Five books you should read before you turn 42!

Remember books? Those old fashioned things that have letters printed on them? Those objects that are never old if you haven’t read them?

Franz Kafka described them as “an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul” and William Ewart Gladstone said “Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome“.

Books are always better than the movies that are made based upon them because, when you read a book,  you build your own characters and you shape what you are reading to your own imagination.

Everyone has its classics when it comes to literature. Everyone has a book that turns to over and over again. Everyone has THAT book that always comes up when talking about books. Much like with music, those really into books can connect specific books to specific moments of their life.  The following is a list of five books everyone should read in my opinion.

This post was inspired by a recent question that my fellow Rebel Clement made on Twitter. More than one list, it is a open door to my creative universe as well as  an open invitation for you to share your own list,  by leaving a comment.

1. “The Ultimate Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams: This is not a book, this is a master piece. Douglas Adams takes the science fiction genre to a whole new level by defying our own imagination. In this  trilogy, that is made of four books , Douglas Adams takes us on a emotional roller coaster that makes us feel sympathy, hate and pure pity towards the numerous characters that he so carefully develops while laughing the all way through it. Characters include Marvin, the  paranoid android and Arthur Dent a middle class British citizen that sees himself hitchhiking through the Universe . The beauty of this book is that when you think you can’t laugh any more, you turn the page and there you laugh even more. Warning: Can make you look like a mental case if read in public or with strangers around you. One more reason why you should read it.

Favorite quote: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

2. “Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman: This is a fiction novel that opens the door  to Albert Einstein’s dreams while he was working on his “Theory of Relativity” back in 1905. It consists of 30 short stories (dreams) and explore, with infinite grace and insight, different relations every one of us has with time. You know when you are waiting for someone that is late and time seems to pass so slowly? Or when you are having a great time and time goes by so fast? Alan Lightman, a physicist that works at the M.I.T., challenges its readers to explore the relations we have with time. Insightful and thought provoking.

Favourite Quote: “In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.”

3. “Neuromancer” by William Gibson: How to describe a book from someone that back in 1984 was already talking about cyberspace when cyberspace didn’t exist? William Gibson as always been ahead of his time and his novels are full of details of the future because that is where his mind lives. No matter in what decade you read them you will always be surprised by the fact that something that is referred to, in one of his many books,  just happened 2 years ago. While some try to imagine the (near) future, William Gibson shapes it.

Favourite quote: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…”

4. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa: I could write many things about this book and about Fernando Pessoa, to me one of the greatest writers of all times. I could but I could not really do him any justice. “The Book of Disquiet” was found after Pessoa’s death and is a mix of prose, small paragraphs and poems that contain all the creative brilliance of this man that was a copywriter  (he was responsible for the Coca~Cola’s most famous slogan in Portugal) and a writer by devotion.

Favourite quote: “So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I’ll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.”

5. “All families are psychotic” by Douglas Coupland: Few contemporary authors can describe U.S. society like Coupland. His style of writing, the attention to detail, the self criticism and a deep of knowledge of the big picture make Coupland a extremely effective narrator of the the story of the Drummond family on its travel from Vancouver to the Kennedy Space Center. What could be an uneventful trip to some, by the hand of Coupland its transformed into a novel that includes geriatric HIV, armed robbery, death in Walt Disney World, pharmaceutical drug lords, black market baby sales, suicide attempts and a letter stolen from Princess Diana’s casket from Prince William.

Favourite quote: “I keep thinking that if I look at my life long enough, there’ll be a sort of grand logic to it – a scheme. But I don’t think there is.”

What five books would you recommend? Let me know in the comments. Thank you!
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Picture Credits: Flyziiper via Flickrs