Favorite Books

I'm not well-read, and I have plebeian taste, so this is not meant to be a meaningful excursion into literature. I really enjoy books: the heft of leather-bound books, the crisp smell of new books, the swish of flipped pages, the neatness of thread-bound signatures and whatnot. In fact, my part time job is in the Preservation Department of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard; I fix broken books.

I digress. What we love most about books is reading them, that act of discovery. And some books never really leave us but, instead, become embedded in our memories and our concept of self. So I'm sharing some books that mean a great deal to me:

• The Water Margins: one of the lesser known four great novels in the Chinese literary tradition. Unlike The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is an intellectually challenging discussion of war and strategy or Dream of the Red Chamber, a psychologically complicated work on fate, love, and 18th century Qing social life, The Water Margins lacks depth. It's basically about lawless ruffians that band as brothers, get drunk, and smash a lot of corrupt officials in the face. I love it.
  

• The Redwall Series: A lot of mice and woodland animals live together in an abbey. It's one of the first books I remember reading in English; it introduced me to fantasy (and I mean that here as a state of mind, not a genre of fiction) and made me realize how easily imagination traverses the limits of reality.

• The Joy Luck Club: For me, Amy Tan seems to be the singular figure narrating the Chinese diasporic experience. It's not great literature, and it's not even descriptive of my experience in America. It's the weird distant uncle: I can barely comprehend him, but I recognize him as kin.
  

• Pride and Prejudice: Every girl's fantasy involves a Mr. Darcy.
  

• Random Family (tracing a family in the Bronx over the course of two years) & The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (the struggles of a Hmong family in California with the healthcare system over their epileptic child): For a few years, I read solely nonfiction narratives (other fantastic examples of this genre include Reefer Madness, Savage Inequalities, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families). These books cultivate social consciousness: they made me, living in an upper-middle-class suburb, feel obligated to the poor, the socially underprivileged, the geographically marginalized of the world.
  

• The Picture of Dorian Gray: The character I find compelling in Oscar Wilde's book is not Dorian Gray, the corrupted Adonis, but Lord Henry. He champions moral ambiguity so persuasively that, to this day, I remain highly skeptical of anyone who actually has a functioning moral compass.

• The Shadow of the Wind, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Prep, History of Love: Contemporary literature, it's like candy.

I realize these kinds of lists are self-absorbed to the point of solipsism, so I'll finish here. Won't you share your books too?