Beloved Books

I couldn't live without books. While most people I know at college have nothing but text books on their shelves, I have my favorite books with me all the time. I never get tired of them, and will pick one at random to read if I have a bit of time to spare (which is depressingly rare these days) before dashing off to work or class or study groups or all that other college stuff that demands so much of our lives. These books comfort me when I'm sick, or feeling lonely and lost, or just plain bored. I recently re-read Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and loved it even more the second time. Alexie has an amazing way with words, a way I often wish I could emulate though of course then it wouldn't be original anymore. Smoke Signals, the film based on The Lone Ranger, was excellent in and of itself, but the book is even better. Besides, I spent all my growing-up summers on Lake Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (no, not Ohio or Iowa), where Alexie grew up. Douglas Coupland has been both lauded and condemned for his novels depicting the trials and tribulations of Generation X. His novel, Life After God, managed to keep me going through an otherwise pretty hellish 1995. I just read his latest, Girlfriend in a Coma, over spring break. To be honest, I wasn't all that impressed, but man was it weird to have one of the central characters share my last name... Prozac Nation is Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir of struggling with depression. Makes you wanna hold her, makes you wanna kill her. Tom Robbins has written such questionable books as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Asleep in Frog Pajamas, and Still Life With Woodpecker. He is also a contributor to an anthology entitled Edgewalking On the Western Rim, which is a compilation of essays by writers living in the Pacific Northwest. I started reading Poppy Z. Brite during my freshman year here at college. I guess I was looking for something a little bit morbid, a little bit kinky, a little bit bizarre. She satiated my longing for something other than the semi-preppy world that is Columbia University. With her dark twisting tales of murder, love, music, vampires, and drugs, Brite is making a name for herself in the world of horror. Check out her latest, Exquisite Corpse, if you can handle a tale of necrophiliac lovers on a killing spree in New Orleans... The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin, opened my eyes to the beauty of true socialism. If only I could believe in the human spirit's ability to carry it out... Ordinary People, by Judith Guest, is the story of one family's attempt to overcome the death of a loved one. Although I've read several novels by Philip K. Dick and enjoyed them well enough, I truly loved his A Scanner Darkly. It's this bizarre, convoluted tale of a narcotics agent working to turn in a big-time drug dealer. The problem is that this particular drug dichotmoizes the brain into two distinct personalities. While I could get into the psychological trauma inflicted with the realization that he's narcing on himself, I'll try to refrain. Just go read the book already. I just read Tim O'Brien's book The Things They Carried and now I have to read it again. Ostensibly, this is for my senior thesis, but in reality, it is just an amazing and beautifully written book on life before, during, and after service in the Vietnam War. One of my favorite authors is Chaim Potok. Okay, so I wasn't raised Jewish (though my father's mother's family was Jewish... not much of a connection, I know) but I loved The Chosen and The Promise and My Name Is Asher Lev when I first read them at fourteen and I still love them today. During the summers growing up we had "summer reading" for school and the year after I started reading Potok, The Promise was one of our summer reading books. I was so excited, but then I found out that it was Danielle Steele's The Promise, not Potok's. So frustrating... A nifty little ezine called pug. books of an academic sort A great bookstore, if you are ever in the Seattle area, is the Elliot Bay Bookstore But the coolest bookstore in the world is here.