What I read the summer I was 16

I keep old journals. Lots of them. In fact, I heap them all in a vintage wicker basket my parents used to take on picnics. And lately, I've been trying to organize them -- mainly by affixing labels to the covers so I can figure out what years or events the journals cover.

And that's what led me to discover a journal that contained a list of the books I had read when I was 16 years old. It was probably the first time I'd logged the books I'd read -- something I continue to do to this day in a small notebook (for reasons I can't quite pinpoint).

Back then, I was meeting certain authors for the first time -- Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus and James Baldwin -- and amassing as many of their titles as possible.

In some cases, the titles were books my father recommended -- including Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Sterile Cuckoo and Breakfast at Tiffany's (he's always had wide-ranging interests; he also put me onto the book by Feynman, the renowned physicist).

Another impulse motivating some selections: reading books that were repellent to good society in one way or another. Exhibit A: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. I would have trouble reading it now. But back then, I resolved to face how ugly society could be to women. Henry Miller could also fall under the heading of authors who challenged the status quo, but my father encouraged me to read his works so in some ways it doesn't count since it didn't involve rebellion.

Here are some of the books I read that summer AND the following summer (the lists appeared together in the notebook):

The Stranger – Albert Camus

The Sterile Cuckoo – John Nicholls

Them – Joyce Carol Oates

The Fall -- Albert Camus

Six Degrees of Separation – John Guare

Hiroshima – John Hersey

Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

The Joy Luck Club -- Amy Tan

What Do You Care Anyway? -- By Richard Feynman

Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov

Native Son -- Richard Wright

Go Tell it on the Mountain -- James Baldwin (did not finish)

Play It as It Lays – Joan Didion

Illusions, Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah – Richard Bach

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury

Pentimento – Lilliam Hellman

American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

The Last Tycoon – F Scott Fitzgerald

Cybele – Joyce Carol Oates

Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut

Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby

Opus Pistorum – Henry Miller

Conclusions can be drawn. For example, as much as I was already a Feminist in high school, I hadn't yet committed to seeking out books by women authors so there is not a concentration of books by women. Not many books in translation either (Did Nabokov write Lolita in English?). And not many books by diverse authors. It would take me a while to read the essay "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin and realize his style of writing suited me to a tee, and hence I needed to read all of this works. I also hadn't yet read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

What did you read? Do you remember? Is it possible you have a log somewhere? Look for it. In many cases, the ideas in these books continue to reverberate in my mind. Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, for example, was so explosive I see it my mind as written in all-caps.