My investment in this one is more specific than the rest because it has to do with a particular edition of the book. My husband’s grandmother gave me her copy of the 1930 edition of Moby Dick, illustrated with ink drawings by Rockwell Kent. We inherited this volume with several others in her collection. Before that edition, I had been uninterested in the book. I was asked to read it in high school but never actually did. Despite loving to read, I seldom read assigned books in high school. Well into grad school, this particular edition, though, led me to something that would become foundational. Both author (Melville) and artist (Kent)—men from two different time periods—came together to create a book in which the visual and the literary are beautifully conjoined and wholly ethnographic. The broader arc of Melville’s story is one thing, but the magic is in the details of description: the scarred body of the white whale, accidental joy in shipmates squeezing each other’s hands in spermaceti, the malodorous insides of the oily beast, the way Ishmael tattoos the dimensions of whale bones on his body so that he won’t lose them. Kent’s illustrations in Moby Dick are considered some of his finest work. He toggles between didactic images and ones that create fused context and beauty more abstractly. Both Kent and Melville were ethnographers in this sense—and both had been immersed in maritime cultures. I knew something of the maritime world due to the three summers in college I spent commercial fishing in Alaska. At my uncle’s fish site was another small bookshelf, mostly full of James Michener and Ernest Hemingway, and I have vivid memories of using the pages of an ancient copy of Michener’s Hawaii to kindle the flames of my wood-burning cabin stove. My experience in a fishing community had primed me for understanding Moby Dick as a text. The book also played into my graduate school education more directly. My advisor Tim Earle loved the Rockwell Kent edition of the book, and we sometimes discussed it. He once told me that my writing about gang graffiti was like a “flayed fish.” He said that, in analyzing gang expression, I had managed to kill the thing entirely. He asked me to think instead about how to communicate the sensibility of the thing. My pathway for how to get there came partly from Moby Dick: the balance of image with text, of story with ethnography. Moby Dick allowed me to understand what it meant to write visually. The structure of my first book includes sections on “Etymology” and “Extracts,” as does Melville’s work—a small gesture toward a transformational text.

I often find short books to be powerful. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida is like that for me, as are Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Angela Davis’ Abolition Democracy, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. I could have chosen any of these for this list, but The Question rises to the top because of the particular style of reflection it provides. The book involves the question of torture. Alleg was a journalist in Algeria in the 1950s when his detention led to his becoming the victim of the torture he describes. The book demonstrates his ability to be both lost in the experience and to describe it in vivid detail. The real feat is that he teaches the readers what he clearly learned himself: about the subjective experience of the torturer. He describes the work of torture—meaning that he interprets torturing to be a form of labor. In this the reader begins to understand the complexity of the act— the way in which the roles of victim and victimized are shoved together in this strange project. The book created social change and outrage as people had to deal with it as an object and as a narrative in the world. The book’s publication represented a time when citizens of a Western, democratic country—in this case France—had to come to terms with themselves as torturers. They had to come to terms with themselves and to admit that they, a former colonial power, were now the savages.

This book’s power is its foundation in connection and empathy. The relationship of the author to her research subjects—elderly Jews in 1980’s Venice, California—facilitates her ability to understand people, to embed them in their daily lives, to see the pain of their pasts, and to show how these things are interrelated. Myerhoff sees herself in her respondents. She knows that she will someday be an elderly Jewish woman. She wants to know what it’s like not to be a spry young person, but instead to struggle with movement or vision: the multiple challenges of an aging body. She dons dark sunglasses and oven mitts that dampen her senses and slow her reactions. But mostly, she immerses herself in stories and relationships, forming intimate connections as a result. Myerhoff’s own early death from cancer unintentionally becomes the “invisible protagonist” that haunts the narratives of her research participants, just as she argues that death is the invisible protagonist that haunts her research participants. The layering of death’s shadow in this text—the early violence her respondents describe in shtetls or in the Holocaust is qualitatively different than death’s omnipresence in the contemporary lives of her participants. When Myerhoff was writing the book, she didn’t know about the cancer, but her early demise is the inevitable lens through which later readers approach this text. I continue to think in terms of her concept of the invisible protagonist in order to name hidden forces that are acting upon people and things. I carry that phrase with me as a stand-in for her larger intervention, and as way of perceiving patterns at play in people’s lives, to see what people are carrying with them that may not be evident to the casual viewer.

In this future, not-quite-science fiction book, Butler tells the story of race, the city, and conceptions of the future through the experiences of a young, black, female protagonist. Like the others on this list, this book has etched a series of images into my mind. It’s a profoundly visual text through which Butler conjures up a new idea of Los Angeles and the world as a whole. Butler paints scenarios of future L.A. by pulling at the threads of today: with gated communities, rampant gang-like violence, people walking on freeways, and children learning to make acorn bread in order to utilize the resources that remain: resourcefulness, resilience, but also pain and fear. This post-apocalyptic tale of Los Angeles has now become legend just as Butler has become a legendary author. Many things are fused together in this text for me: my relationship to my mother—a deeply empathetic person who also loved the book and Butler’s work as a whole; my relationship to my city—I’ve “sited” this book without meaning to by populating it with places I know; and my brief encounter with Butler herself, who said she recognized something “true” in my depiction of the gang life in Los Angeles. Truth radiates from her depiction, far more profound than most other depictions of Los Angeles or anywhere. Octavia Butler has given a gift in her vision of the world. The fact that it comes through my city and never lets go of empathy and its dangers has impacted me deeply.