Hypable staff challenge: The books that define Selina Wilken

Say you had a hundred children, and you had to pick five to bring to your family reunion. That’s kind of how I feel right now.

There’s a book challenge going around various social media sites right now that requires you to list the 10 books that have affected you the most. Here at Hypable, we’re kicking off our own version of the challenge. While we may be doing only five books, we’re also going to tell you why they affected us — and maybe we can convince you to read them, too.

Sometimes I think I’ve spent my whole life reading books, devouring everything from epic series like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to romantic real-world (more or less) dramas like Memoirs of a Geisha and The Time Traveler’s Wife.

On my house’s many bookshelves, guilty pleasures like Twilight and Percy Jackson (arguably) stand side-by-side with more critically acclaimed works like The Alchemist, Pride & Prejudice and Gone With the Wind.

But sometimes I wonder if I am even entitled to call myself a bookworm, considering I’ve never read a single word of Stephen King, am only just beginning to venture into the worlds of Anne McCaffrey and Neil Gaiman, and have only a handful of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books on my shelves (I am partial to the stories about Death and the witches, FYI).

Picking just five books for this article was torturous. In the end, I’ve gone with the five books which I think have influenced me the most, teaching me five very different and equally valuable lessons about the world, and my place in it.

‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ by J.K. Rowling

While Order of the Phoenix may be my favourite (it’s the longest, and I adore getting to know so many of the peripheral characters through the DA), Philosopher’s Stone is not only special to me because it’s the first in the series, but because it’s so damn magical. The way Rowling introduces the world – staircases that lead somewhere different on a Tuesday, portraits that talk, chocolate that jumps around – is so whimsical and paints such a complete picture of a world we can all escape into.

I resisted reading the Harry Potter books for so long, because my 11-year-old self wanted to be original and damn it if I was going to read something popular (I was a hipster before there were hipsters, apparently)… then I read the first chapter, and ew, there was hardly any magic at all! But then came the second chapter, and I fell in love.

The further I get from the movies, the more I realise that I have serious issues with them. The way they bring the magical world to life feels mechanical, too grandiose and too mundane at the same time (if you want more reasons why I dislike the movies, check out an article I wrote with Marama Whyte). Wands are like guns, the staircases move on hinges and the magic is completely de-mystified on screen.

There’s a lot of great things to be said for the creative team, of course. They brought the series to so many new audiences, and the standard was high all around. I’ve never adapted a book series and hey, I probably couldn’t do a better job.

Nonetheless I still maintain that for me, the movies sucked the magic right out of the story. Instead, I hold onto the novels: the Philosopher’s Stone novel changed my life and opened my eyes to the world of storytelling, and I will always cherish it above all other fiction.

‘Song of the Lioness’ by Tamora Pierce

Tamora Pierce is also hailed by fellow Hypable writer Natalie Fisher, and should be by everyone else too: Pierce creates “strong female characters” effortlessly because guess what, she’s just creating characters.

While I enjoy her other books, the Song of the Lioness quartet reached me at just the right time in my life. I was about 12, just beginning to figure out who I was supposed to be… and I guess I was supposed to be a lady knight of the Tortall kingdom. But okay, I’ll settle for being a writer or whatever.

Alanna is one of the best, most stubborn, most flawed, most heroic, most wrong (although I understand why it had to happen this way, I still say she ends up with the wrong guy, sorry TP) characters I’ve ever read, and I love her to pieces. (Basically she travels to the royal castle, disguised as a boy, to become a knight. It’s as amazing as it sounds.)

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ by George Orwell

George Orwell’s classic gets a spot on the list because it was the first book I was ever assigned to read in school that I not only enjoyed, but read twice. I immediately realised that the Orwellian future is not only terrifying because it’s so confining, but because it’s real.

Newspeak? Something may not yet be doubleplusungood, but how about the words “selfie,” “smartphone” and “bae”? We’re losing our ability to speak in complete sentences due to the need for brevity in texts and on Twitter. We’ve got no reason to write anything by hand anymore because everything is done electronically. Some kids no longer do actual puzzles, they just move one-dimensional shapes around on a touchscreen, slowly forgetting how to (literally) think outside of the box.

Surveillance? Drones. Body cameras on police. Wire tapping. Search monitoring. Google Earth. It’s already happening.

Thought control? Look, I love fiction, and I think both books and television are excellent ways to not only escape reality but also to critically examine the real world. But we’re on this website right now, reading casting updates and fangirling about the new Marvel movies, while civil wars and government corruption are only brought to our attention when they’re “hot topics.” Remember Syria? Palestine? Ukraine? If you only watch the prime news channels, the fates of these nations got lost somewhere between the Ebola hysteria and the World Series.

Of course the media wants to convince us that the most important things in life are keeping up with pop culture and having the perfect haircut. Because if we actually looked beyond that, there’s no telling what might happen. 1984 reminds us of that, and we should all strive to be a little more aware.

‘One Day’ by David Nicholls

I have already waxed poetic about One Day in a previous article, but heck, I’ll do it again! One Day is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, because by diving in and out of the love story of two people so clearly wrong (and so clearly right) for each other, David Nicholls illustrates one single point: everything ends.

It’s a powerful message in a time where we’re all trying to make ourselves immortal – through our writing, our selfie-taking, our tweeting, our YouTubing, our traveling… the Millennials, more than any other generation before us, have made it our collective mission to leave as many pieces of ourselves behind as possible. Individually it might be deemed narcissistic, but as a whole, one might see it as a desperate attempt to have existed – “pictures or it didn’t happen” has taken on a very literal meaning since the smartphone was invented.

What One Day helps me remember is that no matter what, this day will end, and it’ll be nothing but a memory. For yourself, or someone else, or maybe to no one at all. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and it doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the ride while it lasts.

To (somewhat randomly) quote the Angel television series: “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”

‘Pippi Longstocking’ by Astrid Lindgren

Forget Buffy, Hermione, Katniss, Alanna, Annabeth and all those other supposedly revolutionary “strong” female characters. Swedish author Astrid Lindgren was ahead of her time in many ways, but no more so than with her 1945 novel Pippi Longstocking, which introduced the grandmother of all modern heroines.

Pre-teen girl Pippi has orange hair and a face full of freckles. She lives alone with her pet monkey and spotted horse, her mother absent and her father a pirate sailing the high seas. She is incredibly rich and has complete control over her own life – and she also has super-strength, which she’s inherited from her father.

Pippi frequently bests villains, both with her superior strength and her intellect. There is remarkably little fuss made about the fact that she is female; she simply exists as superior, both to her adult foes and her friends Tommy (a boy) and Annika. She is the natural leader of her little pack, and if anyone dares to question that fact, she’s quick to prove them wrong.

This was a book frequently read to me as a child, and I grew up watching the Swedish TV series. Without even realising it, Pippi Longstocking normalized female empowerment and independence for me, and to this day I am still astounded whenever the phrase “but you’re a girl” is used as a serious argument. I’m not even angry (though maybe I should be), I’m simply confused. “But you’re a girl” means nothing to me, because I grew up under the blissful illusion that the world was full of Pippi Longstockings – and that I could be one, too.

Do you agree with my choices? Share the books that have defined you in the comments!