Birthday Post: 32 Books That Shaped Me
On becoming normal-aged
Exiting Youth, Entering Normal-Age
This month, I’m turning 32 years old.
32 is the first year of what I consider to be a “normal human” age. In your twenties, you’re young. Too young to do anything without your age being remarked upon. 30 is just a hangover from your twenties and 31 is still basically 30. 32 is when you stop being young and start being normal-aged.
If you publish your first novel at age 32 or later, no one is calling you a wunderkind. 32 is young to either die or be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but normal for almost every other job or occasion. 32 is a normal age to either get married or divorced or have a baby.
To put things in perspective, by age 30 Alexander the Great had defeated the Persian Achaemenid Empire and conquered a huge swath of territory from Egypt to India. At 32, he died in Babylon.
My greatest recent victories have been reaching 500 subscribers to this newsletter and potty-training my new puppy, Athena. Maybe I’ll achieve eternal glory next year.
The best part of being normal-aged is that it’s much easier than being young. When I was 22, I had a mentor at the Smithsonian who had developed an essential tremor in his hands and was dealing with some health issues.
“Don’t get old, Lillian,” he told me once. “It’s hard being old.”
”Is it harder than being young?” I asked.
He thought about it for a minute. “No,” he said, and laughed.
Being young is hard. You’re stupid and don’t know how to do anything. You are physiologically incapable of making good decisions with your underdeveloped brain.
When I was young, I hated myself, had a constant internal monologue of self-loathing. Too fat, too awkward, too boring, too lazy, too cringe. That’s all I heard, ringing in my ears, every day, until around the age of 25. I was shy and insecure and needy. I was convinced that I was somehow smarter than everyone and yet also painfully uninformed, ignorant, uncool, inferior. Every new social interaction felt like dragging my naked body over broken glass.
Now that I’m normal-aged, I don’t think this way. I don’t hate myself anymore. In fact, I think I’m pretty rad. I’m still naturally introverted but no longer shy. Recently, I went to a party where I didn’t know anyone. The person who invited me hadn’t arrived yet and neither had my husband. I stood awkwardly in a corner for a few minutes until I remembered that I wasn’t afraid of these people. I introduced myself and had a few stimulating conversations before my backup arrived.
I had a nice time at a party. This would’ve been unimaginable in my youth.
Now it’s just normal.
32 Books That Made Me Who I Am
In honor of my 32nd birthday, here are the top 32 books that shaped me. This is not a list of my favorite books. There are many books that I enjoyed more and re-read more often, but for whatever reason, did not make the same impact on my selfhood-formation.
You know how there are some books that stay with you, that become part of the way you move through the world? Books that give you a new way of being and seeing? Books that change your idea of what language can do? Books that send you down morally bankrupt rabbit holes and books that show you salvation is possible? These are those books, for me, in roughly chronological order by the age that I read them.1
I noticed, as I was putting this list together, that I encountered all but two of these books for the first time before the age of 21, and all of them before the age of 30.2 Partly I take that as a sign that, at age 32, I’m more or less an adult, and my ‘formative’ years are behind me. The general mold of my personality has been set. That’s not to say that books can’t still affect me deeply, but I suspect I’ll need greater distance to say for sure which books shaped who I became in my 20s and 30s. I’m certain that in another ten years I’ll have a very different kind of list.
Note that I’ve included links if I’ve written about the book and/or the author in previous installments of the LilRB.
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
Dune by Frank Herbert3
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick4
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
The Iliad by Homer
Plato’s Republic
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf5
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Notice any patterns? How many red flags can you count? Let me know in the comments how much my list overlaps with the books that shaped you!
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As best as I can remember. It was exceedingly difficult to narrow it down to 32, and I realize I cheated a little by including a few series, but I did my best.
I read #1 at age 8 and #32 at age 28.
I read the first Dune book every year from age 9 to 18.
This one is a stand-in for several PKD novels I read in high school.
This is the book that broke my internalized misogyny.
surprised The Sun Also Rises isn't on here! You recommending me that, The Sound and the Fury, Pale Fire, and The Third Policeman were in retrospect legit life-changing. Those were the books that ultimately made me get into reading literature. Reading those four books in a row blew my 18 year old mind back in the day lol.
Jeez, no mention of all the Harry Potter books I read to you before you were 6….Happy Birthday and keep reading and writing, love, Dad