Books That Change Lives

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Last week Lifehacker asked its readers to vote for the books that changed their lives. I think the resulting list gives a lot of insight into the kind of readers Lifehacker has, but it also made me wonder what I would say if someone asked me to list books that had changed my life. Whenever I have to fill out profiles that ask for my favorite books, I always say “too many to list,” which is quite true, but I wonder if I can narrow down the books that changed my life? In no particular order, this is my list:

To Kill a MockingbirdTo Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

This story of racism and prejudice in the Deep South profoundly affected me when I first read it in the 11th grade. If I recall, it was the only assigned reading in high school that I actually read ahead of the reading schedule. I really enjoyed that book. Since then, whenever I have shared it with students, I have fallen in love all over again — with the language, the characters, the story it tells. Harper Lee calls her novel “a love story” (the paperback version linked here includes this reference Lee makes on its back cover). It took me a long time to figure out what she meant, but I believe I understand.

Gone With the WindGone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

While today I find the characterization of the African-American characters to be at best romantic and at worst racist, I have to admit this book was my first “adult” novel and really taught me how amazing and wonderful the world of books could truly be. I took the book with me everywhere and read it whenever I had a free moment. It took me two or three weeks to finish the first time I read it. I think I will most likely always have a soft spot for this novel.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, 10th Anniversary EditionHarry Potter Series, by J. K. Rowling

No other books have given me so much delight and have so frequently been on my re-reading cycle. Believe it or not, I have endured a lot of criticism for liking these books — some of it from people I am close to. I have had to defend my interest in these books to adults who think I should know better than to love children’s books. I just can’t understand why those people feel it necessary to be so narrow-minded and joyless. Why should they care? I fell in love with these books some time during my reading of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. If I had to select an exact moment, it might be when Hagrid shows up at the hut in the sea. In fact, my favorite scene in any of the books remains Harry’s first trip to Diagon Alley to get his school supplies.

The Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Containing some of the most beautiful prose in American literature, The Great Gatsby remains one of my favorite books to teach. I have many of my favorite passages highlighted. I actually enjoy the language more than the plot of the story. I pulled out my favorite passages and wrote about them many years ago.

The Mists of AvalonThe Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

I know I really like a book when I finish and wish with all my heart that I had written it. Why I feel it necessary to make it even more mine than it is after having read it, I’m not sure, but I have felt it several times. However, I think the fist time I felt it was after reading this novel. I still maintain, even after ten years have passed since I read it, that it is the best rendition of the King Arthur story I’ve read. I’ve never looked at the character Morgan le Faye the same way since then (or Guinevere, for that matter). To me, this novel was pitch-perfect, or it was when I read it. I was enthralled by it.

I’m sure I could expand upon this list with a bit more thought. It would never include any Ayn Rand, however.

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The Professor and the Madman

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The Professor and the MadmanMy British literature students are (I hope they are, at any rate) reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary as part of their summer reading assignment.  If they enjoy it half as much as I did, I will consider it a great success.  The story is enthralling.  Winchester examines the relationship between Dr. W. C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran who was committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after murdering a man in the street, and James Murray, for many years the chief editor of the OED.

When Murray took the helm at the OED, he solicited help from volunteers who might we willing to look up what he called “catchwords” in their reading and copy quotations.  The OED wanted to include quotations to illustrate each word’s use and also to trace the words back to their earliest uses.  Considering the seeming disorganization of the affair (to modern eyes) and the unclear instructions volunteers were given, you, like me, will probably marvel that the volunteers were ever any use at all.

Winchester does not flinch from honesty with regard to Dr. Minor’s crime, but he also manages to portray him in a sympathetic light, and I found myself feeling he had, in some measure, been redeemed even if his mind was never to give him any peace.

I highly recommend this book to students of the English language, word lovers (this book is essential for word lovers — those children who used to haul out the dictionary at home and just look up words), history buffs, and anyone who just loves a good yarn.

For my next book, I will return to the Historical Fiction Challenge and read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.  If you have followed my progress with Emma in the sidebar under DailyLit, you may notice I will be finishing that book in less than a week’s time.  I haven’t decided which DailyLit selection I’ll read next.


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Fine Lines: Books We Loved as Girls

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Through Amazon’s Ominvoracious blog, I was introduced to Fine Lines, a weekly series by Lizzie Skurmick at Jezebel. Skurmick’s ruminations on children’s and YA books of yore earned her a book deal with HarperCollins (congratulations!). What a fun time I had browsing the archives for my favorite books. Some particular favorites (warning: Jezebel is notably more PG-13 than this blog):

I cannot wait until she gets to Lois Duncan’s Stranger With My Face, which is just one of the best books EVAR!


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Goodreads Bookshelves

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Goodreads has a lot of options for organizing books. So many in fact that I decided when I joined up that I would have to wait until summer, when I would have more time, to create tags for my books. Goodreads calls their tags “shelves,” which is appropriate for a social network/organization system focused on books. After shelving all my books, I checked out the book tag cloud feature. Here is a screenshot of my book cloud as it looks today:

I feel as though I should explain some of my tags. I labeled some books “fantasy/sci-fi” when other people might not have, but my reasoning is that if there is any element of the supernatural, it’s fantasy or sci-fi. Thus, I tagged Macbeth as fantasy because of the witches (I also labeled it “feminist” because Lady Macbeth is an unusually strong female character for both the time in which the play is set as well as written). I probably should have tagged it gothic also, but for some reason, my definition for gothic was more precise. I tagged some books “feminist” when others might not consider them feminist. For my purposes, a feminist book is any book that has a strong female character for her time — someone who stands up for herself. Feminist books are also books that criticize patriarchal attitudes and structures (which, I think, is probably the more standard definition). Therefore, I labeled The Scarlet Letter as feminist even though I believe it might give Nathaniel Hawthorne a heart attack (if he were alive to have one, that is) to hear me say that about his book. However, books with modern women who stand up for themselves and hold their own I didn’t label feminist because I think that’s what modern women do and it’s acceptable for modern women to do. If, however, that modern woman lives in a society that suppresses women, that’s a different story. I used the tag “taught” for any books I have taught in the past or will teach this year. I cannot believe I have taught that many books.

I have to watch it. I can login to Goodreads and wind up spending hours fiddling with my books and reading reviews.

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The New Classics

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I am certainly not first out of the starting gate with the news that Entertainment Weekly has published a list of 100 “new classics” — supposedly the best reads of the last 25 years.  If that’s true, I have read depressingly few of them:

  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling (2)
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison (3)
  • Maus, Art Spiegelman (7)
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (16)
  • Possession, A. S. Byatt (27)
  • Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (29) (most of it, at least)
  • The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (48)
  • The Giver, Lois Lowry (65)
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (72)
  • Holes, Louis Sachar (84)
  • A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (93)
  • The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (96)

Quite a few of the books mentioned are on my to-read list, and I have heard a lot of these books praised. However, I have to say that I don’t think some of them should be considered “classics.”  Popular, maybe, but that’s hardly the same thing.

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Wuthering Heights

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I finished reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I was originally supposed to read it in high school, but I quickly fell behind our class’s reading schedule, and before I knew it, the unit was over and assessment was done. I donated my copy to my teacher, who gave us extra credit for book donations because she was trying to grow her classroom library. Alas, I didn’t return to the book until this year. I loved it!

I think my favorite part of the book was the setting. I could so clearly see Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and all the moors surrounding them. In a way, the setting was almost a character, too. I found the characters, for the most part, easy to dislike, yet strangely sympathetic. Just when I had truly written Heathcliff off as totally evil, Nelly jumps in and reminds the reader of his boyhood, and her concern for him near the end of his life awakened my own. I disliked Linton intensely, and I found myself annoyed with Cathy for her sympathy for him. Then, I would feel guilty because he was, after all, slowly dying, and who knows how that altered his character (not to mention contempt from his father and the loss of his mother). And speaking of Cathy, her treatment of poor lovesick Hareton I found horrid. What a forgiving sort he turned out to be. In short, one thing I think Brontë did quite well is paint characters who while flawed and perhaps even reprehensible, still manage to evoke the reader’s sympathy.

I think my favorite character was the storyteller Nelly Dean. She spoke her mind when she felt the need, and I sensed a deep respect for her from the other characters. I did wonder a couple of times why she would dish the family dirt to a complete stranger (Mr. Lockwood). At first, she struck me as gossipy. Later, when I decided that wasn’t exactly the case, I was at a loss as to determine why she would tell the story. I came to the conclusion that she was lonely for the first part of the story. After Heathcliff died and Mr. Lockwood returned, I decided she wanted the story preserved in some manner.

Mr. Lockwood is an interesting character. Through Nelly, he knows more about the true events of the whole story than some of the principal characters, and he is, I think, deeply affected by the story (witness his visit to the graves of Catherine, Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton).

I’m not sure if this will make sense, but this book struck me as so quintessentially English — I couldn’t imagine it in another setting. I imagine that many other British novels and plays could (and indeed, in the case of Shakespeare especially) have been re-imagined in different locations. Wuthering Heights, however, belongs to the moors of Yorkshire.

I will have to think carefully about how to teach this book so that my own students won’t fall into the trap I did. This reader’s guide Web site is excellent, and if you are interested in Wuthering Heights, you might wish to check it out.

I have to take a break from the Historical Fiction Challenge to read some summer reading so I can create assessments for my students. For the record, I planned to read the following books (titles stricken through I have completed):

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is long, but Northanger Abbey is fairly short. I think I can manage to finish the challenge by October, and perhaps the idea that I need to finish the challenge will compel me to finish the former — I put it aside because it was taking me forever, and I wanted to read some other things.

My next book is Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, a story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Bookish News

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The Mark Twain House and Museum Hartford, CT. may be forced to close.  The situation is dire — even after reducing staff from 49 to 17, the museum only has enough funds to operate for another few weeks. [Via The New York Times.]

LitLovers is a great site for book lovers with special focus on book clubs. Students and teachers would also find the site helpful. [Via Book Club Girl.]

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Borders Online

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Borders, my favorite offline bookstore, which used to be a partner of my favorite online bookstore, Amazon, has launched its own online version. I really like being an Amazon affiliate. I opted to receive payment in the form of gift certificates from Amazon, and every once in a while I earn enough referral fees to get some free books for my classroom (or for me!) — books I might not ordinarily purchase for various reasons. If Borders online wants to win me over from Amazon, they will need to introduce an affiliate program that beats Amazon’s. However the site design is very attractive, and I will probably browse it for deals when I think Amazon’s prices are too high.

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Emily Brontë

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As I read Wuthering Heights, I find myself somewhat awed by Emily Brontë’s characterization and storytelling, especially given her own sister Charlotte’s assertion (in the 1850 introduction to Wuthering Heights) that Emily didn’t have the opportunity to travel widely and learn a great deal about different types of people.  Also, given her age (29) when the novel was completed, her accomplishment is all the more astonishing.

I think many people might read Charlotte’s introduction and find her criticisms somewhat unfair, but they struck me for their even-handedness.  Many of us might be tempted to see only good in a sister’s only novel and greatest accomplishment, especially after that sister’s death, but Charlotte seems to me to be quite a keen critic.  I’m not sure I agree with her criticisms yet (I think I’ll finish the book first), but I found them interesting nonetheless.

I found an excellent resource for readers of Wuthering Heights.  I especially like the photographs and artwork, which help me visualize the setting (not that Brontë is any slouch at description).

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Why Have I Not Read This Book Before?

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I am totally loving Wuthering Heights.  So why have I not picked it up until now?  What prevented me from finishing it in high school?  I guess books come back to us when we’re ready for them… if we’re ready for them.

What about you?  Has this ever happened to you with a book?  Tell me the story in the comments.

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