If you travel in writing circles on social media, you’ve probably seen the “nine books that shaped me” meme that has been circulating in recent weeks. On the website myninebooks.com, you can enter the names of your nine favorite literary works (or any other book) and it will pull up a cover image of each of the books, arrange them in a three-by-three grid, and allow you to save and download the image if you wish, or share a link to your grid on your favorite social platform. (Make your own book grid.)
I put together my list from memory in a few minutes, and if I had it to do over again I might remove one to make room for The Grapes of Wrath, but it would be tough to decide which to cut. Anyway, here’s my grid and, because I can’t just blithely post a grid without presenting an argument for why I think these books merit my attention, below the image is my summary of why these books matter to me.
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This is the book that introduced me to the concept of magical realism in literature. Garcia Marquez deftly wove surreal and magical elements into this narrative in a way that made it sound or seem almost ordinary. Many writers have followed in his footsteps, but few have managed to make their prose flow so effortlessly. One Hundred Years of Solitude also contains was is considered one of the greatest openings of any novel ever written:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
This sentence opens the mind to so many questions, it’s impossible to not read further.
2. Geronimo Rex, by Barry Hannah
I was dating a girl in college who was taking a course in contemporary Southern literature, and she told me about this writer named Barry Hannah they were studying. The were reading Nightwatchman, which she lent me, but I didn’t like it much. But it led me to consider some of his other works, including his debut coming-of-age novel Geronimo Rex, which follows the life of an unconventional young man growing up in a dead-end Louisiana town, where he learns about rock’n’roll, racism, and white supremacy. Hannah is commonly cited, along with Harry Crews and Larry Brown, as a progenitor of the modern “grit lit” storytelling style. Plus, a little Easter egg I enjoyed, there’s a references to Stephens College, an at-the-time all-women’s college in Columbia, Missouri, where I was attending the state university when I first read this.
3. The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
Before I learned about Barry Hannah and many other southern writers, almost everything I knew about southern literature came from two sources: William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I preferred O’Connor to Faulkner because she excelled at writing short stories so dark, grotesque, and weird that I could not soon shake them, any more than Hazel Motes (the protagonist of O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood) could shake the haunting, fire-and-brimstone Jesus of his grandfather. O’Connor wrote two novels–Wise Blood and the lesser-known The Violent Bear It Away–but neither of those could live up to the power of her short stories. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the most well-known and probably the most anthologized, but “Good Country People” is the one that really left me slack-jawed for its depiction of characters, dialogue, and intriguing story line. I love how she introduces the character Mrs. Freeman in the opening paragraph:
Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of them figs you put up last summer.”
And for insights into the issues of immigration that still haunt our nation, you can’t get much better than “The Displaced Person.”
4. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
This collection of short stories is based on O’Brien’s experience as an infantry grunt in Vietnam. Every story is linked and portrays some aspect of Alpha Company as it trudges through the Vietnam jungle, as well as life before and after the war. It is in my view the foundational fictional narrative of war and military fiction to come afterward, including Thom Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest (which, granted, was about boxing and other themes beyond Vietnam) and, more recently, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, about the U.S. Marines’ experience in the Iraq War. Take a look at the opening lines of the title story and marvel:
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant.
5. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Required reading for a college course on the American novel, Invisible Man is one of the finest writings I’ve ever encountered about the Black experience in America, the themes of cultural and social invisibility, identity, and the manipulation of social and political “causes.” The writing is sublime, and Ellison’s decision to make the protagonist nameless and anonymous–invisible, in other words–reinforces the novel’s central themes. It too has a phenomenal opening, this one in the form of a prologue:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids–and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination– indeed, everything and anything except me.
6. The Brothers Karamozov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ah, the Russian novel. I can’t say I’m a fan, but I really haven’t tried very hard to immerse myself in the Russian masters. Call me a Philistine. I’ve never read War and Peace, and although I listened to an audiobook version of Anna Karenina, I struggled to keep up with everything. But Chekhov’s short stories are fine, and Dostoevsky, for some reason, appeals to me. Maybe it’s the darkness of it all, the brutality, the unreliable, anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground (which carries some parallels to Invisible Man [see No. 5, above]). But Karamozov is exquisite not only in the story of the corrupt father and his four sons (one of whom is illegitimate) but also, and possibly even more so, because of its philosophical discussions. Yes, there is a murder mystery, but Dostoevsky’s novel is an exploration of ideas–of faith (embodied by youngest brother and Christian mystic Alyosha) versus reason (embodied in the brother Ivan), nihilism, the permeation of evil and suffering in the world, and the heavy burden of free will. If you, like me, tend to shy away from the sweeping narratives of the Russian novels but think you might enjoy philosophical musings wrapped in allegory, start by reading “The Grand Inquisitor” excerpt from The Brothers Karamozov and go from there.
7. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
Shout out to Karen Kroll, a wonderful English teacher during my high school days, who had us read this collection of short stories in ninth or tenth grade. The Illustrated Man introduced me to the power of short stories and first inspired me to think I could be a writer, even though I understood I could never approach Bradbury’s brilliant and imaginative storytelling. The stories contained in The Illustrated Man were published during the post-World War II golden days of science fiction and, as Garcia Marquez did with magical realism, convey the surreal and uncanny in common language. One of my favorites from the collection is “The Veldt.”
8. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
A brilliant comic novel I discovered during my college days (early ’80s, when it first came out). The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, a slovenly, lazy intellectual who still lives with his mother, embarks on a series of misadventures in early 1960s New Orleans and encounters a cast of colorful characters. Ignatius is obsessed with Medieval times, and writes scathing critiques of the debauched contemporary world on Big Chief tablets while exchanging long, argumentative letters to his girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff, an East Coast progressive Ignatius met during his brief time in college. The author, unfortunately, did not live to see his book published and win the Pulitzer Prize, as he committed suicide after failing to find a publisher. His mother continued the quest to find a publisher and, after several unsuccessful attempts, managed to get the manuscript to New Orleans novelist Walker Percy, who helped get the novel published.
9. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Yet another comedic novel makes the list. (Are you sensing a pattern?) Heller’s novel about John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Corps bombardier during World War II who is trying to get out of service, captures the absurdity of military red tape that could apply to nearly any other organization. The novel’s title comes from a military rule governing the process for getting out of bombing missions.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Those are my nine. What do you think? Share your thoughts below or share a link or list of your own top nine.
