This is a list of some of the books that have had the biggest impact on my thinking or were earth-shattering for me in some way. Coincidentally, these are all books I read at sixteen or seventeen while studying for my A-Levels (not my A-Level texts themselves) so maybe there’s just something about the books you read between sixteen and eighteen. Some were impactful because I found them to be examples of stunningly beautiful writing and others I found impactful because of what they taught me. All of them made the list because at sixteen and seventeen, they each reminded me of why at six and seven, nothing was more exciting to me than the prospect of having my nose buried in a book.
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925)
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001), p. 3.
Summary:
Through the narration of a Wall Street salesman named Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a man obsessed with a woman from his youth. Gatsby is known by everyone in the part of New York that the novella takes place in for being extremely wealthy and owning a large house from which he throws lavish parties every single night in the hope of getting the attention of his former, now married sweetheart Daisy Buchanan (née Fay). Daisy happens to be Nick’s cousin, so when Nick moves in next to Gatsby, Gatsby befriends him, intending to use Nick to reconnect him with Daisy.
Why it’s on this list:
The book’s opening line emphasises the importance of empathy, which, when I reached the end of the book, I remember thinking was such a lovely, humane way of beginning a story where almost everybody is absolutely awful. Although Nick goes on to undercut this sentiment with his following statements in the same introduction, his father’s advice to remember that not everybody has had the same privileges you’ve had when you’re prepared to condemn someone for something really stuck with me and it’s come to my mind every instance the opportunity to be censorious about a person’s behaviour has presented itself in the seven years since I first read the novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose was (and still is) absolutely breathtaking to me and as a sixteen year old inordinately interested in the the past, I particularly loved getting a glimpse into a rarefied (and obviously fictionalised) experience of 1920s life, along with the commentary on the hollowness of wealth. Through the attitudes of Tom, Daisy’s husband, towards anybody not a WASP, and through Fitzgerald’s depiction of Meyer Wolfsheim, I also enjoyed the insight into the extent to which 1920s white upper-class American society depended on antisemitism and other forms of racism for the formation and consolidation of its own identity.
2. His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Saraband, 2017)
‘Dear Father,
I am writing in the hope that this letter will find your situation improved. I myself have but a brief time left and do not crave longer in this world than that which is allotted to me. The walls of my cell make for a dreary vista and though I would dearly love to see Culduie once more, if I could hasten my execution, I would gladly do so. For the time being, however, I am quite comfortable, and you must not concern yourself about my wellbeing, nor lament my passing. I wish to say that I am earnestly sorry for the trouble I have caused, and that I earnestly wish you might have been blessed with a more worthy son.
[Signed] Roderick John Macrae’
Graeme Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project (Saraband, 2017), p. 279.
Summary:
On the opposite end of the wealth spectrum to Fitzgerald’s story is Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, which recounts the events leading up to a triple-murder that takes place in a small crofting community in Culduie of the Scottish Highlands in 1869. To make things more interesting, this murder is committed by a teenager of whom the author is purportedly a descendant. The book is presented to us as a historical account and largely focuses on Roddy’s (the murderer) narration of his family history and reasons for eventually murdering his neighbour and tormentor of his family, Lachlan Mackenzie.
Why it’s on this list:
I loved the book primarily because it challenges the privileged view we often have of our own objectivity. Burnet achieved this by creating one narrative through the use of various, disparate discursive fields and by beginning the novel with conflicting character statements. As a city-dweller, I found the rural setting and the ways in which Macrae suggested that the insularity and deprivation of Roddy’s community contributed to Roddy’s crime really interesting. I also enjoyed how the novel’s persuasiveness as a purportedly historical account reflected our own capacity for seduction by the presentation of a given thing, and the fragility of our objectivity as a result. This believability is a testament to both the vividness of Macrae’s descriptions (of the physical landscape in particular) and to the impact of the novel’s various paratexts. Roddy’s linguistic capabilities and his humility regarding them brought to mind Othello’s speech to Desdemona’s father about how he was able to woo her despite his “rude” (unrefined) speech, as well as Humbert Humbert’s ability to seduce as a villain through his command of English, both of which I doubt were incidental to Burnet’s characterisation of Roddy.
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007)
“Now he is a little older than you,” Afsoon chimed in. “But he can’t be more than… forty. Forty-five at the most. Wouldn’t you say, Nargis?”
“Yes. But I’ve seen nine-year-old girls given to men twenty years older than your suitor, Mariam. We all have. What are you, fifteen? That’s a good, solid, marrying age for a girl.” There was enthusiastic nodding at this. It did not escape Mariam that no mention was made of her half-sisters Saideh or Naheed, both her own age, both students in the Mehri School in Herat, both with plans to enroll in Kabul University. Fifteen, evidently, was not a good, solid marrying age for them.
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), p. 44.
Summary:
In Kabul in 1974, fifteen year old Mariam, labelled a “harami” from birth because she is born out of wedlock, is married off to Rasheed, a man unknown to her, to unburden her father’s legitimate wives and children of the shame of her physical proximity to them. Rasheed is abusive and does not believe in the education of women, nor does he view them as equal to men, and Mariam’s marriage to him marks the beginning of years of suffering until four years later, unfortunate circumstances mean that recently orphaned fourteen year old Laila must also marry Rasheed. The daughter of prosperous Afghan ‘liberals’, Laila’s familial and cultural background differs greatly from Mariam’s and when she joins Rasheed’s household, all three characters’ lives are changed in grave ways.
Why it’s on this list:
Hosseini provided an extremely affecting picture of the harms of misogyny and culturally sanctioned male domination of women, and the desperation that can result from living under sustained domestic violence and other attempts at the erasure of a person’s personhood. In the midst of suffering at the hands of abusive men, Hosseini also depicted the beauty of female friendship and the wonderful refuge that shared womanhood can be in times of crisis. What was most impactful to me was Hosseini’s representation of the losses – political and other – suffered by Afghan women as a consequence of the political changes in the country, losses which are represented microcosmically in Mariam’s marriage to Rasheed and opposed, by contrast, in Laila’s adolescence. Hosseini’s prose is unassuming and he is sparing in his use of figurative language, which I really enjoyed because it made the one liners that his novels have come to be so known for all the more impactful when they arrived. (One such example is: “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.” Technically two lines but the second always can’t be left out.) At sixteen I thought Hosseini wrote with such a depth of empathy for a plight that was not his (to my knowledge) and with such insight and sensitivity into both universal and very isolated female experiences that I remember thinking he was somebody I would love to sit across a table and have a conversation about anything with.
4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, trans. by Edith Grossman (Alfred A Knopf , 1988)
Born and raised in the Caribbean superstition that one opened doors and windows to summon a coolness that in fact did not exist, Dr Urbino and his wife at first felt their hearts oppressed by enclosure. But in the end they were convinced of the merits of Roman strategy against heat, which consisted of closing houses during the lethargy of August in order to keep out the burning air from the street, and then opening them up completely to night breezes. And from that time on, theirs was the coolest house under the furious La Manga sun, and it was a delight to take a siesta in the darkened bedrooms and to sit on the portico in the afternoon to watch the heavy, ash-gray freighters from New Orleans pass by, and at dusk to see the wooden paddles of the riverboats with their shining lights, purifying the stagnant garbage heap of the bay with the wake of their music. It was also the best protected from December through March, when the northern winds tore away roofs and spent the night circling like hungry wolves looking for a crack where they could slip in. No one thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations could have any reason not to be happy.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin Essentials, 2016), p. 19.
Summary:
Love in the Time of Cholera tells the story of Florentino Ariza’s half- century long infatuation with Fermina Daza who he met and became involved with in his youth, only for her to marry the prolific Dr Juvenal Urbino instead. The story follows Florentino’s life before, during, and after Fermina Daza, taking us through the exploits of a young man in love (or lust) and the mundanities of life of an old man in love (or lust, or whatever you’d call Florentino’s feelings towards Fermina).
Why it’s on this list:
I loved this book at seventeen primarily because of how utterly spellbinding García Márquez’ writing was to me then. Márquez tells the story with an attention to the details of his characters’ surroundings and a sensitivity to the hidden parts of human beings that I had not yet encountered in a novel (to the extent that García Márquez displays it) at that age. What stands out as an adult reader is the novel’s strong sense of place. García Márquez’ descriptions of the Caribbean weather, and of the houses, bedrooms, libraries, verandas, feelings and daytime musings of his characters were wonderfully vivid and effortlessly poetic.
5. The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (ONE, imprint of Pushkin Press, 2015)
Before that letter came, everything was in place: Father went to work every morning and Mother, who ran a fresh food store in the open market, tended to my five siblings and me who, like the children of most families in Akure, went to school. Everything followed its natural course. We gave little thought to past events. Time meant nothing back then. The days came with clouds hanging in the sky filled with cupfuls of dust in the dry seasons, and the sun lasting into the night. It was as if a hand drew hazy pictures in the sky during the rainy seasons, when rain fell in deluges pulsating with spasms of thunderstorms for six uninterrupted months.
Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen (ONE, 2015), p. 15.
Summary:
The Fishermen is the story of the tragic events that befall a family of seven after its patriarch is moved to a new city by the demands of his job.
Why it’s on this list:
I liked The Fishermen because of the voice it was told in, which was that of one of five siblings retrospectively narrating what happened to his family when his father moved to another city for work, leaving him, his siblings and his mother to live without him. The story is told by Benjamin, the second youngest male child in his family and although Benjamin is twenty-nine at the time of narration, describing events that happened when he was nine years old, his voice is marked by the guilelessness of youth that gives the narrative a mythic, folkloric feel. The book is not a light read in the slightest, sharing similarities with His Bloody Project and other stories that tell of radical, seemingly overnight changes in character that often precede great acts of violence. What I found really striking at sixteen was the stigmatisation of mental illness that the book explores, the shadow of conflict between Nigerian Yoruba tradition and Christianity in the characters’ lives, and the afterlife of British colonial rule on everyday life in 1990s Akure that, while peripheral to the plot, Obioma narrates implicitly through the characters’ ways of thinking about various things and perhaps most obviously, linguistically.
6. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, imprint of Orion Books, Hachette, 2012)
Amy Elliot Dunne | July 25, 2010
– Diary entry –
It is our third wedding anniversary and I am alone in our apartment, my face all mask-tight from tears because, well because: Just this afternoon, I get a voice mail from Nick, and I already know it’s going to be bad, I know the second the voice mail begins because I can tell he’s calling from his cell and I can hear men’s voices in the background, and a big, roomy gap, like he’s trying to decide what to say, and then I hear his taxi-blurred voice, a voice that is already wet and lazy with booze, and I know I am going to be angry – that quick inhale, the lips going tight, then shoulders up, the I so don’t want to be mad but I’m going to be feeling.1 Do men not know that feeling? You don’t want to be mad, but you’re obligated to be, almost. Because a rule, a good rule, a nice rule is being broken. Or maybe rule is the wrong word. Protocol? Nicety? But the rule/protocol/nicety – our anniversary – is being broken for good reason, I understand, I do.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2013), p. 72.
Summary (*spoilers ahead*):
Amy is married to Nick and when Amy goes missing, her diary entries shed light on marital troubles that perfectly, almost as though contrived for this very purpose, point to Nick as the prime suspect for her disappearance. Except, Nick didn’t kill his wife and Amy has some very big control issues. She is also seemingly quite content to be with someone who cannot stand the sight of her as long as she knows that she has him under her thumb as it’s revealed that all of everything she’s done, from her diary entries to other, non-written activities, has been to secure Nick’s lifelong, unquestioning obedience to her.
Why it’s on this list:
I like to think that Gone Girl stayed with me because it was the first mystery/thriller novel I read and therefore marked my branching out from the historical fiction and fantasy I typically read at that time, but the truth is that Gone Girl stayed with me because in Amy Elliott Dunne, Gillian Flynn created probably the most terrifying character I’ve ever read in a novel. While to those who grew up not surrounded by Amy Dunne type characters, Amy and the lengths she goes to to achieve her aim will sound entirely too far-fetched to be taken seriously, the way Flynn told the story, which was with masterful characterisation, very gradually revealing the less normal aspects of Amy’s character, made the novel as engrossing, disturbing and memorable as it was.
Perhaps due to Rosamund Pike’s performance in the movie adaptation and the famous ‘Cool Girl monologue’, the release of the movie prompted the celebration of Amy as some kind of women’s rights or feminist icon among some women and girls. I would just like it to be very clear that Amy Elliott Dunne is not an aspirational character for women or girls. Among other things, she kills a man. She’s a very interesting and well-written character and the book is immensely gripping, but if I could go back in time, seventeen year old me would have the bravery to say to my friends that it’s ok for female villains to remain villains and that a woman simply doing something, especially when that something is framing her husband for her murder and murdering her ex-boyfriend as plan B when plan A fails is not – or at least should not be – the stuff of feminist dreams.
7. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (Random House, 1969)
… Wouldn’t they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about “my daddy must of been a Chinaman” (I thought they meant made out of china, like a cup) because my eyes were so small and squinty. Then they would understand why I had never picked up a Southern accent, or spoke the common slang, and why I had to be forced to eat pigs’ tails and snouts. Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Virago Press, 1986), pp. 4-5.
Summary:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the autobiography of Maya Angelou’s early years in Depression Era southern America and chronicles the events of her life from her birth to the birth of her son Guy when she is sixteen.
Why it’s on this list:
Learning about the difficulties of Angelou’s childhood was deeply moving and learning about the joys in spite of those things was lovely. The almost blasé way in which she narrated the traumatic events of that childhood was also very interesting to me. Getting a glimpse into the person behind the famous works gave me a newfound appreciation for her poetry, which I was a fan of then and still am now.
Honourable Mentions
While these books did not necessarily remain permanently ingrained in my brain like the former seven did, they were equally great and also influential to me at sixteen/seventeen. Because of that, I feel that to leave them unmentioned would constitute treachery.
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1954)
The first in a trilogy characteristic of the epic genre, The Fellowship of the Ring is, for about ten pages, a quaint domestic story about fictional creatures called Hobbits, after which point it becomes a really dark story about a quest to destroy a ring that is essentially the source of all evil. (Ten pages is an exaggeration, but relative to the sheer amount of walking to Mordor that Tolkien describes, ten pages really feels about right.) To rectify the grave mistake of his uncle Bilbo, Frodo Baggins is forced to leave his cosy hobbit hole and everything he loves about provincial life to walk a lot to destroy said ring. Being a mere hobbit, he thankfully has his friends and a troupe of different kinds of beings to accompany him on this quest, the entire group forming the titular fellowship (…of the Ring).
There is so, so much walking in the book but Tolkien could construct a world like nobody else and I loved the beautiful descriptions of Middle Earth and hobbit life pre-quest. Having watched all three of the movies many times thanks to my sister, I also enjoyed being surprised by the appearance of characters such as Tom Bombadil that were not able to make it into the film, presumably because 3 hours and 15 minutes would have been just too long for anyone to sit through (as opposed to the 3 hours that film 1 is).
Ain’t I A Woman? by bell hooks (South End Press, 1981)
An examination of the impact of slavery and racialised misogyny/misogynoir on contemporary African-American women’s lives, which when hooks was writing were those living in the 20th century. This book gave me a deeper understanding of intersectionality while studying Sociology and provided some fascinating analyses of race relations and racial politics from the perspective of an African American woman.
1984 by George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, 1949)
Everything wrong with totalitarian, authoritarian government and the implications of such government on selfhood. Does “really good” suffice as a description of a book which has made every Classics list and will go on to do so forever?
The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Penguin Books, 2009)
The Help is a novel primarily about twenty-three year old white female aspiring writer Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan, who in 1960s Mississippi is struggling with the expectation that she should be a married homemaking mother like all good Southern white women are. Within this are the stories of the black maids that Skeeter decides to interview for her first book, which will be a tell-all of the lives of the black women employed by the white households that Skeeter’s own family and friends constitute. The aspect of the novel that I thought was the most beautifully done was Stockett’s depiction of Skeeter’s alienation from her own circle because of her rejection of their ideals, both in her racial politics and in her desire to be something other than a wife first and foremost.
Kindred by Octavia Butler (Doubleday, 1979)
A sci-fi story set in 1970s America about a black woman named Dana who discovers that she is able to time travel but (but is not in control of when these moments of time travel happen) and can only go back in time to Maryland in the early 1800s. As she flits between her modern day—the 1970s where she is free and married to a white man—and 1800s Maryland—where she is an enslaved woman—Dana’s future/present becomes more and more jeopardised by the actions of the characters in her past. This novel was my introduction to Octavia Butler as well as my introduction to sci-fi writing and next to the concept of the story itself, my favourite things about the book were how Butler managed to maintain tension throughout the novel and humanise the slavers of 1800s America.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Olympia Press, 1955)
Humbert Humbert is awaiting trial for murder when he writes a memoir detailing the beginnings of his sexual predilection for adolescent girls, who he calls “nymphets”, and the circumstances leading up to and concluding his abuse of twelve year old Dolores Haze, known to him as Lolita. Second to its obviously controversial subject matter, this book is probably most known for the quality of Nabokov’s prose, which was charming, seductive and captivating, all things that Humbert presented himself as in his narrative.
- Emphasis mine. The words in bold appeared in italics in the book. ↩︎
