My Top Ten Literary Books

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It's spring in Vancouver, and I'm happy to emerge from the very busy winter I've had. Since January, I've been attending TheWriter's Studio at SFU. It's a creative writing certificate run on a mentorship model. Every two weeks, nine of us meet with novelist Kevin Chong to workshop our writing. 

Recently, my fellow mentees and I shared lists of our Top Ten books. I've never had the courage to compile such a list. How to choose? How to order them? And… scariest question of all… what about all the books that get left out??? So this list is accompanied with a few caveats: it is not comprehensive or definitive, and it is certainly not compiled in any particular order. 

These are just a handful of the books that haunt my psyche and my intellect. They are the voices I engage with when I write.

1. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. I love and aspire to the way Morrison uses language to create a compelling story as well as a gripping metaphor for the class systems and the social/racial inequalities that are rooted in the ghosts and traumas of colonialism. And she does all that without spoon-feeding you a history lesson.

2. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood. I have a love-hate thing for Murakami's crazy surrealist/absurdist leaps, but this one is a bit more grounded and down-to-earth. I spent 6 years in Japan, and the images in this novel remind me of why I loved living there so much. Murakami's characters defy any stereotypes we might have about the Land of the Rising sun.

3. Virginia Woolf, The Years. Woolf describes small details in a scene or landscape, details that open tunnels into a character's stream of consciousness.

4. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights. I love the gothic intensity of this novel and the rich story-within-a-story layering.

5. Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Atwood writes poems inspired by Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, a memoir of immigrating to Canada c. 1832. Atwood relishes in the more ghoulish aspects of this adventure in Canadian history, thus giving the collection a gothic feel that I just love.

6. Jessica Westhead, And Also Sharks. Short stories, many of them set in offices, about an automaton way of living life, following trends, repeating patterns, getting stuck in emotional ruts. Can we find a real place of human connection when we spend so much of life on automatic?

7. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. Wow. Roy creates beautiful language tableaux to explore the personal and political reverberations of social inequality in India. A beautiful, bittersweet statement about the power of love.

8. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. A dense analysis of gender using the deconstructionist theories of Derrida and Foucauld. Not an easy read. Yet there was something enlightening about the experience, too: it blew apart my understanding of language and how it is used to describe gender and other social constructions.

9. The Way of Zen. Alan Watts. This is mostly about the religion/philosophy of Zen Buddhism, but Watts also talks about Haiku as a different way of using language poetically--Haiku recognizes the limits of language, and therefore uses it sparingly, avoiding convoluted metaphors.

10. Julian Barnes, Arthur and George. Just simply a page-turner and a great story: set in 19th C England; deep psychological exploration of the characters' passions and ambitions; a great mystery; and echoes of our own post-9/11 culture of paranoia and racial profiling.

What are some books that still haunt you years after you've read them?