Facebook today is trending lists of Ten Books That Stayed With You.  I had to cheat.

1. The Hobbit.  Of course.  It gets to be top of the list just because the movie is coming out today.

2.  Watership Down, which is actually my favorite book.  I loved it when I was a kid, completely forgot about it, and then read it with my students every single year for ten years.  Now I re-read bits all the time.  It just gets better and better.

Here I will cheat (already) and include Oedipus Rex for being my other favorite book to teach.  We used a shorter version and did the whole play, “reader’s theater” style.  It’s perfect for 6^th grade – 7^th graders were already too jaded and cynical to be really, really surprised and horrified by the whole thing.   I have a happy fantasy that somewhere out there are a handful of 20-somethings who are putting Oedipus on their Ten Books List because we read it together in 6^th grade and it stayed with them.

3.  Beowulf in Old English, because I’ve had dreams about it more than once.  Not dreams about Beowulf, Grendel et al., but dreams about the book, especially about the missing Battle of Brunaburh section.

4.  Grimm’s Fairy Tales, especially the darker ones, and all their kin, Anderson through Lang.  I have zero tolerance for the Disnified, dummed-down, cheesy versions of these stories.  Disney fairy tales tell girls that their life is all about getting kissed, and men are there to rescue you, largely by means of kissing.  I have nothing against getting kissed.  But the real fairy tales told me that a girl’s life is a journey, filled with tests of character, where the rules are there to be broken and the men need rescuing too.  A foolish princess lost in the woods sees only bears, ogres, and wolves; a wiser goosegirl sees in their place a challenge to her ability to be compassionate, a potential ally, a companion-soul on the same journey through the woods.

See, this is cheating too, because I’ve lumped all fairy tales together.  So as long as I’m cheating so much I’ll add this one, which might not make this list otherwise:

I have a vivid, visceral memory of this book – the weight, the smell, the weird juxtaposition of the ancient, elegant leather book cover and the cheap metal shelves of the library stacks.  It was Spenser’s Fairy Queene, one boring summer (I was old enough to ride my bike to the library on my own, so at least ten, but it was before we had cable tv, so not yet 13).  And to be honest, I wasn’t hanging out the library all day because I was such a bookish lass, it’s just that the library had air-conditioning and it was really hot that summer.  And I don’t remember a thing about the actual story, which I found dull and confusing.  But I read the whole damn thing, convinced that it was going to get good, eventually.  This firm belief was based entirely on the fairy-tale title and the fact that the multiple volumes were leather with gold on the edges of the pages.  I was transported.

I will never be entirely won over by the kindle because even if you get a leather cover for it, it doesn’t have gold edges.

5.  A copy of Herotodus’ Histories, in ancient Greek

I bought it at a used bookstore when I was too small even to know how to accurately count the coins I had in my hand.  I am sure the bookstore guy was just amused that I wanted it, and agreed to sell it to me for whatever small-change I’d offered up.  I have no idea where my mother was – she must have been nearby – but I remember finding the book, realizing what a treasure I’d discovered, and breathlessly offering all the money I had to this old man behind the counter, all by myself.

Sometimes in memories of childhood I “see” myself and I know that it’s not a true memory, just a constructed collage of things other people have told me about what I did when I was little.  But sometimes in my memory I’m still seeing what the child-me actually saw; my visual point of view is still my own.  I remember looking down at these pages in my hand, and the wooden 2-shelf cart the book had been on, with its random collection of cookbooks and novels and other trash, and I remember the old man barely visible to me above the height of the counter, and the coins in my sweaty hand, and not knowing how much money it was but hoping it was enough.

Here’s the thing about this book – I knew how to read.  I could totally read.  I could read lots of things, and when I saw a word I didn’t know, I could still see that it was a proper word and I could sound it out, more or less.  But I picked up this old leather book (such a sucker for gold-edged pages!)  and the words in it were not proper words.  It was obviously writing, but it wasn’t words.  I knew all the letters in the alphabet and I could see was some Other Alphabet.

Clearly, this was a magic book of spells, and I scarpered it for less than a dollar.

The physical book stayed with me until it stopped being a miracle and turned into a dusty history.  The certainty that in my early childhood I found a book of magic spells in the labyrinth of a used bookstore, and bought it for a couple of dimes, stayed with me all my life.

6.  Mouse Soup – a very early-reader-book.  It was my first introduction to the story-within-a-story concept, which I’ve always liked; plus, the internal stories end up impacting the outcome of the frame story in charming ways.  Definitely this book influenced my taste for form in literary work, very early.

Cheating again to include The Canterbury Tales, the logical heir of Mouse Soup.

7.  Jeeves and Wooster, the entire collection:  the only books funny enough to make me laugh out loud if I’ve been crying.  My Great Uncle John, a huge influence on my literary life, loved these too.

8.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – I knew it by heart in high school, the way some kids knew the Bible.

9.  I have to include some books I hated, because they really stayed with me too.  But I’m going to cheat again and include two because I can’t decide which one I hated more:  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Madame Bovary.

I had to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the 8^th grade and I couldn’t understand why anybody would write a story with a sad ending.  What the hell was Thomas Hardy thinking?  Not to mention the bit where the girl falls asleep in the woods, and the creepy guy who likes her rides by on his horse…  and in the next chapter, she’s pregnant!?  I knew perfectly well where babies came from and they didn’t come from people riding by on a horse.  I didn’t swear at that age, but in my head, I was totally, like, …tf?  It just made no sense at all.

Madame Bovary was assigned in high school, and we were learning about symbolism.  I was very smart and I had decided that symbolism was complete bullshit.  It was just some English teachers’ idea for making reading harder than it needed to be.  No way did any author actually think of all these complicated schemes for everything to mean something else.  I was having none of it.  So I wrote an essay intending to show that symbolism was all a bunch of baloney, and in reading very carefully I discovered, to my great chagrin (and as many scholars have noted) that whenever the color red was mentioned there was some impending danger, that green was always associated with luxury and wealth, and that when both colors appeared together, Mme was about to make a pivotal decision.  Damn you Flaubert!

10.  AUGH!  How can I put only one more book on the list?  My Name Is Red, Absalom Absalom, and Invisible Cities, for changing the way I think of narrative. Connie Willis’ genre-bending sci-fi/historical novel blends.  The Shortest Way to Hades for being much funnier than Sherlock Holmes ever was, lord love him.  Goethe’s Faust for being the first thing I ever read that was really hard but didn’t make me resentful.