Someone I love tagged me in on one of those Facebook “list” challenges – the only kind I can’t resist, which is the kind about books. “Name ten books that blew your mind when you first read them.” What first seemed an annoying but irresistible game turned into something – well, instructive, if not interesting. Instructive because the first list I drafted was very heavily male, which horrified me. How does that happen? There are plenty of women’s books that have blown my mind – why were the men popping up first? Here’s that list (and towards the end I was consciously trying to add women because I got self-conscious, but otherwise it’s pretty stream-of-consciousness):

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
2. Another Life – Derek Walcott
3. At the Full and Change of the Moon – Dionne Brand
4. Heaven’s Coast – Mark Doty
5. The Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
6. Paula – Isabel Allende
7. In the Skin of a Lion – Michael Ondaatje
8. Land of Love and Drowning – Tiphanie Yanique
9. Texaco – Patrick Chamoiseau
10. The Arrivants – Kamau Brathwaite
11. Myal – Erna Brodber
12. Jazz – Toni Morrison

So I decided to ditch the men entirely, and make mine a women-only list:

1. Kindred – Octavia Butler
2. Jazz – Toni Morrison
3. Beloved – Morrison
4. Myal – Erna Brodber
5. At the Full and Change of the Moon – Dionne Brand
6. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
7. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
8. A Map to the Door of No Return – Brand
9. Paula – Allende
10. Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting – Shivanee Ramlochan
11. Land of Love and Drowning – Tiphanie Yanique
12. Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo – Ntozake Shange
13. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

What interests me about this list – both of them, really – is what it says about my reading. That Dionne Brand leapt to the top of the initial, drafty, man-heavy, first-impulses list attests to how deep and broad an imprint her work has made on my consciousness. The list as a whole says that I am somewhat sentimental (Austen, Shange, Woolf) but also strongly attracted by stylistic tours-de-force (everything on here, really – although Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, both master stylists, don’t feature). Most of all, here’s a thing I know that I didn’t before I drew these lists up: The work that haunts me is that which lives in the fraught space between pain and beauty. There is no alchemy: pain is not transmuted into beauty, aesthetics will not save us. Nothing will save us. In all likelihood, we cannot even save ourselves. But here we are, just the same: hanging on, being with and beyond time, with and beyond (no, never beyond) pain, making and making and always making.