Better Living through Bookery

A friend of mine came up with a rather nifty question recently: compile a short list of books specifically meant to help somebody understand you. These are not (necessarily) non-fiction books that catalogue your particular disorders or quirks, but books that especially resonate with you, that express a facet of you in book form.

Here’s my list:

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth: Slavery, insanity, the relationship between religion and commerce, high-seas adventure, the nature of justice—read this book to understand how I feel sometimes about humanity as a whole. But if you can’t be arsed to wade through several hundred pages of slaveship shenanigans, “Humanity I love you” by E.E. Cummings condenses that attitude into a few scathing stanzas.

The BFG by Roald Dahl: Look, it’s a book about the friendship between a little girl and a farting giant who dispenses dreams. If you can’t figure out why this is on my list, you obviously don’t know me at all.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: When I was a little girl, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to marry Mowgli, or just be him. Hell, it’s still true.

A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky: It’s about animals. It’s about Africa. It’s about the relationship between humans and animals. It’s about (the futility of) conservation (in the face of human industrialization and progress). It’s about an awkward nerd bumbling his way through a completely alien environment. It’s funny. And it’s utterly heartbreaking. If I were a neurotic Jewish neurocientist haring off to the wilds of Africa to study baboon immune systems instead of a neurotic Chinese technical-writer-and-soon-to-be-law student in the urban tameness of Portland, this would’ve been a book about me.

The Windflower by Laura London: This book probably captures a lot more of what I think love is like and what I want love to be than I’m comfortable with. And yes, that absolutely does mean I wish I were a charming American ingénue kidnapped by a high-born British privateer and brought onto his ship, where I proceed to charm all of the crew and the pet pig.

The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne: I am an unholy combination of Pooh and Owl.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser: This book utterly changed the way I looked at food.

Wasted by Marya Hornbacher: Like many women I know, I don’t have an eating disorder, but I think very much like somebody who has one, and that fact was driven home very strongly by this book. It was eerie, reading exactly how I felt about my body expressed in somebody else’s words.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson: The reason why this one is on the list should be pretty self-evident, I think.

Animal Farm by George Orwell probably best expresses the way I view politics and the nature of revolution in book form, while

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes expresses why I think it’s important to keep fighting, anyway.

This last one is cheating, because it’s not a book, but “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, more than any other work of art, resonates with my emotional space, barring certain Bach concertos. (God, how emo is that shit?)

What books are on your list?