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[mabith]

List ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes and don’t think too hard - they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.

1. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
2. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein
3. We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse

Comments

[flibble_2000ad]

Some interesting books there! I love The Hobbit and Kaddish of course, but there's a few there I'd like to check out. Grapes of Wrath is one I've always meant to read as I loved Of Mice and Men. And that Boy from Mars one interests me of course. As does The Woman Warrior. Surprised I haven't heard of those ones.

[mabith]

Daniel Pinkwater is a genius. His books are so much fun. Can be a bit hard to find though, if the 5 Novels and 4 Novels sets aren't in print there. I've read his books most of my life, but started reading more of his children's/YA novels in middle school (I didn't know they existed before that), at a point in a my life when I was feeling bad about who I was. My long-term best friends had started completely blanking me out of nowhere, because I didn't wear the right clothes or shave my legs or want to wear makeup. I still wanted to play silly imaginary games.

Alan Mendelsohn and Pinkwater's Snarkout Boys books made me feel better about myself, and kept me from stifling my imagination (which I'm sure I wouldn't have done for long, but still).

The Woman Warrior is a classic for good reason. I found it incredibly, and it also came during a hard part of my life and reawakened me a bit.

[teagues_veil]

I'm intrigued by #3 & #5. What about them stayed with you? No spoilers though, please, I'm probably going to add them to my Goodreads! :D

[mabith]

3 - Just a very different view of psychology than is typically presented, and the way it's written is very compelling. It's a combination of transcripts of conversations and a written correspondence. I was 14 when I first read it.

4 - The way The Woman Warrior is written is also compelling. It blends autobiography/biography with Chinese folktales. It's creative non-fiction (versus semi-autobiographical fiction), and the way she writes about the experiences of herself and her mother, first versus second generation immigrants, women's history... It's just an incredibly book.

I also first read it at a really hard time in my life, when I was staying with my sister and her husband for weeks on end so I could be close to Johns Hopkins when I was close to getting a diagnosis. It helped me wake up to the world again, after being focused so inwardly for so long.