Ten Books I Grew to Like, Eventually
(Some of these I was simply too young to appreciate the first time I read them. Others demanded a change in my aesthetic or even my character before I was able to recognize their virtues. One or two I disliked at first for reasons I really don’t know how to explain—maybe I was just in a bad mood that day. I’ve arranged them in order of the age I was when I first encountered them, and I’ve footnoted them generously.)
age 11: Inferno by Dante Alighieri *
age 11: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell **
age 20: Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson ***
age 21: Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson ****
age 24: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders *****
age 26: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender ******
age 28: Incidences by Daniil Kharms
age 30: Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
age 34: The Loser by Thomas Bernhard *******
age 36: How I Became a Nun by César Aira ********
* I was expecting a cool page-turner about devils and demons.
** I was expecting an action-packed sci-fi adventure story, a la Escape from New York.
*** I just reread this book thirty years after hating it and found it moving and absorbing, thus providing me with the excuse to create this list. By 1993, I had read and treasured both Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and (particularly) Sexing the Cherry, but when I picked up Written on the Body, I disliked it so much that I gave up on Jeanette Winterson for years. It wasn’t the book’s story that nettled me, nor its gender ambiguities (which didn’t seem to me then as ambiguous as they were meant to be, and still don’t seem so today), but what I regarded as the overripe blurry expressionism of its prose. I can see poetry there now, and humor, and feeling, but thirty years ago I saw only a haze of verbal hesitancies. The book has inspired such devotion, though, in readers I respect—more than one of whom has told me it’s their single favorite novel—that I decided to give it another try. Sometimes there are books you grow out of; this, it would seem, is a book I grew into. Everyone else was right, and I was wrong.
**** I had read “Emergency” and was expecting a bookful of the same. I love the whole collection now, but initially the other stories seemed like lesser achievements to me.
***** I thought he was too cruel at first—the opposite of how everyone has come to perceive him—but I loved the book after a month or two went by, and it remains my sentimental favorite among his collections.
****** This was just too similar to the work I was doing at the time. All I could see were the ways in which it wasn’t mine.
******* I know: inexplicable.
******** He quickly became one of my favorite writers, but this was the wrong book for me to start with. I read Ghosts about a month later and understood.
— March 4, 2023