My 10 Favorite Books (Part 2) – WN 025

This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Warner, Episode 25, My 10 Favorite Books, Part Two.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And with this episode, I am going to reveal to you the final five books in my top 10 favorite books of all time countdown.

I always think that writers have a special relationship with books and not just because when we pick up and read a book, we’re interacting with the very medium that we’re seeking to create. I suspect that for many of us, our love of reading is what first inspired us to write. Our love of reading is what eventually grew into our love of writing. After consuming so many well-told stories and after sinking so happily into relationships with characters and tasting over and over the prose in which it is written, I think that sometimes we just can’t help it, but be spurred to create our very own.

My love of books came early on in life. I was naturally very shy and introverted, and unlike many people who grow up to lead very interesting lives, I was not a risk taker. I was not a tester of boundaries. For whatever reason, I feel like I was just a very naturally obedient child. I was told not to touch the stove and I didn’t test that theory by touching the stove. I just wanted to make people happy. And so I think what I did was I made life very boring for myself. I was focused on being a very good girl. And good girls don’t have a whole lot of fun. Entertainment-wise, we weren’t permitted to watch TV outside of Sesame Street and the occasional Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And so for entertainment, I turned to the library. And my parents had this rule that while we couldn’t watch TV, we could read pretty much anything we wanted to.

And so I found myself at the public library, and for once in my life, there were no rules or restrictions. I was free to select whatever I wanted to select and to fill my brain with whatever I wanted to fill it with. And so like so many writers, I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on. I learned what I liked and I learned what I didn’t like. And I learned what was good and what was poor writing. And I found that sometimes I liked books that were written poorly and sometimes I did not care so much for the books that were written with a higher level of skill. And I realized that that was okay because I read mostly for enjoyment, for entertainment.

So consequently, most of my favorite books are on the higher entertainment value side of things rather than the literary merit side. And I think that’s okay. I also think it’s okay if you prefer to read nonfiction, or if you prefer to read only one genre like horror or fantasy. There are plenty of people out there who will judge you for what you like to read.

In a previous podcast episode, I shared with you this story of the admissions counselor who told me I would never get anywhere in life reading the trash that I so dearly loved to read. Well, there’s nothing wrong with reading the so-called trash, and there’s nothing wrong with only reading what you consider to be the treasures. It’s all so subjective, which is why my 10 favorite books are probably different from your 10 favorite books or your 20 favorite books or your 50 favorite books or your one favorite book, that one book that you return to over and over again, that brings you comfort, that keeps you sane, that acts as a friend when life kind of sucks.

I took a look at my list and I realized exactly how varied my reading tastes are. The five books that I listed last time were a science fiction/speculative fiction book, a work of fiction, a work of nonfiction, a YA book, young adult, and a classic. This time I have a contemporary fiction novel, a mystery, a children’s book, a work of fantasy, and a work of urban fantasy. I did not do this on purpose to make sure that I had represented a book from every single genre that I like to read. I just like to say that there is value and I think equal value to be found in any and all books. There are of course books that I don’t like. And maybe one day I will do a podcast about the top 10 books that I really, really hate. But I still won’t judge other people for enjoying them. All right. So without further ado, the next five books on my list.

Starting with number six, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. There is a certain stigma associated with Cormac McCarthy’s name. He’s a wonderful writer. And in fact, I think he’s one of the best writers that I’ve ever read in my life, the most talented, the most lyrical, the most emotionally moving. But he’s also known to be very bleak. If you’ve seen the movie No Country for Old Men or The Road, or if you’ve read either of those books or if you’ve read any of his other books such as Blood Meridian or the Sunset Limited, you know what I’m talking about. Those works are trying and painful and, despite the beautiful words that are used to weave them, really hopeless. Part of what makes his work so effecting is the equal parts of beauty and horror, of skill and viciousness, of lyricism and gore.

So why is All the Pretty Horses on my list of favorite books? All the Pretty Horses is the first book in Cormac. McCarthy’s Border trilogy, three books that are set in Texas and Mexico and sort of harkens back to the classic American Western. When I first picked up this book, I was in high school and I had no idea of what I was getting into. I selected it from the shelves because I was interested in horses as lame as that sounds. I wanted to read something new. I saw the library had a lot of books by Cormac McCarthy, and I selected that at random. It’s safe to say that I had no idea what I was getting into. I had no idea what Cormac McCarthy’s reputation was, and I was not the same person that I was when I finished the book as I had been when I started it.

I love book recommendations. I love it when my friends send me books that they know I’m going to enjoy reading. I love that. But there’s just something very special about discovering a good book for yourself, of enjoying that happy accident, of pulling just the right volume off of the shelf at the right time. And I think that’s part of the reason why this book is on my list of 10 favorites because you know I love surprises and it was just such a wonderful surprise.

All the Pretty Horses is the story of two friends, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins. And they are heading to Mexico together to try their fortune. John’s family has been in the process of slowly drinking itself to death/selling off the beloved family farm. And so he begins, as many young adults do, his search for home. John Grady has a special gift. He’s sort of a horse whisperer figure. And this was really my favorite part of the book. And that’s what sets this apart I think from a lot of Cormac McCarthy’s other works. There’s a lot of love as cheesy as that sounds. There is a lot of love that comes out of the language in this book. And it’s powerful. While you’re reading this book, you’re living the life and seeing through the eyes of someone who dearly loves horses and all that they represent. And it’s amazing.

So with that in mind, you won’t find the bleakness of The Road or the visceral terror of Blood Meridian. And while it’s not sort of the happy-go-lucky buddy cop kind of scenario that I may be painting it to be, it is beautiful and worth reading. Some people express a distaste in Cormac McCarthy’s works because he uses a very simplistic sounding language sort of like Hemingway did, and he also is not a huge fan of proper sentence structuring. So people who are kind of put off by grammatical inappropriateness, if you’ll get hung up on the fact that, oh, there should be a comma here and there’s not, then this might not be the right book for you. And that’s okay. But what I really love about this is the way that the rules are broken and they’re broken well. They say that you should never break rules in writing unless you’re going to do it really well. And he does it really well.

I’m going to read a brief excerpt, just a paragraph from All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. And I want you to listen for the lyricism in his style. I want you to listen for sort of the spoken word poetry that’s inherent in this paragraph.

“In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles dripped and rang like water dripping in a well and in his sleep he dreamt of horses and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the tilted stones like horses come upon an antique site where some ordering of the world had failed and if anything had been written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again and the horses were wary and moved with great circumspection carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and other places where horses once had been and would be again. Finally what he saw in his dream was that the order in the horse’s heart was more durable for it was written in a place where no rain could erase it.”

I love that that selection is only two sentences and contained zero commas, but yet the phrasing is so strong that you still know naturally what to do with the language and how to read it. And I think that’s so powerful. I would never try that style myself because in my hands it would turn into a giant run-on sentence. But in the hands of a master inserting commas and pauses without commas or periods or semi-colons or dashes, it makes for such a flowing and lovely reading experience. So book number six in my top 10 favorites, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.

Book number seven is The Ape Who Guards the Balance by Elizabeth Peters. Now this was a tough choice for me. The Ape Who Guards the Balance is the 10th book in the Amelia Peabody mystery series. Amelia Peabody is a early 20th century archeologist. And she and her husband Emerson devote their lives to unearthing treasures in Egypt. And along the way, there are murders and thefts and all sorts of political intrigue, which makes the series appear delight to read. The Amelia Peabody series was sort of like my Indiana Jones. There is adventure and action and romance and mystery and all sorts of cool intrigue in exotic locales. And perhaps most wonderfully/embarrassingly of all, the series is home to my very first literary crush.

I selected The Ape Who Guards the Balance out of all, gosh, I think there’s 20 books in the series, but I selected the Ape Who Guards the Balance because it was the very first one that I read. And it brought me for the very first time into a world filled with characters that I would grow to love. This was really that first experience for me where I found myself immersed in a fictional world where I cared about the set of fictional characters more than a lot of people I knew in real life, which sounds terrible. But if you’re an avid reader, you might know what I’m talking about.

Elizabeth Peters, who is the pen name for author Barbara Mertz, passed away recently in August of 2013. And it marks another first for me. It was really the first time that I read about a sort of celebrity death on Twitter. And it felt like I had been punched in the gut. The creator of this world that I so deeply loved was gone and it hurt. I was always too afraid to write fan letters to authors that I loved. That fear came from being afraid. Maybe that they wouldn’t read my letter, or that they would think I was stupid, or that I simply had nothing of use or value to say.

When Ms. Peters passed away, I really regretted never having sent her a letter expounding on my admiration for this world she had created. So Elizabeth Peters, wherever you are, thank you so much for this gift you gave us. You were an amazing writer and you gave me characters to love in a time where I just felt so alone. So thank you.

The next book on my list, number eight. It was a favorite of mine growing up because it opened my mind to a whole new world of possibility. The book I’m talking about is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. And while it’s technically a children’s book, it’s one of those books that I think anyone can read and just really enjoy reading. It begins on a dark and stormy night with a girl named Meg and her little brother, Charles Wallace. And without very much preamble at all, it sets them off on this insane whirlwind adventure to find their father through space and time quite literally and rescue him from the clutches of true evil.

What is most notable I think about this book and the reason that it’s so enduring is that technically it’s a children’s book, but it does not talk down to the reader. It’s not pedantic. This is a book that truly respects its audience and respects its audience’s intelligence. There is no overexplaining or dumbing down. This is a book about the fourth dimension. This is a book about travel through time and space. And it is a book for children, but it is not necessarily a book that is pandering to children. There’s no preachy morals. There’s no dumbing down. It’s just honest, and it’s beautifully honest in a way that fiction and science fiction and fantasy can be honest. The characters are real.

Meg is a girl who is, I think, in middle school maybe, but the book never, never once goes into sort of the typical high school, middle school politics of being that age. What I mean by that is Meg never gets bullied by cheerleaders, even though she loves math and wears glasses. I think so many stories written for children and young adults center around school and use school as a crutch. Sure, a lot of life when you’re that age happens at school, and school has a tremendous effect on who you are as a person and who you grow to be. But I just really get tired of the metaphor of school as real world.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when you’re watching, if there’s a TV show, that’s set in a high school setting, it’s just so stereotypical, but it’s not stereotypical of how things actually are. It’s stereotypical of how aging writers for TV remember an exaggeration of their high school years to be. The whole jocks versus cheerleaders versus nerd thing is so overdone and I feel untrue. But I digress. We’re talking about A Wrinkle in Time.

The other thing that I really love about this book is the relationship and the loving relationship between its family members. There’s so many books where people are fundamentally alone and they need to find love. And those stories usually end up being romantic or some kind of love story that’s written there that develops. But A Wrinkle in Time begins on the foundation that Meg is a very loving person and has very strong ties to not only her brother, Charles Wallace, who she’s very protective of, but also with her father who she’s never given up on even when the rest of the world has. The love is so natural and powerful and elegant. It’s not all awkward and tripping over itself, like in so many other books. It’s genuine and deeply and truly so. So give it a try if you haven’t read it before, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, a great adventure for any age.

Speaking of adventure, book number nine is a beautiful, quirky and wholly original fantasy written by Australian author, Garth Nix. It’s called Sabriel. And it’s one of those books that I keep next to my bed and I have a copy of digitally on my phone so that I am never anywhere without it. This book is again a fantasy. And I almost don’t want to tell you what it’s about. I read a lot of young adult literature. And a lot of the less, well-written, YA literature focuses on a girl with super powers and she fights evil and looks gorgeous doing it and often gets into very bad situations because of poor choices that she’s made.

This book is the opposite of all that. And despite the fact that it says it’s for ages 12 and 13, I don’t think this is by any means just for that age. This is a young adult novel that does not once again pander to its audience. It doesn’t leave you frustrated with the characters or groaning at their choices because the main character, Sabriel, despite being 18 years old, is smart and level-headed and admirable and makes smart choices that really builds the story up to a whole nother level. And she is being hunted by very dark and deadly forces. With the help of seven bells, Sabriel has the power to put to rest the dead. She has her set of bells, her sword, her friend Touchstone, and a very small, delightful white cat named Mogget, who is just a pure delight to read, and together they have a grand adventure that in my opinion is over altogether too quickly. I love this book. It’s a quick read. It’s an easy read and it is well worth your while even if you don’t like fantasy. It’s very subtle and mature. And I really think you’ll like it.

Book number 10 is a work of urban fantasy called Storm Front by Jim Butcher. Urban fantasy is I think a relatively new genre. So what it does is it takes your typical fantasy type tropes and characters and dumps them into a more modern, urban setting. So it takes place in Chicago and kind of has a noir field and is a mystery to solve. But it’s just a mystery where there also happens to be vampires and werewolves and all sorts of things stomping around.

Storm Front is about a wizard named Harry Dresden, who works as a sort of private investigator detective in downtown Chicago. As a wizard, he has certain magical powers, one of them being that he’s very good at finding lost things. And that’s really the premise of the book is he has this detective office, and very few people in the world of Chicago that is established know what magic is and know that it exists. And so most of the time he’s just laughed at like, “Oh, you’re a wizard like a stage magician.” And that’s part of the fun of this book. It’s sort of like the X-Files where Mulder and Scully have seen all these weird things and everybody else around them just misses out on these weird things or just thinks that they, “Oh, I just saw something and I’ll just conveniently forget about it.”

And so it’s fun because as the reader you’re clued in and you just get to go along with Harry for the ride. This is the first book in a series of mysteries. And it’s one of those good series where the character learns and grows throughout. So he starts off in this first book as sort of a snarky, cocky, one-liner spouting detective and grows and emerges into this wonderfully dorky misfit through. The course of the series, buildings get blown up, cars get blown up, apartments get blown up, Harry rides a zombie dinosaur through the streets of Chicago in a lightening storm. It’s silly and it’s fun and it knows it’s silly and it’s fun. And that’s part of what makes it so enjoyable to read. They’re very cinematic books. And so they’re very easy to just kind of lose yourself in and imagine. And that just really makes it very pleasurable to read. So the series is called The Dresden Files, and the first book is called Storm Front by Jim Butcher.

So to recap, my top 10 favorite books of all time: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, The Ape Who Guards the Balance by Elizabeth Peters, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Sabriel by Garth Nix, and Storm Front by Jim Butcher.

Give these a read. Let me know what you think. I would honestly, whether it’s good or bad, positive, or negative, I would love to hear your thoughts about these books. I love talking about books, and even if you decide that you hate them, I still want to have a discussion with you about why you hate them. I still think that’s really interesting. I’m one of those people who enjoys an argument just for argument’s sake. And so I will happily argue or argue against the merits/demerits of any book that you want to talk about. So if you want to contact me, you can do so through my website, sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H–W-E-R-N-E-R.com. You can navigate to the Contact page and fill out the easy little form there.

Alternately, you can email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. And I will try to get back to your email in about 24 hours. Note that I said “try.” I am notoriously bad about answering emails in a timely fashion. I will always answer them. So if you send me an email, I will respond, but it might be a week later. And I’m so sorry about that. It’s just not one of my strong points, but please do email me because I love to hear from you.

All of the books that I talked about today are listed in the show notes for this episode and the previous episode, part one. So you can click on them there. It’ll take you to Good Reads and you can go from there. You can also sign up to receive a weekly email from me. I’ve kind of changed the way that I do email sends recently. And so what I’m doing is I’m sending you a sort of inspirational quote for the week and my thoughts on writing for that week, and this is new content that you won’t find in my podcasts.

So if you’d like to receive emails from me, you can sign up on my website. There’s a black bar at the very top of sarahwerner.com. And you can just type your email address there. You can also scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and a little gray popup box will come up. You can type in your email there. Either one, it goes to the same list, and I will send you emails once a week for fun. I hope you like them.

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Speaking of Patreon, I would like to thank my donors for helping make this week’s episode possible. Special thanks go to official cool cat Sean Locke, official rad dude Andrew Coons, and official podcast caffeinator Rebecca Werner. I would not be able to do this without your generous support. So thank you.

Special thanks to the authors of all of the books that I mentioned. These gifts that you have given the world are so meaningful to people like me. So thank you. And you, yes, you, this is the reason that you need to write your book. No matter what it is that you end up writing, it will mean the world to somebody somewhere, and you might even just change their life. And with that, this has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am Sarah Werner and I love books.