“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures”
~ Jessamyn West
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
~ Franz Kafka
From an early age, I talked to books. And they talked back. This dialogue represented my initial foray into the practice and experience of learning, assimilation, stimulation and distillation. I began to “mark up” the books that I read (I still do!); I underlined, asterisked, made notes in the margins, highlighted, dog-eared furiously. I layered my own thoughts and responses on top of the primary text. I asked questions, drew conclusions, disagreed vehemently with the author’s points, exclaimed passionately in agreement. There was no end to the churning that took place in my mind as I delved deeper and deeper into the world of the book.
When I read and mark up the text I use my hand in a different way than I do my eyes. The information is presented to me first through sight; it is then sifted through, analyzed, and interrogated through writing ~ not a sense, but as a discrete action, representative of an effort that extends beyond that of vision. This is my “processor;” this method dictates the limit of my “processing speed.” I can only assimilate the information in bits, as I unravel each line of text and translate it into something meaningful through my dialogic interaction with it.
To impose order on these selections presented me with several options. I could arrange the list by: year of publication, geography, genre, field of inquiry, the chronology of my own reading, or according to some sort of hierarchical order of preference. But none of these seemed appropriate to the task nor aligned with my intentions.
So here they are, beloved books and authors, in some semblance of order, sometimes. But mostly just materialized out of a vast chain of associations, hazy remembrances, vivid recall, and psychological imprint. These books and authors have inspired, surprised, amused, angered, depressed, and enlightened me. They have all moved me in way or another ~ and sometimes, in many directions all at once….
*I am extremely fond of poetry and short stories, but there are far more poems, poets, and short story titles to list on this page, so pardon the exclusion of most of them here. In addition, many of my books and reading journals are housed in a storage unit at the moment, so this list is of necessity fragmentary and loose.*
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish & Madness and Civilization
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or The Bullet” & The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
David Harvey, Social Justice and the City & The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change & The Enigma of Capital
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Brothers Karamazov
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Langston Hughes
Frederick Douglass
Robert Hayden
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, The Book of Hours, Duino Elegies
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter
Henry James
Kazuo Ishigiro
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government
Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays & Living My Life
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse & A Room of One’s Own
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
Alice Koller, An Unknown Woman: A Journey to Self-Discovery
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Noam Chomsky, Manufactured Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin & The Pleasures of Exile
J.M. Coetzee
Mary Oliver
Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eaters
Wendell Berry
Simone Weil
Yusef Komunyakaa
Lucille Clifton
Barry Lopez
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Rebecca Solnit
Dr. Seuss
Shel Silverstein
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Bishop
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
Hannah Arendt
Gayl Jones, Corregidora
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Wallace Stevens
Flannery O’Connor
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Elizabeth Bishop
Scott Russell Sanders
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Emily Dickinson
Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Raymond Williams, Culture & Society: 1780-1950
Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: the Social Logic of Postmodern Culture
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Angela Davis
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
George Orwell, 1984 & A Collection of Essays
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Yaa Ngasi, Homegoing
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Toni Morrison, Sula and Beloved
Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton
Ralph Ellison
Gwendolyn Brooks
Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector
Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife
Haruki Murakami
Yusef Kumunyakaa
Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Keri Hulme, Bone People
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
James Baldwin
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
sonia sanchez, homegirls and handgrenades
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
© Rachel Rosekind, PhD, MLIS
