RANDOM LIST OF LIFE-CHANGING BOOKS

There are any number of novels that I will admit I have not read. Many of them are listed as either stellar works of literature, or in some way very significant, profound, and life-changing. At the very top of that list is One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nope, never even touched it. It is, apparently, a masterpiece of magical realism. As well as brilliant, and deeply spiritual. All of which is enough to scare me off.
I refuse to read anything that would presume to speak to my intellectual side, in the estimation of people who think they know me.
I would rather see meaningless crap that is well written.

But I will compromise.

I have read The Catcher in the Rye, and while I did not know it at the time, it likewise is also in some way meaningful. Possibly even spiritual. And uplifting, or inspiring. But somehow it never made my list of re-reads.
The House of Mirth is also an important book. Depressing, though; not a re-read. Catch 22 is amusing, and only a re-read for cynical teenagers.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a book even I acknowledge as important.
Yet remarkably I have not re-read it either.

On my list of permanent revisitables, you will find classics such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, and Pride and Prejudice. That latter is an intense exploration of society through the eyes of its heroine, and made me feel what it means to be a woman of character, intelligence, and an independent personality. Which is rather disturbing, because I am not a woman. Persuasion, by the same author, added on to that, with a hefty dollop of the angst and frustration that as a young lady in regency era England would naturally be my fate.
Again, I am not a woman. Please stop doing that.

Other books which may change your ideas about what it means to be a woman -- or not, if that isn't a choice -- that are also significant and "meaningful" are here listed in no particular order.

I have attempted to read them all, and in some cases actually succeeded.


GOOD BOOKS

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. The Rainbow, by DH Lawrence. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. Villette, by Charlotte Brontë. The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot. Animal Farm,by George Orwell. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ulysses, by James Joyce. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust.
Anna Karenina, by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.


The first two listed were jolly good reads. The Little Prince was not to my taste. Frankenstein grew dreary half-way through. I cannot stand Maya Angelou. Read Anne Frank in several languages, I even have a copy in Chinese. Animal Farm is a jolly good romp, as well as a cautionary tale about how to run an enduring socialist dictatorship. Gone With the Wind is very long, and my alter ego is Rhett Butler. Ulysses is for young men in college who have a large supply of cigars and whiskey. Tolkien is vastly overrated. Proust is a digestive feast.
Anna Karenina is splendid melodrama and very silly.

Marguerite Yourcenar's entire oeuvre is excellent, ditto for Mary Renault.
Anything by Krishnamurti is, of course, a load of twaddle.
As is everything in the self-help category.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh is not by a woman, nor is it an exploration of womanhood. It is never the less a volume that must be on your plate, along with The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Cary, and Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis. Neither of whom were woman either.


For truly life-changing works, also try 'Den Spaanschen Brabander', by Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Brederode, 'De Tienduizend Dingen', by Maria Dermoût, and 'Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification', second edition (Dover Publications),
by Dr. L. Wieger, translated into English by L. Davrout.




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