hot new thing is all over the New York Times bestseller lists and be the hit of all the dinner parties (note: this is not really a thing. I don't know anyone who throws dinner parties, and I don't know that I have the manners to attend them anyway). Most recently, I optimistically acquired copies of Nicole Krauss's  Great House, Jennifer DuBois's A Partial History of Lost Causes, and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, the last of which was recently shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Of course, I've had less than sufficient time to actually crack any of their spines since classes started, but after an academically exhausting few weeks, I thought I needed to get back in touch with what I love about reading. I'm glad I started with The Art of Fielding tonight, not only because it only took me a single chapter to fall in love, but because I found this upon turning the first page:

It was like getting an unexpected letter from a friend in the mail, or two candy bars from a vending machine when you've only paid for one, or whatever the opposite of rain on your wedding day is: totally great. So thanks, Morristown Library; I've always been a fan of you.

The Books I Read: 2011

Presented without excess commentary, explanations, or embarrassment, these are all the books I read in their entirety, a few for class but mostly by choice, from this past January through December. There is, of course, significant overlap with my Summer Reading 2011 post, but it made more sense to be redundant and comprehensive than to skip over those books in this list.

How to Make an American Quilt -- Whitney Otto
Rites of Spring (Break) -- Diana Peterfreund
Sense and Sensibility -- Jane Austen
The Virgin Suicides -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Beauty and the Beast -- Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -- Dave Eggers
Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam -- David R. Farber
Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded -- Samuel Richardson
Shamela -- Henry Fielding
Colossus: The Rise and the Fall of the American Empire -- Niall Ferguson
What Now? -- Ann Patchett
How Did You Get This Number -- Sloane Crosley
Nine Stories -- J. D. Salinger
Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- Marisha Pessl
On Chesil Beach -- Ian McEwan
The Russian Debutante's Handbook -- Gary Shteyngart
The Phantom Tollbooth -- Norton Juster
A Widow for One Year -- John Irving
Someone I Loved -- Anna Gavalda
I Am Charlotte Simmons -- Tom Wolfe
Indecision -- Benjamin Kunkel
The Luneberg Variation -- Paolo Maurensig
Selected Stories -- E. M. Forster
Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel García Márquez
The Forgotten Garden -- Kate Morton
The School of Essential Ingredients -- Erica Bauermeister
Old School -- Tobias Wolff
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation -- Elizabeth Berg
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance -- Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Still Alice -- Lisa Genova
The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- Muriel Barbery
Picnic, Lightning -- Billy Collins
Interpreter of Maladies -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The Music Lesson -- Katharine Weber
One Day -- David Nicholls
Little Bee -- Chris Cleave
The Classmates: Chaos, Privilege, and the End of an Era -- Geoffrey Douglas
A Moveable Feast -- Ernest Hemingway
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- Lynne Truss
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris -- John Baxter
The Hunger Games -- Suzanne Collins
Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Everything Beautiful Began After -- Simon van Booy
Nocturnes -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Middlesex -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Catching Fire -- Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay -- Suzanne Collins
Anna in the Tropics -- Nilo Cruz
The Handmaid and the Carpenter -- Elizabeth Berg
Spring Awakening -- Steven Sater
The Anthologist -- Nicholson Baker

If authors were stocks, I'd say I made some pretty strong investments this year.

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Summer reading 2011.

These are the books I read this past summer, presented in chronological order and with minimal commentary because I'm currently occupied with much less recreational reading. Critical thinking on writing composition theory, anyone?

Italics indicate books I had read previously; bold type marks my recommendations. [If I re-read it, that's a recommendation in itself.]

The Truth About Forever -- Sarah Dessen
Prague -- Arthur Phillips
How Did You Get This Number -- Sloane Crosley
What Now? -- Ann Patchett
Nine Stories -- J. D. Salinger
Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- Marisha Pessl
On Chesil Beach -- Ian McEwan
The Russian Debutante's Handbook -- Gary Shteyngart
The Phantom Tollbooth -- Justin Norton
A Widow For One Year -- John Irving
Someone I Loved -- Anna Gavalda
I Am Charlotte Simmons -- Tom Wolfe
Indecision -- Benjamin Kunkel
The Luneberg Variation -- Paolo Maurensig
Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel García Márquez
Selected Stories -- E. M. Forster
The Forgotten Garden -- Kate Morton
The School of Essential Ingredients -- Erica Bauermeister
Old School -- Tobias Wolff
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation -- Elizabeth Berg
Still Alice -- Lisa Genova
Picnic, Lightning -- Billy Collins
The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- Muriel Barbery
Interpreter of Maladies -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The Music Lesson -- Katharine Weber
One Day -- David Nicholls
Little Bee -- Chris Cleave
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food -- Jennifer 8 Lee
The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era -- Geoffrey Douglas
A Moveable Feast -- Ernest Hemingway
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- Lynne Truss
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris -- John Baxter
The Hunger Games -- Suzanne Collins
Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro

Herm-own-ninny.

Everyone has some skeletons in their closet. This is one of mine.
(Double posting today because I wrote this on the way home from Chicago and just remembered it now.)

I remember my first foray into the Harry Potter universe with what can only be described as shame. Having caught Potter fever in its early but decidedly dire stages, I was finishing up a much-labored-over presentation on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to my fourth-grade class, who I imagined could have been nothing less than enraptured with my inspired recounting of the story. This was, for the record, likely also the first but not last instance of my burning the midnight oil to finish a paper to my insane personal standard of satisfaction. Digression: two years later, I would find myself embarrassed with the gentle criticism on a twelve-page analysis, so-called, of Louis Sachar’s Holes that my English teacher informed me was a good effort, but more a retelling than a report. Considering that I had doubled the recommended page length and had an un-athletic sixth-grader’s difficulty applying adequate force to the stapler when it came time to hand it in, she wasn’t wrong. At the time, I thought myself some sort of feverishly inspired literary journalist, duty-bound to inform the masses of the brilliantly rendered coming-of-age story that I had already read twice that summer; actually, I had just babbled on for pages and pages with my keyboard only too willing to cooperate in an embarrassing outpouring of seriously-no-one-cares. I only made that mistake once. End digression.

I remember distinctly the boy I argued with: Billy Morris, forever engraved into my memory as the teasing little twerp who called me “Pancake,” which certain current friends of mine have appropriate into more a term of endearment than the bizarre juvenile disparagement it was originally intended as. (Thanks, friends.) I can’t vouch for much wit on my part as a generally speech-shy fourth grader, but I know that most comebacks I made to that round-faced blond kid inevitably played on the pun of Billy Morris living in Morristown. Clever and also hilarious! Or maybe not, but I’ll never forget his name. Unfortunately, that means he stands out in my admittedly selective memory as my antagonist in a heated debate over the correct pronunciation of Hermione, the bookish, smart and occasionally smart-alecky female best friend, with whom I and thousands of other readers inevitably identified: I was, and here comes the confession, a proponent of the “Hermy-own” theory. I have absolutely no idea where I came by this pronunciation, and even less regarding the origins of the particular conviction with which I self-righteously and incorrectly corrected he who dared to challenge me. But seriously, what a little creep: was I the one giving this report, or wasn’t I?

The release of Goblet of Fire, with Rowling’s sly lesson in How To Correct Widespread Misperceptions About Your Main Characters (or alternately, “Get Your Shit Right, Readers: 101”), dealt a devastating blow to my argument. For the benefit of more casual Potter fans who can’t quite remember the scene I’m referring to, not even Hermione’s Yule Ball date Viktor Krum can get her name down, and Harry hears her correcting the clueless foreigner on the dance floor: “Her-MY-oh-nee,” she enunciates. I went through a few stages of grief after that scene, not least of which was denial: “What a stupid way to pronounce it!” If arrogance were one of the stages of grief, I could check that one off, too: “My way is totally better.” I came around, eventually; a fifth-grade independent study I conducted on all things Harry Potter (my school district really let Gifted & Talented kids get away with anything) inspired an exhaustive exploration of character name origins, leading me to discover the beloved authoress’s habit of adopting literary names, Hermione having been appropriated from the queen in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. When confusion ensued about character names during a read-through of the play in my senior year AP Lit class, I basked in the knowledge that this time around, I really was right about Her-my-oh-nee.

Until the very end.

It's been a while since my last update. Sorry (to all three of my readers). I spent the last few days in and around Chicago, trying to relive Ferris Bueller's Day Off with limited success, although I did learn a lot about art and architecture along the way. On the home front, I've been trying to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for the greatest cinematic event of my lifetime:

I couldn't exaggerate my excitement if I tried. When I was in fifth grade, I spent half a year researching for an independent study on all things Harry Potter, compiling a hefty biography on J. K. Rowling (stands for "Joanne Kathleen" -- her publishers suggested she use her initials to avoid alienating young male readers; lacking a middle name, she adopted her grandmother's first name), creating a collage larger than my entire eleven-year-old upper body, and becoming irritatingly Hermione-like in my inability to stop blurting out the origins of character names in casual conversation. I got an A++++. True story.

There's not much point to this post but to stall until I start re-reading Deathly Hallows again, one last time before everything changes. Of course, after the movie ends, I can just start all over again, and again, and again.