Top 10 Favorite Books

Recently I was asked to list my top ten favorite books. I could easily have listed 100, but I did manage to limit myself to the following:

Mixed Marriage by Elizabeth Cadell – a laugh-out-loud story with a timeless portrayal of family. It’s one of the rare books that has me laughing out loud every time I read it.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani – Remember the flood of email scams from Nigeria? This book gives us a look at the other side – why Nigerians initiated the scams. Read more about it here – http://emandyves.com/etcetera.html

Alphabet by Kathy Page – Ms Page was a writer in residence in a prison in England and this book is a gritty tale of one young illiterate prisoner in a high-security facility. He learns to read and write and begins an illicit correspondence with a series of women. Strong, eloquent, tightly constructed.

A Cup of Tea by Amy Ephron – The writing style is exquisite. Every single sentence is to be savored. Here’s one: “It would be easy to say the war has made us do things we otherwise wouldn’t have.” Another. On the corner, there was still the shape of the woman standing under the streetlight. It was more than an accident of death and a length of pavement that separated these two women.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett – What happens when the Queen of England decides to borrow a book from the mobile library? So well written and lovely humor. The Queen talking to a servant – “None of his friends liked the dog, ma’am.” “One knows that feeling very well,” said the Queen, and Norman nodded solemnly, the royal dogs being generally unpopular.

Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen by Glen Husar – My little blog story may do justice to this amazing YA novel. I was a teacher and principal in junior high school and this story rings so true. http://ow.ly/pk2CC

Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock – Beautifully illustrated by Mr. Bantock, it’s great fun to take letters out of envelopes and enjoy such great art as you read. There’s a mystery here too. Is Sabine real? Is Griffin a split personality? Or is he crazy?

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel – A heartbreaking story of people who try to survive against terrible odds.  Gabriel Bagradian—born an Armenian, educated in Paris, married to a Frenchwoman, and an officer doing his duty as a Turkish subject in the Ottoman army— leads 5,000 Armenian villagers to the top of Musa Dagh, "the mountain of Moses." There, for forty days, in the face of almost certain death, they will suffer the siege of a Turkish army hell-bent on genocide.

Clash of Civilizations Over An Elevator In Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous – Wonderful satire of immigrants’ life in Italy. Publishers Weekly says, “Intriguing psychological and social insight alongside a playful whodunit plot, exposing the power of fear, racial prejudice and cultural misconception to rob a neighborhood of its humanity.”

The Blue Castle by Lucy Maude Montgomery. – A gentle old fashioned love story by the author of Anne of Green Gables. Colleen McCullough was accused of plagiarizing this book when she published The Ladies of Missalonghi.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid – Intriguing look into the mind of a young man educated in the US on an international scholarship program. Presented in the form of a monologue, Hamid's second novel and holds the reader intrigued. At the end is the question of "what happened?" and "why ?" as the protagonist,  Changez, turns away from success in America to anti-American activity.

Have you read any of these? Did you like them?  And, what would your Top 10 list look like?

Old Books Can Charm or Revolt

If stranded on a desert island and only allowed one book, I’d take Mixed Marriage written by Elizabeth Cadell and published in 1963. Written in diary format, it’s the story of a young English girl about to marry a young man from Portugal. Doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, does it? So why is it so special to me? The writing style is superb, the characters lovable, the story line intriguing, and, most importantly, the portrayal of family spot on and timeless. Uncle George huffing about as patriarch of the family could be your uncle. And, it’s funny, often laugh out loud funny. Here’s a snippet of the bride meeting the groom’s family.

After lunch, entire disappearance of everybody; all reappeared for dinner, with addition of Ana, Valeria and black-clad companion known as Senhora Dona Beatriz; in all fourteen at table; Mama said with obvious sincerity that so nice to have little family party.

Another charmer is The Blue Castle, written by Lucy Maude Montgomery and published in 1926. While depicting an era foreign to us, it too has a timeless quality that sucks us into the story of Valancy’s love and adventures. Colleen McCullough was accused of plagiarizing The Blue Castle when she wrote The Ladies of Missalonghi, and indeed, there are passages that seem to have been lifted almost word for word.

I liked another oldie, Jim the Conqueror, published in 1929, so much that I searched for other books by the author, Peter B. Kyne. I found one called The Pride of Palomar which turned out to be an unbridled racist rant.

I’ve tried other authors like Wilkie Collins and found those books to be unbearable reading now even though I liked some of them when I was younger.

Scrolling through the thousands and thousands of books available today, I wonder what people fifty to eighty years from now will think of our efforts. Will our novels still be available to readers then? And, if so, will our stories charm or revolt?