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Top Ten Books

It may be true that everyone has a book inside them, though if you’ve ever tried reading Paris Hilton’s Confessions of an Heiress you’ll know that not everyone has a story worth telling. Chris Rush, an artist and designer who lives in Tucson, not only has one hell of a story, he also has the talent to bring it to life. You can open his gorgeous memoir, The Light Years, to any page and the prose will leap out—funny, charming, effortlessly descriptive. You can see the writer he became in the 11-year old boy he is in the book’s early chapters—selling his home-made paper flowers to the ladies at his parent’s bridge party, erecting a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary in his bedroom, prancing around in a pink satin Pucci cape he found at Polly’s Bric-a-Brac. “For a week, I wandered the neighborhood in my cape, feeling potent and magical, a vampire-saint prowling the earth,” he writes. “In a Transylvanian accent, I asked people: Do you like my Pucci?” When his father forbids him to wear the cape any more, Rush is puzzled. “Later, during an argument with my mother, I heard him us a new phrase. “The boy is a goddamn queer, Norma—it’s obvious.” See the full list...