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The Ten Most Memorable Books I've Read in the Past Ten Years

I was thinking the other day about how I remember some books as being good without really remembering them, whereas other books have stayed with me more or less in their entirety for a long, long time. I decided to make a list of ten books like this. It really should be called "The Ten Most Memorable Good Books I Read in the Six Years Leading Up to 2010" because I left a little buffer zone for time to do it's work (appropriately, the most recent book on my list is A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), which is about that sort of thing). I also left off books that were memorable in a bad way (e.g. certain D.H. Lawrence novels, some exceptionally bad self-help), and, like I said, a lot of good or even great books of which I can only recall little chunks (e.g. Winter's Bone, Portrait of a Lady, certain non-fiction texts).

This is not by any means a list of The Best and Most Impressive Books I've Ever Read, but all of these are worth at least a good read and at most a years-long obsession. (They are listed in no particular order.)

The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists, ed. Irene and Alan Taylor

I found this book by chance at Half Price Books. I only picked it up because it was so big and had such an interesting title (from the William Soutar line "a diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen"--a metaphor for the keeping and betraying of secrets that writing in a diary entails). 

Like I said, it's a large book (600+ pages), so I obviously don't recall everything, but that still leaves dozens and dozens of incredible--and funny and mundane and even horrifying--stories that have stuck with me for years. Some of the diarists lived centuries ago, and others are still alive today. They run the gamut from housewives to aristocrats, soldiers to writers, and even several soldier/writers, like Stendhal, who wrote, chillingly, on February 25, 1808: "Since the last entry I've killed three hares, the first quadrupeds in my life." (Did he mean he'd only killed birds before, or men?)

My favorite diarist in the book is John Evelyn, who brings to life a seventeenth-century carnival on the shores of the Thames (reviling the bear-baiting) and in other entries, recounts the loss of a beloved child to illness, and the loss of a treasured signet ring to highwaymen. The entries are arranged by date (regardless of the year), with several disparate, contrasting, or hauntingly similar entries from a variety of people for each day. (You could read the book as I did, starting on New Year's Day, in "real time" so to speak.) This is a brilliant book, and just holding it makes me want to read it again.

The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart

In college, I used to walk through the library with my eyes shut and pick up whichever book I--literally--bumped into. I usually did this in the stacks upstairs, but I found The Places in Between in the new books section near the door. (It was so new in fact, that it was the British edition, and I was the first person to check it out!) Rory Stewart is a Scottish man who, having gotten a bit too comfortable strolling around Scotland, decided in the year 2000 that he wanted to traverse Asia on foot. He had to skip Afghanistan at first, though, because scary, right? Well that changed slightly in 2001, when the Americans charged in. Stewart jumped at the chance to cross the border, and that's where the journey described in this book begins. The title refers to the Afghani practice of reciting the order of villages in a journey rather than carrying maps. You want to go from here to there? These are the places in between. 

Other than buying himself a sturdy walking staff and asking a smith to weld a giant lump of iron onto the end (with which to fend off feral dogs) Stewart makes very few preparations and carries very little with him, relying instead on the deeply ingrained prescripts of Islamic hospitality. He gets into quite a few scrapes, as can be expected in a harsh and varied environment dotted with warlike tribes of uncertain loyalties, but his persistence, his shalwar kameez, and his ability to guilt-trip even the most hostile of xenophobes get him surprisingly far. He is also quite the scholar (and egotist), and never passes up an opportunity to share his extensive knowledge of near east geography, history, and customs with the reader. I could not fucking shut up about this book for months.

Tracks, by Robyn Davidson

When I wouldn't shut up about The Places in Between, my sister said, "Well, if you like that one so much, you should read Tracks." There are a lot of similarities between the books, but this one takes place in Western Australia, and it's written by a woman, who completed her journey a quarter of a century before Rory Stewart began his. It's hard to say who has a tougher time of it. Davidson at least has camels to carry her stuff, but they require extensive care (you will learn so much about camels if you read this book). But aside from the occasional wandering Aboriginie, Davidson encounters very few friendly "villagers", and certainly none who wash her socks and warm them in front of the fire for her, as they do for Stewart. In fact, Davidson gives up on clothes entirely for much of her journey. 

This is something of a feminist book, but I remember being mystified by her submission to various men throughout the story when she's obviously such a tough lady. I suppose, in 1977, she was part of that great transition from men being almost completely in control to everyone taking it for granted that women have choices in life. This book, too, was part of that transition, but worth a read for everything else it is as well. And refreshing, since a big takeaway for me from Rory Stewart's book was that crossing Afghanistan alone on foot is one of the few things that you could absolutely never ever ever do as a woman--at least not yet.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

While we're on the subject of tough ladies, let me mention one of my favorite novels. I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school, but it came up again in my American Novel class in college. Having been read twice may give the book an edge in being memorable, but how could I ever forget this book? I'm not even going to say a word about it. If you've read it, you know, and if you haven't you should. (By the way, I can't believe they made a TV movie of it with Halle Berry. Only physically is she right for the part. It got 6/10 on IMDB, anyway. Don't watch it. Read the book.)

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri

I took a Dante class the semester before I went to Italy. We read all three books of The Divine Comedy in facing-page translation. I read the English side and then the Florentine side, page by page, so you could say I've read this one twice, too. A lot of people lump it in with Milton's Paradise Lost, but this book is vastly more interesting and much more strange, Milton's panorganic, sex-having angels excepted. (And what's with Adam and Eve having to do yard work in Eden? Leave it to a Protestant.) 

I don't know if I necessarily recommend that you run out and read all 100 cantos, but I do know that if you do, they will linger for years in the shadows of your mind (assuming you have una selva oscura of your own). Worst case scenario, you can brag that you've read The Divine Comedy, which seems to really impress people, especially Italians.

POPiSM: The Warhol Sixties, by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett

When I first read this book (which I bought in the gift shop of The Sixth Floor Museum, of all places) I assumed Pat Hackett was a quasi-incarnate ghost writer, but I later learned from the aforementioned book The Assassin's Cloak that Andy Warhol used to call Pat Hackett and tell her about his days, and she would write everything down. This book, rather than being in diary form, is written out like a long monologue. It is broken down by year, and in it, the disembodied voice of Andy Warhol tells us how he became a famous artist and social magician. I'm pausing here for a moment, because I don't know if I can do this book justice in a couple of paragraphs. If you have any interest in Pop Art, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol's factory, the time Andy Warhol got shot, any of it... just read the book. There are pictures of naked people in the middle. There's a story in which a 23-year-old Bob Dylan is drunk and lying across a threshold so he can look up girls' miniskirts as they go in and out of a party. Andy goes on a road trip with Dennis Hopper. A guy jumps out of a window. It's all there. Read it.

A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan 

I read an excerpt from this in The New Yorker, and when the author's name looked familiar, I realized she had written The Keep, which I'd read a couple of years earlier. The Keep was one of those uneasy books where some parts are amazing and completely blow you away but other parts make you ask how this crap got published (both books have the same number of stars on Amazon--maybe I should give The Keep another try). I didn't realize the excerpt was an excerpt until I saw Goon Squad on the new books shelf at my public library and immediately knew what it would be (another book I was the first to check out--a germophobe's delight!). 

Enough about how I found it. This book is so crazy. You can see hints of Jennifer Egan's craziness in The Keep, but that's more your conventionally gothic, Mark Z. Danielewski-y/Chuck Palahniuk-y/Neil Gaiman-y crazy. This is crazy like she conceived the book at once in four dimensions and then spent most of her time wrangling it into the covers. The characters are a bit stereotypical, but well thought through, and part of the point of the book is that despite our often painful efforts, we tend to stick to what we are until fate intervenes (the "goon squad" of the title could mean fate or time). The book is memorable not only for it's bizarre, disjointed, out-of-order, mixed-perspective format, but for indelible scenes of weirdness that could also be completely real (shit happens, you know?). I felt a smug satisfaction when it went on to win a Pulitzer (the "u" in "Pulitzer" is pronounced like the o's in "good", by the way, according to Wikipedia).

The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, by Lily Koppel

Another book from the new books section of my public library. Even more serendipitous than my finding this book is the fact that this book exists at all. Lily Koppel, a society page writer in her early twenties, happened to walk past an old New York City apartment building one day as some workmen were clearing out old storage lockers in the basement, mostly steamer trunks full of personal items from the 1920's and -30's. Passers-by swarmed the dumpters, stealing/rescuing anything of value. Koppel is delighted to score a vintage boucle coat, but also rescues a red leather diary that turns out to have belonged to a girl who was in her teens in the early thirties. It covers five years of the girl's life in a format where each year's entries for the same date are recorded on the same page.

Koppel finds the woman, Florence Wolfson Howitt, now 90 years old, and much like in the movie Titanic (but so, so, so much better and real) Florence fills in the gaps surrounding those brief diary entries with vividly-remembered details of her youth. Okay, I'm starting to cry a little bit just thinking about it.

Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

I mentioned somewhere else in my blog that one awesome birthday in my 20's when my dad gave me a gigantic box of new books. This was one of those books. (I actually ended up getting the unabridged audiobook for this 800+-page book from the library so I could sew while I "read", which was worthwhile (the audiobook, not the sewing--the dress I made (from a pattern) came out looking like a hospital gown).)

I don't know much about this Susanna Clarke lady, but I can tell you for damn sure that she's read every British novel written between 1750 and 1850. I have never read historical fiction that could so closely mimic the fiction of history. This is the most faithfully un-modern postmodern novel you will ever read. Plus, there's magic.

Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano, by Dieter Hildebrandt

From Half Price Books. (I try not to buy new books from there anymore, ever since I found out it means that the author most likely didn't get a cut. But I digress.)

This book is Lives of the Musicians: Good Times, Bad Times (and What the Neighbors Thought) for grownups. (If I had made this list 20 years ago, that book would be on it.) Even though this book is called "Pianoforte", I kind of forgot until just now that it was about pianos. I knew there were pianos in it, but really it's like if you called a book "The Internet" it wouldn't necessarily be about where servers are housed and how they work--although now that I think about it, the book offers some description of various technical advancements in the building of pianos, and what made the pianoforte different from anything that had come before it.

This is where I got that story about Schubert writing to his friends as he was dying of syphilis, begging them to find him more James Fenimore Cooper novels. Enough said. Good stuff.