10 books that have stayed with me (part 1)

Because of my recent desire to read more, I started thinking back to the books I've read throughout my life (I haven't really read a lot since high school). I remembered something that was making its rounds on social media last year: people were asked to list ten books that have stayed with them in some way. I thought to myself, have I read enough books in my life to compile a list of ten? So I started this exercise and I realized that I can actually put together my own list. I thought I'd share it here. (This is part 1 of 2.)

1. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

photo from www.novelr.com

The Joy Luck Club was required reading for my high school batch and I'm glad it was because it is one of my favorite books. It shares the stories of eight Chinese women - four mother-daughter pairs - who live in the US. The novel is divided into 16 vignettes that tell the tale of each women as a child and as an adult. I love how these stories develop each character and provide incredible insight into their motivations, how they showcase Chinese and Chinese-American culture in a way that makes you understand, and how they interconnect with each other, making the whole greater than the sum of its individual parts.

You'd think that I wasn't the target audience of this novel, or any of the other guys in school for that matter, but it's such a beautifully written book that pretty much everyone in my batch loved it, gender notwithstanding. It's one of the few books that I wanted to read again immediately after I finished reading it (and I did). I recommended The Joy Luck Club to the rest of my family and they loved it as well. When the movie came out a few years later, a lot of folks from our batch went to see it.

2. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

photo from en.wikipedia.org

This is a literary classic that would probably be in many people's list of 10 books that have stayed with them and it is one of the few books I have read more than once. What I love about The Little Prince is that it shares powerful and universal life lessons which are presented through very meaningful allegories. Its key messages about human relationships are so eloquently yet succinctly written that you will find lot of very quotable lines in the book, such as ""You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed" and the ever-popular "What is essential is invisible to the eye."

The Little Prince is the first book I read that wasn't The Hardy Boys or The Bobbsey Twins; I must have been fifth grade then. I read it a second time a few years later and I appreciated it even more. I now have an urge to reread this beautiful book; I reckon it will have an even greater impact to me now.

3. Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus

photo from www.amazon.com

This is possibly the shortest book I've read, but its brevity doesn't take away any of its value. This allegorical novel tackles our desire to find the meaning of life and achieve self-actualization. It depicts how it can be so easy to blindly follow other people's paths without even knowing where they are going and how easy it can be to step on others to get to the top. In the end, Hope for the Flowers shows how fulfillment can come from finding your own way to reach the sky and how greatness can be accomplished at no one else's expense.


4. Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon

photo from www.goodreads.com

Reading all those amateur detective books as a kid probably piqued my interest in the suspense-thriller genre so when I got older, I moved on to books by Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, and Frederick Forsyth. The first of these that I read was Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon. What I remember most from this book was how blown away I was by the conclusion (I won't spoil it for you). I don't know if the ending will still be as shocking to people who read it now since we have become so used to complicated plot twists and turns over the years but at that time, everyone talked about that stunning ending.

5. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

photo from http://thatwasnotinthebook.com/diff/fever-pitch

I became a football fan and a massive Liverpool FC supporter in 2001 after visiting the UK in the midst of World Cup qualifying fever. A friend suggested that I read Fever Pitch as he thought I might like it and I did. While Fever Pitch talks about Nick Hornby's adoration of Arsenal (and not Liverpool), I could definitely relate to it as I have proven to be a crazy sports fan at times. This book is thoroughly entertaining as the author cleverly talks about different Arsenal matches he'd seen over the years in context of what was going on in his personal life at that time.

I will write about the remaining five books shortly in part 2.