25 Books (Not a List, Not Yet a Ranking)
The 25 books that have most affected me as a reader, teacher, and person
When I was conceiving this list, I was struggling with how to define it. I didn’t exactly want to rank “best books.” I’ve not read nearly enough of them to justify such a ranking, and moreover, what makes one book “better” than another? The scope? Its age? Its universal appeal? None of that made sense.
But I also didn’t quite want to list just “favorites.” This list would lean too far the other way, and I would probably favor books that have I purely enjoyed reading (A canned detective novel) as opposed to those literary masterpieces that were less “enjoyable,” but the reading of which gave me commensurate satisfaction (Moby Dick).
So instead, I tried to strike a balance, and where I landed was this list of 25 books — in no particular order — that have been most meaningful to me, that in some way, small or large, have been instrumental to the reader I have become. These are the books that have resonated the loudest, that have left the deepest impression. I spared you here a long, tedious summary/reflection, and opted instead for a cursory sentence or two on why these books are important to me. I hope you enjoy…
*A note before reading. I’ve generally excluded short stories here (there is but one short story collection on the list). While I think the short story is an underappreciated and otherwise brilliant form of literature, I wanted to keep this list to longer-length texts.
- One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
The best book I’ve ever read. A truly astounding feat of writing. I’ve read it multiple times, and each time I do, I find something new. This is a story that encapsulates all of history and humanity (especially that of Latin America), and does so while playing with themes of time and cyclicality. The Magical Realism is compelling, as are the myriad symbols laden throughout. It’s fun, funny, and full of immense pathos, and the acceleration and dead stop of the final sentences are some of the most viscerally entrapping of any text I’ve read.
2. Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison
My favorite of her books. Like García Márquez, Morrison tackles so much in her novels, but expertly succeeds in doing so. I am a sucker for treasure hunts, and this story intertwines the symbols of gold and flight in ways that asks us all whether the nature of our personal quests are really as they seem. Morrison’s unapologetic fearlessness — and her genius — is on full display here, and there is perhaps no other author who could end a book in a way that is simultaneously ambiguous and cathartic — the former because we readily accept all outcomes; the latter because we’re so glad he leaped at all.
3. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous — Ocean Vuong
Talk about fearlessness. Vuong pulls no punches here. He doesn’t care about your pearl-clutching or your delicate sensibilities. Vuong writes truth here, even if it’s a truth you don’t want to hear. Few writers can so fully crush me in a single paragraph: he wields prose like a weapon and a paint brush (and isn’t this really a weapon of its own).
4. Dharma Bums — Jack Kerouac
More than On The Road, this is the book that makes me want to be a beatnik. As Kerouac tells it, who wouldn’t want to have been in San Francisco at the City Lights bookstore hearing Allen Ginsberg reciting “Howl” to a wine-swilling group of counter-culturists? Who wouldn’t want to chase/embrace those same Buddhist ideals, to live free and carefree, quick and easy? And who wouldn’t want to drop it all and go scaling up Matterhorn peak, to try to eclipse one’s internal peaks to realize, as he puts it, that “you can’t fall off a mountain.” And this all culminates in an ending glorifies isolation and the hermetic, monkish seeking of purpose.
5. Blindness / All the Names / The Cave — José Saramago
You get a three-for here. I couldn’t decide between the three books here that comprise Saramago’s “unintentional trilogy,” so I included them all. Each tells a different story, and yet each are dystopias that allow Saramago to excoriate the ills of society as he saw it while also extolling the virtues of humanity and goodness of the individual. These books are also meaningful to me as they are what my Master’s thesis was centered around, and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to scrutinize and study them so. Blindness asks us how we find humanity in the face of chaos. All the Names blurs the lines between our symbolic and real existence. And The Cave pits man against the machine, the final chapters of which are some of the most thrilling I’ve read, and I’ve never forgotten the chills I felt upon reading the book’s final paragraph.
6. The Torqued Man — Peter Mann
One of the more unique books I’ve ever read. A spy thriller in which the double deception of the two central characters — coupled with their unusual friendship and even more unusual love affair — is mirrored by dueling narratives. There is deception, twists, and frame narratives, not to mention an undermining of the common sympathies of the political sphere during WWII in Europe (it is one of the few books set during WWII that I actually enjoyed). It is also whippingly smart (who has ever called the effect of alcohol “Hegelian” before?).
7. Outline — Rachel Cusk
Cusk has said she wanted to “avoid plot,” and in Outline, she does just that. Yes, there is a “story,” but there’s barely a narrative arc. Instead, Cusk conveys meaning — and the narrator’s search for meaning — through a series of extended, poignant metaphors.
8. Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
A novel that is on the shortlist of my all-time favorites by any measure. Ishiguro is a master novelist. His ability to craft a narrative is matched by few. It is a novel that has only gained relevance as we move deeper into the technological revolution, not only for the ethical questions it poses, but for its ability to be both window and mirror: through seeing the stripped humanity of others, we so much better understand ourselves.
9. Afterparties — Anthony Veasna So
The only short story collection on the list. Set in California, a biting and honest portrait of the first generation Cambodian-American experience, especially in the wake of the genocide that precipitated the mass exodus. “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” has become a staple of my curriculum, and “Human Development” is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Veasna So was brilliant and this was his brainchild, and the tragedy of his early death only enhances its gravitas.
10. The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka
Is it possible that Kafka is underrated? Though I’ve really only delved into his oeuvre recently, he’s always been hanging around, and maybe that’s the point? The deeper you go into the literary labyrinth, the more paths seems to all lead back to Kafka. Like the bug within, the text seems to be always scuttling in the corners of every literary conversation. It is plump and engorged with symbolic meaning, and yet we are scared of squashing it for mess that may end up on our hands. If a window, we are repulsed; if a mirror, we are terrified. And in so many ways it is both.
11. Snow Country — Yasunari Kawabata
A soft yet chilling (no pun intended) narrative that transports us to the hot-springs of Japan. Here, we are given a beautiful meditation on Japanese values as told by the future Nobel laureate. It is a bare and tragic love story, and few moments have resonated with me like moment where the narrator describes a window on a train transforming into a mirror at dusk.
12. Train Dreams — Denis Johnson
A fever dream of a novella. Reading this was like being dropped into a deep forest of the Pacific Northwest and living on a diet of suspicious mushrooms. The line between real and unreal is so fully blurred it takes up the entire field of vision. I read this in a two nights, and have since marveled at the magic within its few but powerful pages.
13. South of the Border, West of the Sun — Haruki Murakami
For who hasn’t gone through their Murakami phase? There’s just something about his books that real you in. I could do without some of the oversexualization of the women in his books, but the pathos within this text is immense, and I particularly like the way the meaning of the title unfolds.
14. The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards — Kristopher Jansma
This book marked a turning point for me. After college, I struggled to find “good” (what I meant was contemporary literary fiction) books to read. I knew of the classics, and I knew of genre fiction, but I didn’t know of that elusive “other.” Then I read this book, and I realized what fiction could do. The conceit of this novel is brilliant: as one of the lines within says, “tell the truth, but tell it slant.” A multilayered metafiction of the highest degree, locating the “truth” here is nearly impossible, but finding meaning is all too easy.
15. Moby Dick — Herman Melville
Is there another book in the cultural capital conversation whose theme is more well known but that fewer people have read? I doubt it. But dammit, I read it. And the grand irony of it all is that I think most people get it wrong: the story is not Ahab’s (the hunt for the white whale (and whatever that represents)), but Ishmael’s (the beauty in the journey, wherever it may lead).
16. A House for Mr. Biswas — V.S. Naipaul
This is when I realized great literature could be funny. Poor Ms. Biswas is the butt of the joke. He is at once tragic and comical, the hero and the fool. He is deeply flawed and yet deeply sympathetic. It’s a compelling read and Naipaul’s prose is as rich and damp with beauty as the very Caribbean island (Trinidad and Tobago) the story is set in.
17. Harry Potter (series) — J.K. Rowling
I had to include this. I, like millions of others, have read and re-read the series countless times, and its importance to my formative years really cannot be overstated. But more than that, as a piece of literature, it really holds up. It’s an incredible story, world, and masterclass of characterization. I don’t need to extol it further. And for the record: Phoenix, Prisoner, Hallows, Prince, Goblet, Chamber, Stone
18. East of Eden — John Steinbeck
Another of my “yes, I did it, I can check it off the list” books. It’s imperfect, but worth the effort of the read. The ending is beautifully ambiguous, and yet still a perfect bow tied atop the well executed Biblical allegory. Also, I’m a sucker for the mystique of California (the good, bad, and ugly), and will nearly always be happily transported there.
19. When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamín Labatut
In so many ways I am this book’s target audience: at once nerd of literature and theoretical physics. Labatut blurs the lines of fiction and truth in a way that is all too captivating, and his ability to capture character without sacrificing science is laudable. To read of genius is nearly always engaging, but to read of the flaws of genius is even more so. I also really enjoyed the quaint metaphor in the final chapter of the overladen lemon tree:
“The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?”
20. The Stranger — Albert Camus
Ah, Camus. A top five first sentence (technically two sentences, but they go together). And who doesn’t love a good existential crisis? Another text that needs little extra pumping-up by me, but one that still deserves its flowers. Perhaps the best part is how easily we believe the shooting scene, as if we all too would have pulled the trigger.
21. Life of Pi — Yann Martel
For a book about a boy lost at sea, there is a strangely deep religious symbolism, the meaning of which I have not yet fully gleaned. It is a very good book until the end, when — because of one of the best twists I’ve read in any novel, never mind that it is not of a “twisty” genre — it becomes great.
22. The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen
I’m always wary of books of wartime, but this was a unique perspective on the complications of the Vietnam War and the immigrant experience. The protagonist’s plight is compelling and at once sympathetic and laughable. It’s a funny book, until it’s not, when it goes full 1984 on us in the final chapters. Much will stick with me from this book, but nothing as much as the line
“in the perineum of time between the very late hours of the evening and the very early hours of the morning.”
Talk about imagery.
23. Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez
Because I read it during May when the days were long, and a warm breeze blew through my open bedroom window, and the evening’s natural melatonin mixed with Garcia Marquez’s delicate prose created the most cathartically Zen reading moment of my adult life. It is not a story for youth, but for the aged, for anyone who wishes they had a chance to right the wrongs of youth. And while I found many of Florentino Ariza’s actions deplorable, I was moved by the inglorious conclusion, the false promise of the endless riverboat ride, a metaphor for the inevitability of aging and time and love.
24. Tracks — Louise Erdrich
The phrase “giant of American letters” is perhaps overused, but Louise Erdrich should be in this conversation. A text rife with the magic and legacy of the Chippewa tribe — and by extension, many American Indigenous Peoples — this book is both captivating in its narrative and edifying in its telling of the atrocious extinction of Native Americans in the 21st century. It is not the only text that tells this story, but it is the most powerful I’ve read.
25. Ulysses — James Joyce
Because I fucking did it, and damn right I’m going to brag. Did I understand every word? No. But no book has challenged me more (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this). And has there ever been anything more impressive than the bar chapter when his prose is written as music? However, it’s recondite-ness is such that I wonder if it goes too far — I could not have completed this Odyssey (the text’s, my own) without help from podcasts, secondary sources, and several internet summary checks just to see if I even understood what the hell was going on. The book is almost Amazonian: if you’re going to try to get through it, you probably should have a guide. You certainly are going to miss important things along the way, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get so lost that you’re never seen again.
Thanks for reading! Until next time…
