Making My Own Ideal Bookshelf

It’s been a few days since I finished My Ideal Bookshelf, and I’ve spent much of that time considering my own book collection, having deep thoughts such as “What do I love most?,” “Which ones made me laugh and cry at the same time?” and “Why does someone who has never run more than 5K in her life have so many books about running?”

My bookshelves are incredibly telling – a history of phases and preoccupations and the best and worst parts of my nature. I could have composed an ideal bookshelf entirely of Bill Bryson books, or bad books with great covers, or books by self-aggrandizing rock stars. Instead, when I finally sat down to make an ideal bookshelf of my own, the organizing principle I used was books with some enduring significance in my life. My picks are below, and I’d love to hear yours in the comments section.

Goodbye to All That / Various Essayists

Goodbye to All That is an essay collection in which 28 writers tell stories about “loving and leaving New York.” It’s perhaps an odd choice to kick off my shelf – the cover is cloying, its subject matter a bit saccharine – but this book meant so much to me. Still does, I suppose. It was published in 2013, three years after I left New York and two years before I went back. When I read it, it served as something of a salve, proof that people could walk away from this city intact (and maybe even better off). My favorite essay of the whole bunch is by Chloe Caldwell, a writer who admirably describes herself as “someone who sees something she likes and then sets about getting it in her own life.” Here are two of my favorites bits:

“I used to think that every eventful thing that happened in my life would feel as good as moving to New York City did, that my life would be like moving to New York, over and over and over again. I know now that as with falling in love, you’re lucky if it happens to you even once.”

“I feel New York inside me when I talk too loudly, when I’m in line for coffee and feel rageful and restless, when I ask inappropriate and personal questions of strangers. When I say, ‘Oh, I walked,’ and people look at me quizzically and say, ‘That’s a long walk.”

The Corrections / Jonathan Franzen

For about a decade, whenever people asked me what my favorite book was, I’d say, without reservation, The Corrections. Today, I’m too rabid a reader to unequivocally name a favorite, but I still consider this book one of my top picks. As a sardonic love letter to suburban ennui, it’s the best. As far as portraits of fucked up families go, it’s unmatched. And as a piece of writing capable of plunking me in a dark, depressive, “Is this all life’s about?” place, there’s no other. Sometimes you just want to simmer in a world that’s darker and stranger than your own for a second, and The Corrections is perfect for that.

The release of this book also marks the first time I became aware of how large a novel could loom in popular culture. There was the massive praise, the feud with Oprah, the coining of the term Franzenfreude by writer Jennifer Weiner. This book was released when I was 15, and I experienced it as a media circus akin to a celebrity marriage or the opening of a blockbuster movie. Today, hundreds of millions of copies are estimated to be in print. The world loved it, and so did I.

The White Album / Joan Didion

Martin Amis once called Joan Didion “the poet of the great Californian emptiness,” and The White Album marks the point in her career when that poetic prose took on sinister tones. The White Album’s California is not a state of sun and sand, but of Manson murders, Scientology, Rorschach tests, and a babysitter who read Didion’s aura and saw only death. Didion is my literary touchstone (Isn’t she everyone’s?) – the woman to whom I attribute my love of the in-between space, many of my feelings about America, my writing ambitions, and, yes, my aspirational longing.

Consider the Lobster / David Foster Wallace

This is the book of essays that sent me on a decade-long David Foster Wallace binge (one that, like my Kurt Cobain obsession ten years before, involved indiscriminately inhaling diaries, biographies, movies, and other associated mementos of the man’s life). Then, I missed half of my grad-school orientation crying over his suicide, the literary bros co-opted his greatness, and someone I loathe got a tattoo inspired by This is Water. My love for “DFW” officially jumped the shark.

But, before all that, there was Consider the Lobster, in which we watch Wallace cross the United States to bear witness to all manner of strange cultural movements and moments. We follow him onto John McCain’s tour bus, down a talk-radio rabbit hole, to the Maine Lobster Festival, and even to Las Vegas to cover the Adult Video News Awards, of which he writes:

“All the clichés are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkie ring the size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is the guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement.”

This isn’t easy subway reading – even now, my mind bends a little looking at all those notations and footnotes – but it remains so very good. Even thinking of him, my melodramatic mourning period is reactivating. Moving on…

We Need to Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver

This, of all the novels I’ve read in my life, is the one I couldn’t stop talking about upon its completion. I had unfinished business with this book. Felt haunted by this book. Pressed this book into the palms of so many friends and family members, imploring them to read it simply so I could discuss it with them.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is the story of the misanthropic and menacing titular character, a morose kid turned teenaged killer. It’s also the story of his mother Eva, told through a series of letters written in her voice.

This book is dark, disturbing, disquieting and also incredibly charismatic. When I was reading it, I felt possessed by it. Lionel Shriver is the M. Night Shyamalan of writers, capable of genuinely shocking me with massive, masterful plot twists. And then it was made into a movie that totally did it justice.

Personal History / Katharine Graham

Before I arrived at Yale to begin business school, I was assigned a long list of summer reading, mostly bad books about going from good to great or being more like Jack Welch. But at the bottom of that list was one brilliant autobiography – Katharine Graham’s Personal History. Graham led the Washington Post for two decades, including through its coverage of Watergate, and her Pulitzer-winning book is candid, full of conviction and made me want to be a more fully-realized human being in this world.

In Cold Blood / Truman Capote

When I was 17, I left my home in suburban southern Ontario and moved 2,000 kilometers away to live with a family I’d never met on a blueberry farm in isolated Prince Edward Island. True story. And, while I was there, I discovered In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s chilling account of a quadruple murder. The parallels between the two settings – the Clutter family lived in western Kansas’ wheat country, while I was surrounded by fields and farmland for the first time in my life – were not lost on me. I read this book beneath the covers of my basement twin bed, agape in awe and terror.

Beyond its (extremely loose) applicability to my own teenaged life, In Cold Blood basically created the true crime genre and bent the rules of non-fiction by going into the heads of victim and killer alike. Along with The Corrections, it’s also one of few books I’ve re-read, and I may go back for a third time as I consider embarking on a creative non-fiction project of my own.

Between the World and Me / Ta-Nehisi Coates

Between the World and Me – a series of essays in the form of a letter from Coates to his son – is just 150 pages long, a blink of an eye. And though Coates didn’t write the book with any particular audience in mind, least of all me, I was so deeply moved by it. I felt so much. I learned so much. I involuntarily cried a little describing it to my husband. I found things revelatory that I probably shouldn’t have. It’s about race, of course, but the beauty of this book is in so much else as well: his description of the freedom journalism gave him, the propellant force that motivated his wife to broaden her horizons, and how it felt to later broaden his own to New York and then Paris. His descriptions of Paris in particular – also my first European city, the city where I fell in love and felt entirely different – rang so deeply true and were so apt and fresh. I haven’t dog-eared so many pages of a book in a very, very long time.

Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to The End of Taste / Carl Wilson

Let’s Talk About Love is part of the 33 1/3 series, a collection in which each book is a meditation on a single album, from Neil Young’s Harvest to Nas’ Illmatic. The albums covered are typically beloved by critics, the writing fawning and flattering. This volume is a different story.

In Let’s Talk About Love, Carl Wilson (Canadian! Once married to Sheila Heti! Music critic at Slate!) is ostensibly writing about the Celine Dion album of the same name, but is really offering up a case study in good vs. bad taste. How can a woman so beloved by fans be so maligned by music critics? Which does it mean when a chasm this wide opens between mass appeal and critical renown?

I love pretentious writing about lowbrow topics – it’s why I’m such a big fan of Rembert Browne – and this book strikes right at the dark heart of this guilty pleasure. I was raised in a Celine-loving household – I listened to My Heart Will Go On until the CD was scratched beyond the point of playability – and then grew up into an adult who disavowed the tasteless tunes of my youth, pretending I came of age in a Patti Smith home rather than a Michael Bolton one. Reading Carl Wilson trying to make sense of Celine’s success is like watching someone trying to reconcile my two selves.