Cut him out in little stars

In the spirit of this list, I am compelled to make my own list of Crushworthy Books I Read In College. (I can't pick just one. I was an English major. All I did was read.)

The book I remember as the most meaningful on every molecular level was Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson. I was taking a postmodern novel class from a weepy  bleeding-heart associate professor who wore shimmery scarves and clogs. It was the first class where I was actually expected to say things out loud (horrors) and after my 15 page in-class midterm, my teacher used my paper as an example to everyone else (ego swells) and wrote very sternly on my own copy, "PLEASE SPEAK UP" (ego deflates). Anyway, Written On The Body is a weird sort of love story where the readers are left in the dark as to the gender of the narrator. The narrator is in love with a woman named Louise who then falls ill- the whole second half of the book is this bizarre take on medical books and terminology, but I was totally swept up in the love story. I don't think I had ever read anything as beautifully wrought as Jeanette Winterson in my entire nineteen years and OH it was BREATHTAKING. Of course, this had much to do with the fact that one of my very dear friends had recently told me she was dating a GIRL and that was pretty much coloring my entire world at that point. It was a whole perspective I hadn't really considered. I haven't picked up this novel since I graduated and I wonder what I would think about it now.

I read a few other for-class books that made an imprint: The American by Henry James for an Early American Lit class (a class I thought I would loathe, but, I don't know if you know this, but there were some pretty great Early American writers! I know!) Frankenstein. Jane Eyre. (Yes, I did not read Jane Eyre until college. A travesty.) Antigone. White Noise.  Pamela and Evelina, if only for the sheer bile they conjured up within. 

But the couple of other books were just ones recommended to me by friends and read in my spare time. One of my friends gave me Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies for my birthday and I spent the whole summer wishing I had the amazing talent of Jhumpa Lahiri. Those short stories are all so perfect. I was taking a short story writing class at the time and hadn't figured out how you actually write a short story. I never found a way to capture a moment or a character in 15 pages, but Jhumpa Lahiri had it mastered.

That book and The Brothers K by David James Duncan were probably the two books that made me want to write my own stories. The Brothers K is a long windy road of a book, spanning childhoods and wars and countries, but I loved it and everyone I knew loved it. Even when the little boys you originally fell in love with grew up into weirdo hippies and depressed soldiers and treated their parents badly- you still needed to know what happened to that family.

I also read Gender and Grace by Mary Stuart Van Leeuwen which was an unbelievable help with the whole "he will rule over you" thing. This is one of the only 'Christian' books I've read about this subject that doesn't make you gag. It was the first time I heard (read) someone say "It's not supposed to be that way." I also devoured China Wakes because, hello, my boyfriend was Chinese and he went to China two summers in a row and it was Very Important I be Up on these things. I hadn't read any big historical-ish book on Asia before that and oh, it was very sad. (I also read the collected works of Eric Hobsbawm; dangerously eye-crossing books for an incredibly interesting class taught by a tiny Turkish man with a Little Bo Peep voice. I gave them all to my dad knowing that he likes that kind of thing and just recently he told me he was enjoying them. Which surprised me as I have now discovered that Eric Hobsbawm is an "unrepentant Communist". Ah, the educational perils of an unassuming liberal arts student at University!)

ANYWAY. Isn't pathetic that so few of these are Of Substance? I didn't exactly familiarize myself with any Great Works in college. I took 3 or 4 Shakespeare classes, ancient lit (Beowulf in Old English anyone?), the Victorians, the postmodernists, the Bible as literature and eventually maxed out my allowable English-oriented credits. I took pretty much everything except the Romantic poets because, despite their lovely name, they bore. me. to. death. Is it any wonder why I didn't manage to minor in anything? I can, however, recite Juliet's Act 3 soliloquy. Does anyone want to hire me?

I have a sneaking suspicion this stuff didn't make me fashionable, much less Well Read. But I figure I have the rest of my life to be Well Read. Right now I'm working on the Martha Grimes bibliography and Best American Travel Writing 2005 and after that perhaps I'll start on The Time Traveler's Wife which has been sitting unread on my nightstand for 300 years and maybe Oprah's top choices. I hear she has good taste. (Although I did not care at all for One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Corrections. Ugh.)

Actually, my next book will be Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking. I read the first 20 or so pages in Barnes & Noble while waiting for Phillip and by the time he found me, I was bawling. In a STORE.

What did you read way back when?

Comments

[jackie]

Wow. That's some serious reading.

I was thinking "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Taking Charge of your Fertility".

-jackie