Of Wolves and Watermelons

There comes a time in every woman’s life when she must curate a list of her favorite books for her blog. She will act accordingly and arrange an impromptu photo session of her bookshelves with the broken camera on her cellphone, and will strategically place glass pumpkins and empty teacups in the shot.

That time has come.

Puttering around my bookcases, I pulled nine books that have meant the world to me. Reading is a complex activity for me, one that pulls on my limited attention span (this blog post has taken me a month). For a great long time, I could read very little, and this past year, I have tussled with reading slumps large and small. At the present, I am reading my first Stephen King books, and they are certainly enrapturing. In fact, most of what I am reading is worthwhile. Mexican Gothic is trucking in cliches galore, but damn it if I don’t enjoy it anyway.

The greatest books I have ever read. That is a difficult list to bring together because it is exploding this year. I suspect that a few more titles will be cobbled onto the favorites shelf before December. From poetry to Nordic Noir (my new and complete obsession), I have a surfeit of texts to get through in which I have already found a kindred, sort of twin soul. Books fill me up; books empty me out. I’ll talk about these rising stars when I get to the bottom of this post.

Before I get into the best books, here are some honorable mentions.

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for good reason, and that reason is The Wild Iris. Graceful and ethereal, these poems balance on the tip of the cognitive and emotional pen. My poor copy has water stains and well-loved pages such that the corners are soft and rubbed thin.

A wonderful poet, Kimberly Williams, introduced me to Glück in the women’s literature class that she taught. I was seventeen. Standing at the front of the classroom, Kimberly extolled the beauty of this book, the way time moves from flower to flower and we end up where we started. A group of us students cooed. I ended up buying The Wild Iris and something flickered in my soul the first time I read “Trillium.” That remains my favorite poem in the collection, and that specific piece has influenced my own novel, Canis Major.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

It is my humble opinion that Anne Brontë is the finest writer of the Brontë sisters. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an underrated masterpiece that I first encountered in that women’s literature class (lifechanging indeed). This book is epistolatory and broadened my narrative horizons with its structure alone, something that hits heavier when you are seventeen.

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

I love a good fantasy. While The Wheel of Time has been criticized for its Brobdingnagian scope and its many constituent novels, I truly enjoy that it is an uphill climb reading these books. I have completed the first three and have loved the richness, the magnificent cast, the traveling. Yes, the traveling.

There is a certain appeal to dualism and it is even more alluring in a fantasy novel. Fantasy is the language of my palpitating heart, and I feel fortunate to be writing in this genre. The Wheel of Time itself is for people who enjoy a dose of story embedded within story, and I am one of those people.

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This being said, I am going to spotlight my favorite reads of all time. I pulled nine books from my shelves, nine masterpieces that have reconfigured my very soul. These nine are:

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

As you will see from many of the books here, I first came to Season of Migration through a class. This one was North African Literature. I was still at the beginning of my career as an Arabic student when I read this book. I can be skittish with graphic content, but Salih did not permit me to look away from the moving parts that come together to create this incredible book. It was the first book I had ever consumed of the Sudan, which is great because Sudanese Arabic was the dialect I originally wanted to study (for Darfur).

Season of Migration to the North is short but dense. I recommend anyone coming to read it to allow yourself to feel horror and to cerebrate. I am about to start my first reading of Shakespeare’s Othello, and I imagine that this book will be on my mind the entire time: I am no Othello. Othello was a lie.

The Verging Cities by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

I have a copy of Poets and Writers to thank for having read The Verging Cities. In their annual poetry issue, they featured a glimpse at this up and coming poet who happened to share my alma mater. Call me arrogant, but I am on Instagram and have been totally unimpressed with the so-called Instapoets, who, really, just write insipid sentences, the sort you find on a teabag, and hit the tab bar every now and then. I tend to assess poetry based on whether or not I — who only dream of being a poet — can reproduce such an individual poem. For the Instapoets, I tend to agree that writing those poems requires little effort.

That is completely different with The Verging Cities.

One thing I learned quickly was how to be in awe, how to be truly breathless with a poetry collection, how to admire a skill that I will never have. I have no qualms confessing that Scenters-Zapico vastly outstrips my narrative imagination. With surrealism and grittiness, blood and sinew, she has created a phenomenal look at life along the US-Mexico border, at the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez. I don’t think I knew what poetry could be until I read The Verging Cities.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

My favorite magazine is World Literature Today, which once ran a cover story on Orhan Pamuk. Because I take everything World Literature Today says as gospel, I picked up My Name is Red, and have since read it four or five times. My own copy is taped together in places, as befitting of a book of this quality.

This book is the very definition of ambition. Part love story, part murder mystery, part meditation on art, part historical epic, it balances a thousand different commentaries and characters who appear to narrate a single chapter before slinking to the background. The passages on art and its significance have proven to be influential in my own writing. I have read other work by Pamuk, but this remains my first and favorite.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

What to say of the zaniest, wittiest book on my shelves? I love Behemoth and I don’t want to share him with the world. That is what I have to say.

Behemoth is of course the breakout character of this book, such that I am obliged to take only a piece of him with everyone who reads this piece. The Master and Margarita concerns the arrival of the devil in Moscow and, I have to say, he sort of goes around mildly punking people. But it has taught me a lot about omniscient narrators, frame narratives, and all around wildness.

In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan

It has been quite a few years since I read In Watermelon Sugar, but that distance has never dulled my love of this book and its strange ways. And In Watermelon Sugar is very much strange.

I have fond memories of my first time reading this book. I was eighteen, loping around the campus of the Santa Fe Community College, where my mother was employed and I was taking a Japanese course. Like a dream, my memory places me within the reading of the book with no recollection how I acquired it. But I felt the flimsiness of my ballet flats on my feet. I smelled the marker where I practiced on my mother’s whiteboard as I practiced my hiragana and katakana. I tasted the food cooked by the Iranian chef of the dining room who kindly offered to talk to me in Persian. Just as the inhabitants of this quirky book took their energy from the sun and watermelons, I took my knowledge of this book with me over a grand summer.

The Diaries by Anaïs Nin

I keep a journal, and it is my dearest friend. My letters are, however, nowhere near as potent as Nin’s. Sometimes reading Nin, I feel a tad insipid. My own diaries meditate on the soup I ate for lunch or the sorrows that plagued me when my red pen leaked. But Nin is the literary equivalent of Earl grey tea: Rich, subtly evocative, swarming with flavor.

I found Anaïs Nin in the library of San Juan College. My mother also happened to work here as I grew up and I spent a great many hours in that library loving Edgar Allan Poe and random guides to dog breeds. Amongst the canopy of books, I found Nin’s diaries and it quickly became my habit to pull a random volume (there are seven of them in total) off the shelves and curl up inside its papery limbs by simply opening to any page. The words sizzled. Now I own and am annotating all seven of these books and always reach for my own diary after I finish even a few sentences of this book.

The Masnavi by Rumi

I’m fond of saying that Edgar Allan Poe is my favorite writer, but somehow Rumi is my favorite poet. I read Rumi poems everywhere. Before I go to bed. When I wake up in the morning. When I make tea. When I crochet. When I said goodbye to my mother’s beloved cat, Oz.

To read The Masnavi in Persian is my life’s goal (though to be fair, I also want to read Pessoa in Portuguese and Bulgakov in Russian). I don’t think there is anything more poetical than the Persian language in service to mysticism (also on my shelf is an introduction to Christian mysticism). Rumi here is at the height of his powers.

“I want to sing like the birds sing, not not worrying about who hears or what they think.”

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

If there was anything that took me by storm this year, it was Pessoa and his masterpiece. I was not expecting to adore this book as much as I did. It was a Christmas present, and I thought it would be an engaging read because of its cover. The saying is literally not to judge a book by its cover, but I very much do because I love beautiful things. As it turns out, the inside of the book is even more exquisite than the outside.

I would sell my soul for the opportunity to read this book for the first time again. Like the proverbial tsunami, I watched this wave of language that I cannot even describe — o to be as eloquent as Pessoa! — barreling toward me and knew that I was about to drown in its waters. I still have not resurfaced.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

I was born to read this book.

The Call of the Wild is my favorite book, number one, king of the hill. As a child whose favorite memories were in the mountains of Colorado, there was nothing superior to this read. I picked up a children’s edition — which I still keep in my desk — at the age of nine and, bored, began to read. This is really not a children’s book, but is frequently classified as such because the protagonist is a dog who is becoming a wolf. Jack London threads through scenes of gruesome violence with the most beautiful language imaginable.

I don’t think any other book can dethrone this because my experience with it is so complete. I grew up with The Call of the Wild. It saw me from misfit child to melancholy teen to hopeful adult, keeping apace as I grew from one person into whoever it is that I was destined to be. For that reason, I keep three copies in my desk, the aforementioned children’s edition, my annotated edition, and my beautiful copy (everyone needs a beautiful copy of her favorite book).

This is the book that spoke to the wilds within me.

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As I mentioned above, there are two books that I am currently in the middle of which I am fairly confident will end up on this list next year. These rising stars are:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

I purchased Don Quixote because my mother and my classmate suggested that it might influence a particular story arc in Canis Major. Always on the lookout for an influential text, I went to Barnes and Noble and the rest is history. What I am liking about this book is the dynamics of the characters tossed together on this quest.

I am writing what is ostensibly a portal fantasy, though there is no resulting quest of the characters who go through the portal. Instead, the quest is undertaken by three women in search of love and meaning. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra certainly has a lot to say on that archetypal journey, which is what makes it such an intriguing work to get through, despite its status as a certified brick.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

My favorite horror film is the 1929 version of Nosferatu. I have a passion for silent films, and was surprised and spooked that Nosferatu could frighten me even today. My copy of Dracula, which I am slowly annotating, features Count Orlok sneakin’ around.

I don’t think I anticipated liking Dracula as much as I have. I read it to compare it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which disappointed me. My mother and I frequently quiz each other on which book we prefer, and one question that popped up as we sipped tea and talked books, was: Dracula or Frankenstein?

I am on team Dracula.

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Reading is a sacred experience. It was passed down to me by my mother, who read Kailee and I all sorts of books and never limited the books we wished to read for ourselves. This meant that in sixth grade, I tried to tackle an obscure nonfiction book on the oceans and was told that my love of Denise Chavez’s Face of an Angel was inappropriate. But my mother never dimmed my worldview by feeding me only a certain type of book. I truly owe her for whatever sort of reader I am today.