What's Your Favorite Book?

 

This is one of those questions where I have strong opinions and can out talk about anyone. If you ask me about hot button topics or current events, I'm much less opinionated and more curious about what you think of those things. Though with books, I want to know what you're reading too. Only you might have to shout to be heard over my tirade about the books I love.

As a child I fell in love with The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. That was my first grade love and the first stories I remember fan-fic rewriting endings to in my head. At some point around then I found a copy of The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key—that was my first fantasy story. It's about a boy who falls through a doorway into another world. It's a thin book and a worthy read for adults too. 

Yes, I loved the Little House books. There was something slow and peaceful about life on the prairies that calmed me when times were rough. I read and reread those. E. Nesbit books are also a childhood favorite. Five Children and It is delightful but I also adored The Railway Children which may or may not have inspired The Boxcar Children. Feel free to fight with me about that in the comments. 

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien and why The Hobbit is my most beloved of them could surely ignite some scorn among the bibliophile crowd. Though I read the Harry Potter books as an adult, and I loved them. J.K. Rowlings book The Casual Vacancy is brilliant in my opinion. If I could, I'd replace all copies of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn taking up space in high school curriculums with it. 

My reading in high school tended toward more popular novels from the New York Times bestseller list books than the classics. The classics I hit harder as time moved on. I love Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Twain, Austen, although another controversial opinion is Tolstoy. I'll never forgive those sixty or so pages about Vronsky's horse and when Anna Karenina threw herself under the train (oopsie spoiler alert) my only thought was honestly, well, thank god, because if I had to spend another minute in her brain I might have done the same). Sorry. Not sorry.

My favorite Stephen King book is The Body (it's retitled Stand by Me when they made it into a movie), although The Stand is neck and neck there. So good. My favorite Dean Koontz is (Sorry Mr. Koontz, you know what I'm going to say here) Watchers. Give me a good futuristic science experiment with a human level intelligent Golden Retriever and I am compelled to purchase all your books forever, but I do keep going back to read Watchers again. 

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon is a book I've loved since the 1990's when it came out in one of those old Book of the Month clubs where you actually got a little catalog in your snail mail and picked the titles that appealed. She's written so many sequels with such rich story that I've long suspected that she is in fact Claire and her husband is Jamie and they're here from the 1700's. Prove me wrong. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is another fabulous read. It's the King Arthur story from the point of view of Morgan Le Fay. Though I think the writer was posthumously cancelled. I always like to tell people to read that little story (it's a tome of epic proportions). It's brilliant story. 

On top of my popular book loves are all of Michael Crichton's (Jurrasic Park, Timeline, Andromeda Strain) and even his posthumously written book Eruption, I incorporated piles of non-fiction in my book love-a-thon too. Stephen Hawkins A Brief History of Time (every time I reread it I make a mental note to do that again because I can almost follow this time), or The God Particle by Leon Lederman, anything by Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson too because when it comes to science, I am a fan. 

Although The Ends of the World by Peter Brannon makes me want to get a PhD in Geology and spend a lifetime with fossils and rocks. It's a story about the five mass extinctions and I found it incredibly uplifting and fascinating, and I will never stop tormenting my husband about the fact that scientists found the missing link lizard somewhere around Hyner Mountain, Pennsylvania because his people kind of hail from there. We've been married since about the day after those lizards crawled out of the ooze so I'm always shopping for such information to torment him with.

Speaking of lizards, War with the Newts by Karel Chapek is one of the best stories I've ever read. This Czech writer and his brother were on Hitler's public enemy number one lists when the Nazi's marched into Prague. It is astonishing to me how what might be considered older books are possibly more relevant today than when they were written. Another couple favorites are All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer, and having watched it on Netflix is not the same. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini astonished me because growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 70's and 80's was apparently incredibly similar to Afghanistan about that time. That realization really stretched my brain.

Now, I'm going to add only Art /Spiegelman's Maus Books because it's thundering outside and here in The Shire that means the power is going DOWN, plus my husband since the Devonian Period keeps interrupting and my brain is hitting bumpy tracks like that one in Anna Karenina. So, to the book club that asked me what my favorite book is, this is my answer. Sometimes I don't exactly follow directions as you can see. 

War with the Newts by Karel Čapek—a book review and recommendation

This book by Karel  Čapek (pronounced Chap-ick) came highly recommended by a Czech friend. In fact she sent me a copy with the best English translation she could find. Imagine my surprise to see a blurb on the back cover from none other than Kurt Vonnegut. 

"God bless Catbird Press for calling the attention of Americans to a great writer of the past who speaks to the present in a voice brilliant, clear, honorable, blackly funny, and prophetic." ~ Kurt Vonnegut

War with the Newts is about a Sea Captain who finds salamander-like beings who help him harvest pearls. I love the way it's written. It's fast-paced with the help of newspaper clippings that one of the characters collects about the newts. 

It stunned me to realize how absolutely relevant this book is in today's world. I didn't get very far in before the Sea Captain was deep into racial slurs for pretty much the entire planet. He hits up a lawyer he remembers from the old neighborhood as a "pimply Jewish kid". Captain J. Van Toch had bullied Bondy in school and now he asks for his help with his newt enterprise. They're old men at this point and both remember the old days fondly, which both made me roll my eyes and chuckle a little. 

Blacky funny it is, but also horribly prophetic in turn. Mankind enslaves the newts. They're used in medical experiments, treated with no regard other than economic needs and help in underwater engineering endeavors (something they're profoundly brilliant at). This book made me see on yet another level how absolutely inhumane and disgusting slavery was.

My first impression of the book was knee-jerk judgement for the racist language and the stereotyping comments about Czechs, English, Americans, and pretty much every nationality. That quickly gave way to the realization that this author knew exactly how to get his point across. What blew my mind was that this book was published in 1936, after World War I, but before World War II, yet it foreshadowed the Second World War at every turn. Another thing that shocked me was that the stereotyping in this book is precisely the same kind still espoused about countries and peoples now.

It even had people in the southern half of the United States trying to give the newts religion and occasionally lynching them. What I think you get from this book is how little the world has changed in nearly a hundred years, how selfishly cruel humanity can be, and how exceedingly short-sighted and stupid we can be when we look at everything first from an economic standpoint. 

If I could have one wish after reading this, it would be that everyone in the country would read this book. Karel  Čapek was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times. He introduced the word Robot into our language. He and his brother, Josef, were famous for their work. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) Karel was considered Public Enemy Number Two. They weren't aware he'd already died of pneumonia, but his brother, Josef, died in a concentration camp. They weren't Jewish, but were well-known to be anti-fascist. 

War of the Newts is a short book and a brilliant read. I'm already hunting up more of his work. It's absolutely that good. I cannot possibly recommend a book more. No amount of stars can do it justice. Read it. You will be blown away.