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My Bookshelf, Myself

My 10 Favorite Books: Alison Bechdel

For his bookshop and website One Grand Books, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, winner of the 2014 MacArthur “Genius” Award and creator of the Bechdel test, which measures gender bias in film. She is also the author of the autobiographical graphic novel “Fun Home,” which was adapted into the Tony-winning musical of the same name. She shares her list exclusively with T.

“Mansfield Park,” Jane Austen

I’d definitely need some Jane Austen on a desert island, so I choose her most complex book. Lots of people (including Austen’s mother) find the heroine Fanny “insipid,” but as a shy person I identify with her and love how she learns to speak up for herself.

“The Price of Salt,” Patricia Highsmith

This has been on my list forever, but it’s been getting a lot of attention lately because of Todd Haynes’s excellent movie adaptation, “Carol.” It was the first novel about lesbians to have a happy ending, but it’s also a really unnerving and propulsive story, like all of Patricia Highsmith’s books. She originally published it under a pseudonym so it didn’t wreck her career.

“The Night Watch,” Sarah Waters

I love all of Sarah Waters’s historical fiction, but this is my favorite novel, set during and after World War II. It starts slow but picks up insane momentum, using reverse narration to follow the characters backward in time to the explosive wartime scenes that shaped them.

“Martin Bauman: Or, A Sure Thing,” David Leavitt

I love this book almost as much as I hate it. Martin, a thinly disguised version of Leavitt himself, describes the “brat pack” of young writers he was a part of in the New York literary scene of the mid-1980s. It’s sort of like watching a train wreck, fascinating and horrifying at once.

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Alison BechdelCredit...Jenny Anderson/WireImage

“Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,” Audre Lorde

I read this in my early 20s when I was voraciously devouring autobiographical books about lesbians and gay men. Lorde’s examination of her multiple outsiderness — black, female, queer, West Indian, poet — pried my sheltered mind wide open.

“Amphigorey,” Edward Gorey

This is actually 15 of Edward Gorey’s illustrated masterpieces in one. My favorite is “The Unstrung Harp,” about a novelist writing his biennial book — the funniest and most accurate description of the creative process I’ve ever seen.

“The Dharma Bums,” Jack Kerouac

This is a great book about Kerouac and his disguised but easily decrypted Beat pals hiking in the Sierras and discussing Buddhism back in the days when nobody did that.

“To The Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf

I reread this book every once in a while, and every time I do I find it more capacious and startling. It’s so revolutionary and so exquisitely wrought that it keeps evolving on its own somehow, as if it’s alive.

“Possession,” A.S. Byatt

I am a sucker for campus novels, and this is one of the best, even though it has some pretty scathing things to say about feminist literary criticism.

“Harriet the Spy,” Louise Fitzhugh

I found this really unnerving when I first read it at age 8. There’s a lot of talk lately about “kids’ books for adults.” But this is an adult book for kids — a realistic, complex and not-at-all-dumbed-down look at a girl who wants more than anything else to be a writer. When I grew up and learned that Fitzhugh was a lesbian, that explained a bit more about why Harriet resonated so much for me.

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