The Five Most Important Books for Julia

(source: La Bloga)
no copyright infringement intended

Julia Alvarez, novelist, essayist and poet, born in New York City, raised in the Dominican Republic, living now alternatively in both places: her books (A Cafecito Story, Once Upon A Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A, The Woman I kept to Myself, among others) speak about this double identity. Other books by her ( A Gift of Gracias: The Legend of Altagracia, for instance) are written for children.

Julia Alvarez gives in Newsweek her Top of Five Books. She takes an interesting approach: one book for each decade of life. Here they are:

1. Childhood: The Arabian Nights. The heroine was a brown, feisty girl who saved all the women in her kingdom with stories.

2. Teens: Leaves of Grass. Behold El Señor Whitman, a Latino-sounding fellow with his long rhetorical lines.

3. Twenties: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. A beautiful, lyrical memoir about coming from somewhere else and reinventing yourself, while still bearing the burden of the past.

4. Thirties: Middlemarch by George Eliot. Writing in the 1870s, Eliot had more to say to us than the hotshots of the 1980s.

5. Forties: Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. An intense and sparse novel about how we become human after our world falls apart.

And Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot is a book that she always returns too: a long, mystical poem that reboots her spirit. You remember that this is also one of the Top-Five for Diane Ackerman (poems about time, impermanence and the glory of everyday life).

Splendid! This is really a life in books!


(A Life in Books)

(J. M. Coetzee)