“i didn’t even know this was an option. i’m about to deep fry the shit out of these poor cutlets”

thoughts on the first six, coming from my personal website Fifteen Dogs is my favorite novel. it's heartrending, tragic, and utterly overflowing with love. read in a single sitting, punctuated by bouts of ugly crying. i have one of prince's poems committed to memory, and i often mutter it to myself when thinking about death. The Once and Future King was assigned to me in an arthurian seminar i took during my english degree. i was half-assing my readings at the time, and skipped most of it. before the exam, i sat in douglas library and read the concluding book, 'the candle in the wind', in one sitting. i was surprised by how devastated i was over the collapse of the round table, and how much it stuck in the back of my head afterward. years later, when i first moved to nyc, i found a used copy at a bookstand. this time, i read it slowly, mostly on my commute. 'the ill-made knight' tore my heart up and further deepened my appreciation for 'the candle in the wind'. i'll think about lancelot forever: "he felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind". Stoner is the first novel i read after finishing my english degree. it left me speechlessly grateful for having had the chance to study literature. The Road is an old favorite. at fourteen, it was the most uncompromising, 'adult' novel i'd ever experienced. the brutality shocked me into reverence, the ending made me cry. i re-read it twice more in high school and decided that i won't return to it until i'm a father. Never Let Me Go is my favorite novel from ishiguro, my favorite author. while i read this one in high school (and liked it), my appreciation for ishiguro was deepened by my favorite university professor assigning his novels in most of her classes. i'm always moved by the way he renders quiet, muddled interiority, doing so much with so little, slowly and generously guiding his characters to agonizing catharsis. after reading klara and the sun, remains of the day, and the buried giant, i re-read never let me go during a daylong personal retreat and was more devastated than i thought i possibly could be by a story i already knew the ending to. Norwegian Wood is my favorite coming-of-age novel, one of those rare books that found me at the perfect time in life. it's a hard one to talk about on a personal level, but i think it's ugly in the ways a story about a young man ought to be ugly, and beautiful in all the ways a story about a young man ought to be beautiful.