Sixteen Things to Read Before "They" Finally Take You Down

As per request from the best flatmate with whom I have ever resided, here is a list of my personal top sixteen favourite reads. I've excluded plays and short poems because Mr. Winkles (of all the voices in my head, he's the scariest one) told me to exclude them.

After no. 1, they are in no particular order of fabulousness/importance.

1. The Bible by God
(But of course! I realise this is the obligatory Christian literary pick, but when the author of the universe writes something, it's probably a good idea to crack it open and take a long, hard look.)

2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
(Fantastic sweets, wild and crazy chocolate manufacturer, golden tickets, and repulsive children. What's not to adore?)

3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
(For some reason, I am not very fond of any books I had to read in middle- and high-school. This is the lone exception. Like Gloria Gaynor, it's a survivor!)

4. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
(Beautiful, and sad, and I couldn't put it down until I finished. And then I went to the surgeon who had to amputate my hands so that I really could put it down. I then learned to type with my toes, but have since found that it's much easier to type using literate slaves imported from India.
The book was up for National Book Award in 1961, along with Catch-22 and The Moviegoer (which won). But both the book and the author subsequently drifted off into obscurity. There's been a recent revival of interest for Revolutionary Road though.)

5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(The same guy who penned Remains of the Day. Nominated for the 2005 Booker Prize. It's a haunting story set in a future where cloning is put to...uh...controversial use. It has been compared to Huxley's Brave New World, but it's much better.)

6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll tear your hair out because you're frustrated and angry at the behaviour of certain characters. For the record, I was already planning to read this over the summer of 2004 before Oprah tapped into my brainwaves and made it her book club summer pick.)

7. Silence by Shusaku Endo
(Simple, yet elegant. Told from the perspective of a Portuguese Jesuit priest who goes to Japan to tend to the local Christian community there, currently facing persecution. As the novel progresses, the priest begins to ruminate more and more on the question of betrayal: what constitutes betrayal and apostasy, what was the nature of Judas' betrayal of Jesus, is Judas so different from Jesus after all?)

8. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
(It looks really big and scary. But extremely engaging once you start reading it. It's 600 pages long, but I ended up finishing it within 3 days. The short of it is that it's about 4 figures caught up in the events of India's 1975 state of emergency. The long of it is that the characters and plot turns and twists are absolutely spell-binding, and that it also made tears stand in my eyes. I don't usually cry, but it was my novel, and I'll cry if I want to.)

9. Bugs in the System by May Berenbaum
(May Berenbaum is my entomologist-heroine! I think she teaches at the University of Illinois Entomology department. It's an engaging and light-hearted book about the roles that insects play in human life, from how many cockroach parts per chocolate bar are permitted by FDA standards to how entomologists suspect that the manna which sustained the Israelites during those 40 years in the desert may have been the honey-dew excretions of a scale-insect native to that area.)

10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
(The standard favourite of every female reader. And Jane Austen is one funny gal.)

11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
(The other standard favourite of every female reader. Everyone loves Jane...so you wonder why the heck must Jane end up marrying whom she does.)

12. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
(Don't Panic. And always bring a towel.)

13. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
(What I found most charming about this novel was the sheer enthusiasm with which Melville seems to have written it. "I'm writing a novel, and by golly, I'm going to put in everything that I really like and enjoy writing about." There's a whole chapter devoted to how scary white things (including white whales) are. There a chapter devoted to bad pictures of whales and good pictures of whales. 'These are not good reasons for liking a book,' you might say. I know. It mystifies me.)

12. Matilda by Roald Dahl
(Having been educated in a British primary school, Roald Dahl was our hero...even after he came to our school to visit and refused to meet the really young children: my class, unfortunately. All of his children's books are great. My particular faves are also "The Witches" and "The BFG". But a story about a book-loving girl-genius mistreated by her vapid, twit-parents? How can one not identify in fits of melodramatic girlish angst?)

13. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
(Elegantly written with a touch of restrained, dry humour, this feminist essay won my heart upon first read. Published in 1929, Woolf sets out to explore why women hitherthen had not produced as many great literary works as men. )

14. All the Sherlock Holmes Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (aka "Conan the Victorian.")
(Jolly good stuff! Smashing good read! Embarrassingly enough, during high school I had a bit of a crush on Sherlock Holmes. But those days are gone. He's fictional to me now.)

15. Charlie Dancey's Encyclopaedia of Ball Juggling by Charlie Dancey
(I thought it was impossible to learn new tricks from diagrams and descriptions. And then I bought this book. It has pictures, step-by-step instructions, and silliness and humour exuding from every paperous pore. It also makes learning how to do 'Rubenstein's Revenge' as easy as A-B-D. Uh...C....I mean, A-B-C.)

16. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
(I love this book. There's nothing hugely spectacular about it, nor any event particularly exciting within its covers. It's just about a girl from a working-class Irish-American family growing up in Brooklyn. But I still love to flip through it when I'm back home and read random passages from it. As a result, it is well-worn and has accidentally fallen into the bath-tub many times.)