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By Newsweek Editors
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My Five Most Important Books
1. CHILDHOOD: "The Arabian Nights." The heroine was a brown, feisty girl who saved all the women in her kingdom with stories.
2. Teens: "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman. Behold El Señor Whitman, a Latino-sounding fellow with his long rhetorical lines.
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3. Twenties: "The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston. A beautiful, lyrical memoir about coming from somewhere else and reinventing yourself, while still bearing the burden of the past.
4. Thirties: "Middlemarch" by George Eliot. Writing in the 1870s, Eliot had more to say to me than the hotshots of the 1980s.
5. Forties: "Disgrace" by J. M. Coetzee. An intense and sparse novel about how we become human after our world falls apart.
A classic book that, upon revisiting, disappointed: "The Arabian Nights," I'm sorry to say. There are too many dull stories, plus all the kowtowing to the male ego is enough to make your hair curl.
A book that you always return to: T. S. Eliot's "The Four Quartets," a long, mystical poem that reboots my spirit.
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