1. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
In terms of quotability, I actually like Slaughterhouse Five more than Cat's Cradle ("Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" is one of the most beautiful lines in the entire world) but Cat's Cradle is so weird and dark and fantastic and unrelentingly critical that it's one of my favourite books. I love the incongruity of such a ridiculous plot (midgets and dictators and the bizarre religion called Bokononism and a man-made substance that's the equivalent of the atomic bomb) and the themes it deals with. Religion is lampooned, science is chewed out, and humanity is just totally and completely fucked, but it's all so funny and so easy to read that you sort of just go along with it and at the end of the book you're like wait.... what? A Sample:
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
And He went away.
2. Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales
Although I have a total soft spot for sappy, weepy movies (I once sobbed my way through an entire box of tissues watching E.T., and while The Notebook doesn't make me cry anymore, that's only because it lost its effect after the first 100 viewings) I REALLY CAN'T STAND sappy, cloying novels. I don't like Nicholas Sparks, I don't like Mitch Albom, and words cannot express how much I dislike Paulo Coelho, the seemingly inexhaustible generator of boring preachy books and annoying platitudes that everyone quotes on their twitter timelines and which make me want to unfollow them. But Oscar Wilde is usually so witty and hilarious and cynical that he gets a free pass to write so unabashedly and earnestly about love, sacrifice and Christianity in his fairy tales. They're beautiful and tragic and heartwrenching, and there are no happy endings. There's a kind of poetic irony in how someone deemed morally corrupt by the society in which he lived could write something so pure. Take that, homophobes! See the beauty the gay man can create!
And though it's not one of his fairy tales, a special mention for the preface to Dorian Gray. I quoted the shit of out of that preface when I was writing my millions of college application essays and millions of drafts of my UCAS personal statement:
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.Every time I read it I remember what it was like to be young and idealistic, sitting in front of a desktop computer at 3 in the morning, trying so hard to inject my worthiness-to-attend-your-noble-institution into one piece of paper. It seemed like the most courageous thing to my 18 year old self to want to dive under the surface, get up close and personal with the symbol, and be totally unafraid to learn the truth.
A Sample:
"Dear little Swallow," said the Prince, "you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there."
So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. Under the archway of a bridge two little boys were lying in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm. "How hungry we are!" they said. "You must not lie here," shouted the Watchman, and they wandered out into the rain.
3. The Lover's Dictionary by David Leviathan
Love! One of my favourite literary topics ever! But not a lot of people can write about love without making me want to throw up. I have a limited tolerance of romantical bullshit, which I would like to think comes from the fact that although I am a Disney Cartoon kid and have been weaned on stories of charming princes and true love and happily-ever-afters, I don't think love is just the happily-ever-after, or the grand gestures or rainbows and roses and kittens and babies that accompany it. It's the reality of the relationship, which can be at times wonderful and terrible and amazing and annoying, but is always the ups AND downs and little things AND huge milestones. The Lover's Dictionary totally nailed what love is. Little snapshots of an everyday relationship defined in every day terms, and mixed up and in alphabetical and not chronological order. I doggy-eared pretty much every definition in it. It's way more my kind of romantic than any sonnet.
A Sample:
Lover, n.
Oh, how I hated this word. So pretentious, like it was always being translated from the French. The tint and taint of illicit, illegitimate affections. Dictionary meaning: a person having a love affair. Impermanent. Unfamilial. Inextricably linked to sex.
I have never wanted a lover. In order to have a lover, I must go back to the root of the word. For I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted to love, and to be loved.
There is no word for the recipient of the love. There is only a word for the giver. There is the assumption that lovers come in pairs.
When I say, Be my lover, I don't mean, Let's have an affair. I don't mean, Sleep with me. I don't mean, Be my secret.
I want us to go back down to that root.
I want you to be the one who loves me.
I want to be the one who loves you.
4. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
So it's not exactly original to include To Kill a Mockingbird on a list of favourite books: it's required grade school reading for most people, but I never read it as part of any curriculum, I never dissected it to pieces in a classroom, and I never learned about racial politics in the Southern US, so when I finished it, I remember feeling punched in the gut from the enormity of it all. It was probably the first book I'd read that dealt with a serious topic. I was old enough to vaguely know about racism, but not old enough to have recognized it in my life or to have read about it. And I felt so enraged with the injustice of what happened to Tom Robinson, so disappointed with the townspeople, and so humbled that Boo Radley, who had been judged unfairly throughout the book, was one of its heroes. Like most bookworms, I learned about life through books - I re-read this one to remember what it was like to be surprised by injustice.
A Sample:
Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
5. The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
Okay, so the premise is almost like The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button, but the author said he didn't know that at the time (which I actually do believe, because the Benjamin Button was a short story that really only blew up after Hollywood turned it into a movie), and I didn't know it at the time either. And even though the premise is so original, it really isn't the reason I like this book: it's because Andrew Sean Greer writes beauuuutiful prose. It's poetic and languid and haunting and poignant. Of course it helps that he's talking about unrequited love and all that, but really he could writing about a fly, and if he did it in the same style, it'd still be one of my favourite books. A Sample:
It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.
6. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Also gorgeous prose. I analysed the movie and read the book for an English literature class that was cross-referenced as a film class AND a feminist studies class (it was like the trifecta of interesting academic subjects) and somewhere between the fifth attempt to play and pause a speech in the movie at the right moment so I could write about the scene in my mid-term essay and the middle of the book, I fell in love. This book is beautiful.A Sample:
We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.
7. This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
Reminiscent of Nick Hornby, who writes classic Guy's Guy literature, but better. Also straddles the line between writing like a Bro and being sensitive and hilarious, which ultimately makes him not a Bro.
I bought this in an airport in Singapore and read it on a flight back to KL. It's about dysfunctional families and broken relationships and mid-life crises, which speaks to me more than it should considering my family is pretty vanilla, my relationship is great and I'm (hopefully) a decade or more away from a mid-life crisis, and I don't know if it was the hormones or the exhaustion or missing Alman or Tropper's writing but I bawled like a baby on the plane reading it, which is really one of my major criteria for whether a book speaks to me or not. Does it makes me blubber? If yes, proceed to Go and collect $200.
A Sample:
Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.
8. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss's style is similar to her husband's (Jonathan Safran Foer) (like an eerie literary equivalent of when couples who have been going for too long start to look alike), but I don't like Foer and I like Krauss, primarily because of this book, and its main characters, a lonely old Jewish man and a precocious young Jewish girl. It makes me think about growing old, and what happens after the love of your life has died, and families, and legacies, which inevitably leads to feeling really melancholy and hugging Alman a lot.A Sample:
2. WHAT I AM NOT
My brother and I used to play a game. I'd point to a chair. "THIS IS NOT A CHAIR," I'd say. Bird would point to the table. "THIS IS NOT A TABLE." "THIS IS NOT A WALL," I'd say. "THAT IS NOT A CEILING." We'd go on like that. "IT IS NOT RAINING OUT." "MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!" Bird would yell. I'd point to my elbow. "THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE." Bird would lift his knee. "THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!" "THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!" "NOT A CUP!" "NOT A SPOON!" "NOT DIRTY DISHES!" We denied whole rooms, years, weathers. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But you're only seven," I said.
9. Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
I don't dislike any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, but THIS is my favourite. It's basically all my favourite ingredients in one book: the City Watch (justice, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, right and wrong, black and white), feminism, class-ism and racism (which is actually specie-ism in the novel, but you can't fool me Mr Pratchett, I can see what you did there!), religion, faith and atheism, freedom and liberty, and lots and LOTS of humour. Oh, and its a murder mystery too.And if you just read the synopsis - you won't even anticipate any of this. And that is why he is a genius and I spent the better part of an entire year reading all his books.
A Sample:
Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw.
It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I saved the best for last: this is THE most hilariously insightful book in the world. And I'm not even exaggerating. Even though I tend towards hyperbole.
I remember the first time I picked it up off the library shelf at school, and how tickled I was when I read the first page, which says that the planet Earth "has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
It wasn't telling me anything that I didn't already know, but it was still like an imaginary cartoon lightbulb switched on above my head. That is totally true! We ARE generally unhappy! And it IS odd that it's all because of paper! And with this re-epiphany came the idea of money being unhappy, which was so ridiculous it made me laugh out loud. So basically Douglas Adams is the master of looking at life from a different perspective, and making you laugh about it, and for that I credit him some of qualities that I value most in myself (I mean I sure hope they're actually there in me somewhere or I've been living a deluded little life): my open-mindedness, my tendency to question everything, and my sense of humour.
It has come to the point where I have actually memorised entire portions of the book, and I am STILL so tickled by it.
A Sample:
The history of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.
For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?
