List five books (with authors listed) you would recommend to someone who wants to know more about you. Books that you identify most with. If Yeah Write has multiple admins, then I want everyone working on the blog to list their five books, and then publish it all at once. Not your favorite books per say, but books that most speak to your character. I hope you guys do this.
Lol, this is such a demanding ask. And sort of not writing related, but I think this is a fun idea, so let’s see:
1. White Oleander by Janet Fitch
I always say that if I could have written any book, it’d be White Oleander. I just love everything damn thing about that book. The writing is breathtaking and super textural, the themes (relationships between mothers and daughters, burgeoning sexuality, figuring out your place in the world) are very relatable for young women, the premise is clever, it sheds light on a social issue (the American foster system)… I could go on and on. I also really like that it’s a novel that follows a young woman from the age of 12 to 18, but it isn’t YA.
2. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
I’m almost 100% German, my mom’s whole side of the family is from there, she was born there, German was my second major in college… I’m pretty darn German. I’ve always been pretty proud of my heritage and how connected I am to it, but I hate that people will say things like “Oh so you’re descended from Nazis” or “Oh so do you hate Jews?” or “Oh you have blue eyes and blonde hair, you must be a Hitler youth.” I know, #whitepeopleproblems, but I still don’t like when people say that stuff. While I do come from German aristocrats (these people are my great aunts and uncles and cousins, here I am in front of my great aunt & uncle’s summer castle lol), my ancestors were not Nazis (and if any of my relatives were technically “part of the party”, it was so that they wouldn’t get, you know, murdered). My great grandfather was a well educated man and knew better than to join the party, and though the whole town knew that he was hiding escaped Jews in his house (like in The Book Thief), he was so well-respected in their town that no one ratted him out. My grandmother, who’d grown up in a pretty cushy environment, had to move out of her house and become an army nurse when she was 14 (likely punishment for her father not joining the party). She ended up marrying my grandfather, an American soldier.
The great thing about The Book Thief is that it really helped me understand how a nation of people could bring someone like Hitler into power, and not understand or see that atrocities were going on in camps just a few miles from where they lived. My grandmother grew up in the same area outside of Munich, near Auschwitz, where The Book Thief takes place, and I just really liked that this book shows that not all Germans citizens during WWII were bad people. My grandmother’s family were Liesels and Hanses and Rosas, and that makes me feel even more pride.
3. Any book by Sarah Dessen
I think a lot of us feel like we can identify with Sarah Dessen’s books. The girls in those stories are pretty standard upper-middle-class high schoolers. When I started reading her books I was probably in 8th or 9th grade and was still deep in the Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings/etc. fantasy game, but hers were the first that made me want to write realistic fiction. So I did! I wrapped up my 80 page fantasy about a half witch who adopted a dragon and started writing stories about my friends and me.
The other cool thing about Sarah Dessen is that she went to UNC at Chapel Hill, where I went, and did the same Honors Fiction track that I did. She still lives there, and a lot of her books take place in towns that are obviously heavily based on Chapel Hill, and incorporate elements like basketball and universities. I was reading What Happened to Goodbye last summer after graduating and laughed aloud at this line that was something like “Dr. Reid Barbour was the toughest English teacher at my high school”. The real Reid Barbour is a Renaissance British literature professor at UNC, and I had him twice, and while he is really tough, he’s also a genius, and hilarious. So that was cool.
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This feels like a stupid answer, but when I reread Gatsby a couple of weeks ago, it was so cool to read about what New York City and the suburbs were like in the 20s. I also grew up in the shadow of NYC (although on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound). Like Nick, I commuted to work for a long time. I went to tea at The Plaza with my grandmother when I was little, and worked right next door until recently. I know the view from the Queensboro Bridge, went to a downstairs jazz show in Times Square last night. I’m familiar with the culture of going into “town” to do business or party and escaping to “the country” on the weekends. It’s the only book that’s coming to mind for me right now that takes place geographically close to where I grew up.
5. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
East of Eden is my favorite book, and I know that’s not what the question was asking, but I think the reason why says a lot about me. I read it in my AP English class my senior year of high school, back in those magical times when you’d read books for English only a couple of chapters at a time and get to discuss them every single weekday. My boyfriend at the time was in the class and was super into reading it too, and we’d talk about the book while we hung out after school (Hazel/Gus/An Imperial Affliction style, I kid you not) and get mad at each other if the other read ahead. My teacher was a former college professor and the structure of that class really prepared me to (eventually) become an English major.
Aside from being magnificently written (and sooo much better than most of Steinbeck’s other work), there are two main things that I loved about the story. The first was how it’s sort of this hack job of The Book of Genesis (our whole course was themed around Genesis, which we had to read in the summer before the course… then we read things like Paradise Lost and Master and Margarita and so on). I’m not a religious person at all, but being an English major really makes you respect what an enormous impact religion has had on literature, and I liked that Steinbeck set up all of these false allegories.
The second reason is that I think Kate is one of the great villains of literature (for me, it’s a tie between her and Iago) and yet still manages to bring up a ton of women’s issues. She’s just a really awesome character overall.
Yeah writers–if you post a list like this on your own Tumblr and send YW the link, I’ll put it right on this post!
