Help! Fun help, I think!

[kate]

Hello there dwircle! Apologies for being absent. Life is absolutely bonkers and I shall not get into it right now because I have a task and it is a happy thing for a Saturday and a way to not think about work.

My nephew is turning 17 next Saturday. My older sister got him a poster of 100 books he should read (I think that's just a list and the poster isn't just... a big blob of text? I hope???) and 6 books off the list.

* To Kill a Mockingbird
* Grapes of Wrath
* The Shadow of the Wind
* Lord of the Flies
* The Da Vinci Code
* War and Peace

I also bought 8 books off the list.

* The Phantom Tollbooth
* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
* Beloved
* Brave New World
* The Color Purple
* 1984
* The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
* The Little Prince

And then thought... you know what? I have books that I thought were worthy and changed my life. Important books to me, books that brought insight or just taught me new ways to look at things or just deeply affected me at different points in my life (as the 8 above had).

* The Lost Language of Cranes (David Leavitt)
* Blink (Malcolm Gladwell)
* Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett)
* Written on the Body (Jeannette Winterson)
* I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
* Nop's Trials (Daniel McCaig)
* Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

I asked my wife, her friends, my friends, and their friends.

* Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)
* Passage (Connie Willis)
* Wicked (Gregory Maguire)
* The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo)
* The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
* The Folk Keeper (Franny Billingsley)
* The Art of War (Sun Tsu)
* The Dogs of Babel (Carolyn Parkhurst)

And now I am asking you fine folks. What books would you add here? Books that brought you joy, challenged you, taught you something, or made you feel something? He loves to read, so while he might not read everything, he will try, and I want to give him as wide a variety of authors and subjects as possible. Your help is GREATLY appreciated. Also, wax lyrical about your fave books, fam, I want to hear it. <33333

Comments

[silverflight8]

Gaudy Night, Nine Tailors - Dorothy Sayers
-> these are the culminations of a dozen detective novels. The prose and the many layers of allusions are so enjoyable, but Nine Tailors has this atmosphere and feeling of the small town England that Wimsey is in. And Gaudy Night really is the culmination of the series, set in a women's college in Oxford - the first, this is 1930s, when women who become scholars choose to give up the ideal of marriage and family in order to pursue it. It's a good book and underlying the whole thing is the question of principle - what it means to have them, to pursue them, etc.

A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K LeGuin
-> Wizard of Earthsea, I mean it was just formative. But as an adult, reading it later, too, LeGuin wanted to write a book with a fantasy protagonist who was not great because his strength or his fighting, it's entirely devoid of that. Left Hand of Darkness is both amazing for its anthropological exploration of an 'alien' species, as well as a truly epic glacier journey (think South Pole expedition!) One of the most amazing things about LeGuin is she explores alien viewpoints in a way that is very nuanced and interested; some fiction treats aliens by putting a head tentacle on and doesn't think about social aspects (or mildly changes a few things - and that's OK, they're telling stories about the struggles of running a spacecraft or whatever) but it matters a lot to LeGuin and her books reflect that.

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie
-> About AI, what it means to be part of a big ship AI and its human bodies which are part of its mind, and what happens when it is just you left. It's very unusual and fresh and also plays with translation convention, as the Radch (main imperialist culture) has one gender and the text refers to everyone as "she" (though the people of the Radch are not female, or women)

Among Others - Jo Walton
-> Epistolary written as a diary of Mori Phelps, who after her twin dies, is sent to an boarding school in England (she is Welsh). The car crash that killed her sister injured her badly and she can't walk well, and feels really isolated from her classmates, so she writes a lot about the SF/F she's reading. There's this amazing joy and reflection I see in her, regarding the books - it's like a love letter to SF/F from the 1970s and 1980s, and it's also in itself sort of low fantasy (you can believe in the magic or not - it's ambiguous).

The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
->An imperial power took over Baru's land utterly; she remembers it happening, and decides that she is going to succeed, so she studies very hard, passes the civil exam with flying colours, and is posted to a different, also annexed land with an imperial post (an accountant). Thereupon she gets embroiled into the local rebellion there. It's very twisty and plotty.

Conrad's Fate - Diana Wynne Jones
-> Diana Wynne Jones has the most incredible writing, it's all just such a pleasure to read. This is secondary fantasy, where magic exists; Conrad starts a job as a footman/valet in a big castle on the hill and gets drawn into an adventure when Chrestomanci (character from the series) shows up. Really, DWJ is just a delight.

The Sky is Falling - Kit Pearson
-> England evacuated thousands of children not just out of London to the the countryside during the Blitz, but some were sent overseas, including to Canada. Nora and her younger brother Gavin (they're like 10 and 5 or so) get sent to Toronto, where they are taken in by a very rich older lady. I've never read anything quite so good at capturing what it felt like to be that age, Pearson absolutely nails the scared and angry and confused feelings about being moved, the way you can love your younger sibling (but not realize) and hate them for hanging around you all the time being drooly and needy, the beginnings of wanting independence and exploration, etc. It's just so well done.

Hawk of May - Gillian Bradshaw
-> Arthurian literature about Gawain. It's got a little touch of fantasy in it, but mostly I really love Bradshaw's characters - very much noble but not in the way that it's sometimes interpreted (raw power, elaborate courtesy), but an inner goodness, I guess. It's just really relaxing to read. More grounded in Wales/England also.

Most of these gave me joy and also left me with very strong feelings/I revisit them. Definitely a major bias towards female authors and fantasy, but that's only to be expected :) Also I have a different list for the kid lit that shaped me, but since he is sixteen maybe he's not as interested in those - I kinda got caught at the right age for em, and I am not sure they're as influential later on. But these ones I listed, most of them I read once I was an adult and I felt like a slightly different person afterwards. It's a lot rarer to have that happen as I get older (I think I have gotten pickier over the years, inevitably - and I've hit 100+ books read a year sometimes, so I have read a lot, and stuff that is revolutionary or novel at age 8 with 20 books under your belt, is somewhat different a decade or more later.)

Anyway. I hope your nephew enjoys the books. I know there is a poster with scratch off detailing so you can visually chart the progress, but while it was cool, so many of the titles were just meh (the standard classical lit, a lot of which I've read, and which leans very hard on some demographics and not other, and also tends to be a bit joyless) so I passed on buying it. But I think about it sometimes! :P It was a very cool poster and I love the concept.

[kate]

Oh, thank you so much! I meant to include Ursula LeGuin, so thanks for that reminder. I've also read the DWJ one, thanks for that reminder too! So much good stuff here, thank you thank you!

[silverflight8]

Always happy to ramble about my favourite books!