Ten Awes

Here's my list in no particular order (with Goodreads links provided):

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - the created chasing after the creator with both hate and admiration, or how the created seek to imitate or overpower the creator (parallels to man and god)
2. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger - "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody;" "Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone."
3. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick - "Maybe we are all cabinets of wonders;" idea of time "in the blink of an eye" and how each of us fits like a machine, weaving in and out of lives with reason
4. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier - what is identity (no one knows the name of the narrator/main character, not even the reader)
5. A Separate Peace by John Knowles - "I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me." Powerful statement, for how can we compare in the perspective of the world?
6. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald - I have never read a more beautiful description of a smile and the emotions one smile can cause for a person receiving it
7. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - "Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories." Can you experience awe in dreams? The concept of a world without books is mind boggling. Even if I'm not personally a heavy reader, the world would crumble without the written word.
8. Anthem by Ayn Rand - the power of "we" or "I"
9. Welcome to Night Vale (podcast by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor) - the strangest thing I've ever had the absolute pleasure to experience; a quote from episode 39 The Woman from Italy: "Usually, after the weather, I am here to tell you about how we have been saved from some world-ending danger that, for whatever reason, has failed again to end our world. But today, I have no such report because there is no such danger. Or, there is an infinitude of such dangers. Rocks hurdling unseen from space, gamma ray bursts created by chance and utterly destroying by chance, disease, war, hunger, or the slow dissipation of it all - not by the sudden, but by the gradual always. But now is not the time for such light-hearted childish thoughts."
10. Sea Wall (play written by Simon Stephens) - I will never shut up about this play because it's beautifully written and executed; three stories woven together and told by one character directly to you; "He says to me one time, he looks at me and he says, 'He's in the feeling of water. Sometimes there's the shape of the roll of land. He's in the way some people move. He's in the light falling over a city at the start of an evening. He's in the space between two numbers."