It’s been a long week for all of us.
Tonight’s NOT is a little different than our usual weekend literary stuff.
What books inspired you, changed your mind or like Officer Bar Brady (South Park) made you regret learning to read?
I can start:
East of Eden by John Steinbeck. It was the first literary novel I enjoyed and didn’t involve SF. Also a very powerful story about forgiveness, something I am still not good at and need to improve.
Once An Eagle by Anton Myrer. “If it comes to a choice between being a good soldier (or any role for that matter) and a good human being — try to be a good human being.”
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. A story about a man lost in time and space and for the stupidest of reasons.
Ball Four by Jim Bouton. Sometimes the most dangerous thing in the world is telling the truth rather than the fantasy. This book made me love baseball more.
As of course, anything goes so open thread!
I just finished rereading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. I first read it in high school.
He was an early conservationist and wrote very movingly about the damage that had been wrought in the US by the early 20th Century and the value of restoring ecosystems. He was a holistic thinker and got me thinking about how interconnected systems could be, and the importance of balance throughout an entire network.
If we’re listing negative influences, the Bible. I still remember sitting and thinking “this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.” I wisely kept it to myself, ’cause I’d have caught a whipping for sure.
On the positive side: A bizarre collection called Collier’s Junior Classics: The Young Folks Shelf of Books. I guess it came along with our Collier’s Encyclopedia but this was an wide-ranging collection of stories including fairy tales, stories about heroes, history, magic, mythology, adventure, and even poetry. I read the crap out of that set — it taught me Norse and Hindu mythology, all the Grimm’s fairy tales, Aladdin, all kinds of stuff. All that context was invaluable in understanding other literature.
Anything by Robert Heinlein. He’s not exactly in vogue now and for some good reasons — lot of casual racism and sexism. But he was my first experience with “hard” science fiction where authors try to extrapolate from actual science.
Tolkien. These were the first books I ever bought myself, from a bookstore. I’ve read all of them multiple times (including a lot of the ancillary stuff like The Silmarillion). Basically the archetype of all fantasy literature.
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. Movie was crap. I read the book repeatedly before I ever figured out it was part of a series. No Amazon back then. Charles Wallace really resonated with a nerdy kid who didn’t much fit in rural Florida. Interestingly, my daughter loved Matilda by Roald Dahl for a lot of the same reasons.
The Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. That was the first time I ever read any “light-hearted” fantasy, and there were passages that made me laugh out loud. I still quote some.
A Wrinkle in Time is amazing because Meg is an angry little girl and the thing that she needs to be in the end is angry. Society constantly tells girls to be nice and keep sweet and it was just amazing for kid me (and adult me) to read a book where the very thing we got chastised for is what she needed and she didn’t need to “change herself”/”grow” etc and become some paragon of kindness.
So on the nerd front, 3 books that really helped shape my adult brain are Hegel’s Science of Logic because epistemology is fucking fascinating, The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault because it’s all about power structures and social structure, and New Rules of Sociological Method by Anthony Giddens because of how he situates personal agency within power structures (hey hey structuration theory). I guess that graduate work in social sciences is pretty obvious here.
None of these are interesting in the “wow, I’ve had a breakthrough that changed my life!” but more in the sense that it changed how I look at why people act how they do and what the fuck is going on with our social systems. Like many folks read Das Capital and walk away like wow man capitalism isn’t good, but oh well, whereas these help lead more to why people do shit within the power structures they are stuck in.
Anything by Jack Kerouac or Herman Melville made me wish I’d never learned to read. With F Scott Fitzgerald a close follower.
I struggled as best I could through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind but can’t say I got more than a little piece of it. And as far as Capital, I’m still amazed Marx was influential — it’s awfully dense and tangled.
Capital for me falls into same kind of category as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species & The Descent of Man
“I need to put every fucking example I have about this and say the same thing like 87 times because it’s 18whatever and no one will believe me if I don’t include all the things since no one has good libraries except like 18 cities and you gotta be a rich white dude to even get in them.”
I thought Das Capital was fine, it just could have been like a third as long as it ended up being.
I read a lot, and I like to think I learn a little bit about the world and the human condition from every book. But there are a few that have had a big impact on me.
Catch-22 Joseph Heller- I read this when I was around 13 or 14, it was probably the first book I read that skewered the American military-industrial complex, capitalism, and religion. I was stunned to realize that WW2 was maybe not the patriot fest I had been led to believe. Joseph Heller started me down my anti-authoritarian path.
The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer – I learned that it was a crime to be poor and mentally ill in the US, that there is little to no support for former inmates, that poverty and violence drive poverty and violence, and that we can’t just oppose the death penalty without calling for prison reform.
Missing, The Execution of Charles Horman Thomas Hauser – A movie by the same name was made a few years after I read this. Horman was an American journalist living in Chile who was arrested after the CIA backed coup of President Allende. It really increased my distrust of the American government.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse Peter Matthieson – The two books that spurred my interest in racial justice and led me to many other important works on the subject.
I almost did my master’s thesis on Catch-22, but I had trouble finding a unique angle to approach it from. I switched to my first love, science fiction, and wrote my thesis about Ursula K. LeGuin.