Lauren Groff, the famed novelist and short story author widely known for her works The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and Florida, is celebrating her fortieth birthday today and, in honor of the reunion of her birth, she took to the Twittersphere to release into the winds a list of forty books that makeup her incredibly vast, brilliant, and talented brain.
I’m 40 today, which is fine!, just a number!, except that I have a problem with thresholds. So I’m going to make myself feel less bummed out by listing 40 of the books that make up my brain, in no particular order:
— Lauren Groff (@legroff) July 23, 2018
Groff has gained notoriety as one of the masters of contemporary fiction, and it’s no wonder why. Her works are bold, cutting, strange, crude, and poetic; she has a way of turning the mundane into something uniquely stunning in all of it’s simplistic beauty:
It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. —Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
She is someone who will no doubt go down in history as one of the leading novelists of the modern era, and getting to take a small glimpse at the inner workings of her mind and the pieces of writing that have helped to influence and inspire her is so, insanely exciting.
Thanks to Groff I officially have a new summer reading list so grab a pen, jot these down, and we can journey through these works together!
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot
2. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
3. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
4. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
5. Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos
6. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
8. Paradise Lost by John Milton
9. Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
10. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
11. Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
12. Beloved by Toni Morrison
13. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
14. Light Years by James Salter
15. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
16. Citizen by Claudia Rankine
17. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis
18. Odyssey by Homer
19. Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
20. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
21. Cane by Jean Toomer
22. A Dance To The Music of Time by Anthony Powell
23. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
24. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
25. A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
26. The Decameron by Boccaccio
27. Inferno by Dante
28. The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams
29. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
30. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
31. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
32. NW by Zadie Smith
33. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
34. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
35. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Lois
36. Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
37. Hadriana dans tous mes rêves by René Depestre
38. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
39. Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
40. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Featured Image via The New Yorker