Ada

You know, where the desert island isn't an actual desert island (I'm looking at you, Boatbuilding for Beginners people) but just an occasion to make a list, one that might be different a different day.

1. The Nightmare Factory

I have a sense that Thomas Ligotti attracts—or attracted, before Penguin Random House picked him up—mostly a certain kind of reader that I definitively am not, being neither a man nor a nihilist—but I just love this omnibus collection. Ligotti writes a baroque prose, thinks up and fills out clever conceits, and can be very funny. For the record, I like the versions of the early stories collected in The Nightmare Factory much more than the edited versions published later, including in the Penguin edition.

Incidentally, I have this book shelved next to Penguin's edition of the Bible.

2. Wuthering Heights

I said this out loud once and was gently corrected—for obvious reasons—by my most wonderful professor, but I stand by it: I feel no guilt for loving this novel's extreme violence, because it truly is personal. It's not structural. It's not about systems of power around race, class, gender. It's just Catherine being Catherine, and Heathcliff being Heathcliff, (which are the same thing if you take Catherine's word for it,) and Emily writing her id.

3. Villette

I love Emily but Charlotte is the greater Brontë, for this novel. It's merciless. Charlotte's eye misses nothing and her pen spares no one, and Villette leaves no reader with a soul untouched.

4. The Bloody Chamber

The title story is a lush and feminist retelling of Bluebeard. It has a high tone but also a heart, and the prose is to die for.

5. The Fall of the Kings

Of the Riverside books Swordspoint is I think the fan favorite, but I love this one even more. It's got the mannered poses, the drawing-room repartee, the political intrigue, that make Swordspoint so compelling, but it's also got a university setting! I read somewhere that Delia Sherman wrote the university sections, and I'm here imagining her imagining medieval/scholastic institutes of learning, if the scholastics had Kings that fell instead of Christ that rose. Sherman writes in an undergirding debate about historiographical methodology, and the debate shows up in the plot as an actual scheduled event which turns out to be the novel's climax where all the plot lines that have been drawn over five hundred pages converge.

One thing I have to say, though, in comparing The Fall of the Kings to Swordspoint, is that I don't care about the central romance in the former: to me it feels like a cofunction of the plot. Whereas I couldn't love more than I already do Swordspoint's Richard and Alec and their dynamic; they break my heart.

Last thing: The Privilege of the Sword is wonderful too! I feel like the three books make something of an equilateral triangle, just the same amount of different from and similar to each other, trilaterally!

6. We Have Always Lived in the Castle

A short novel, creepy af and also perfect. I hear there's a visual adaptation; I can't imagine that it works. The novel is untouchable.

7. Sula

Another perfect short novel. I have no idea how Toni Morrison manages to be creepy-dark-twisted with a heart. Eva's murder of Plum embodies both, yet because it does have a heart it ends up being all heart, and I end up not being able to appreciate the masterly rendering of a mother setting her grown son on fire, because I'm too busy crying into my hands.

I can, however, fully appreciate this masterly rendering of a hot day: "a day so hot pregnant wives leaned up against trees and cried, and women remembering some three-month-old hurt put ground glass in their lovers’ food and the men looked at the food and wondered if there was glass in it and ate it anyway because it was too hot to resist eating it—"

8. The Praise Singer

If I had read more Mary Renault, and I intend to, this entry might be a different novel from her oeuvre. As it is, I've read The Charioteer, The Persian Boy, and The Praise Singer; I love them all, but The Praise Singer is special, because in my view it most examples this about Renault: her characters excel at reading each other through the lens of tact and dignity, imputing to each other always the motives most in keeping with the plain fact that they are all decent men (yes, they're all men in these books). Decent is the wrong word, it's too English. Good is also not the right word, it's too Christian. Noble is too Homeric (is that right?). I don't know the word to use. Whatever the word is, call it X, Renault's characters navigate the tacit undercurrents of interpersonal relations, and read and respond to social cues, always, in the very moment, in the very most [superlative of X goes here] way.

9. The End of Everything

I mentioned Emily Brontë's id, above; now is a good time to clarify that I'm using it wrong, the word id. I'm not referring to desires the subject may harbor, to fuck his mother or strangle his boss, because in these instances there is a subject. I'm referring to, like, the dark playground in the psyche where we entertain and relish and aestheticize notions of how wonderful the whole world would be, how beautiful and fascinating, if it were twisted just a few degrees to the left or turned entirely upside down.

(major spoiler)

As here, in this book, in Megan Abbott's playground, where the thirteen-year-old girl everyone thought had been kidnapped turns out to have known her supposed abductor had been watching her—inflamed him on purpose—gotten into his car. And this is how she tells it later, back home, weeks later, her v-card punched to confetti: "he loved me so much those nineteen days I thought I might die from it." And this is how she describes their parting to her friend: "he said, No one will ever love you like this again, and I knew he was right." That's delicious, that's the kind of stuff the id, in my usage, feeds on, subsists on, adores. Abbott hits my id with every book. This one is my favorite.

10. Gone Girl

This one's film adaptation worked, and how, Rosamond Pike idly flying pens out the window on the highway... I love Gillian Flynn's sandboxes too; I wish there were more of them.

(major spoiler)

I fucking love Amy Elliott Dunne, who coolly and meticulously plans the suicide she'll commit in order to provide the dead body that will guarantee her lying, cheating husband the death penalty he deserves. I will sign up for a booze cruise—something to get me out into the deep end but nothing requiring identification. I will drink a giant ice-wet shaker of gin, and I will swallow sleeping pills, and when no one is looking, I'll drop silently over the side, my pockets full of Virginia Woolf rocks. It's magnificent.