A Book List

Look Through My Window
Originally uploaded by Elizalou.

1. A book that changed your life.

B Is for Betsy, the first book I remember checking out from the library. And Madeleine Lengle's whole Murry family quartet certainly blew my mind when I was younger and made me see the universe in a whole new way.

2. A book you've read more than once.

Look Through My Window by Jean Little. This was one of my favorite books when I was a little girl, and I love it completely still. My cover is tattered and torn, as you can see in the photo above.

3. A book you'd want on a desert island.

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. It's a book about overcoming struggles and not always knowing the answers, which I suspect are concepts I'd embrace if stranded on a desert island, and it would make me laugh.

4. A book that made you giddy.

When I read Bridget Jones's Diary in my friend's attic in Florence, Italy, in the spring of 1998, it made me guffaw in a way that few books had before or have since. I laughed until I cried; I profoundly identified. Judge me if you must.

5. A book you wish had been written.

For forever and a day, I wished that Ellen Emerson White would write a new book about the Meg, the president's daughter, and the rest of the Powers family. This was my number one wish book. And now she has! It's called Long May She Reign. And it's coming out next year. We've even corresponded a bit about it. So I consider this wish fulfilled in a big-time way. Book miracles do happen, people.

6. A book that wracked you with sobs.

The Brothers K by David James Duncan. I cried during both readings of this book, but most memorably on an airplane when finishing it last year. As reported before, I soaked cocktail napkin after cocktail napkin with my tears. I cried loudly enough that those sitting around me noticed and shot me concerned and possibly annoyed glances. I could not hold them in, the sobs. My sister's had trouble getting through this book. Her complaint is that "nothing happens." I keep telling her to keep going, keep going, because I want her to feel how I feel in the last two-thirds of the book when rescues are being staged, loves are being reunited, and people are saying goodbye. I want her to feel that heart-combusting feeling of grief and joy and anguish and hope. Like this part (I'm trying to put it in white font so you have to scroll over it to see the text so I don't spoil anything for those who haven't read it):

I refuse to resort to Uppercase here. But you hear me. And I feel you. I mean you, the who or whatever you are, being or nonbeing, that somehow comes to us and somehow consoles us. I don't know your name. I don't understand you. I don't know how to address you. I don't like people who think they do. But it's you alone, I begin to feel, who sends me this woman's love and our baby, and this new hope and stupid gratitude, even as my father goes down and my stupid brother lies broken. So:
O thing that consoles.
How clumsily I thank you.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold also left me a sobbing mess. I remember finishing it on my couch during the summer of 2002 and burying my face in the cushions and wailing somewhat inconsolably.

This is the paragraph that did me in (scroll over the text to read it):

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections -- sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent -- that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable point in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

God, that killed me.

I've certainly wept or had tears fill my eyes and slide down my face while reading countless other books, but those are the two from recent years that I recall actually made me sob.

When I was young, I bawled like a baby in one of the old green velvet chairs at my parents' house (the ones we were NOT allowed to eat or drink while sitting in upon pain of death but where I spent most of my time reading, which might explain why I was such a skinny child) when finishing The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton for the first time. And don't even get me started on my childhood reaction to the end of Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows. I can still recite the saddest line from memory, and it still makes me feel like falling to pieces.

7. A book you wish had never been written.

This is a tough one. Apparently I was not fond of Bergdorf Blondes.

8. A book you are currently reading.

I just started How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie Debartolo, author of God-Shaped Hole, which, since this is partly a discussion of books that make us cry, I finished in the bathtub. (While crying.)

9. A book you've been meaning to read.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. More than one person has asked me if I've read it or recommended it to me, so I'm taking it as a sign that I need to read it soon.

10. Tag 10.

I'm not really a tagger, but if you make your own list like this, post the link in the comments, because I'd love to read it.

(From Doppelganger.)