speed of warping: some books that changed my life
Apr 01 '09 (Updated Apr 07 '09)
The Bottom Line Of course my internal monologue speaks in book-review form. That's why my website is here instead of $#@%$ Blogger.
In a comment section at http://lancemannion.typepad.com/ , I spent far too many words tonight accepting Lance's to-all-readers challenge to answer the same tag-you're-it question he'd received from another blogger: "a list of 15 Books That Will Always Stick With Me. I take that to mean books that pithed me straight through the occiput when I read them and changed the way I saw the world and my place in it, books that imprinted themselves so indelibly on my heart and mind that I don't have to have them in my hand to re-read them, I just need to shut my eyes and watch them unscroll in my imagination".
It's a question I've pondered before, though never made a coherent attempt to answer: what are the books that made me me? Would the same books also turn you into me, and if so do you at least get my fast metabolism along with my dubious taste in shirts? Probably, and I'd pass on the mint cheesecake brownie recipes myself, so perhaps I mean this as a Recommended Reading list. All the books I mention are excellent.
But it's not exactly a list of my favorite books: as extraordinary and wonderful, richly imaginative and funny a set of novels as Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms or Jane Smiley's Moo or Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, and Electric might be, they didn't _change_ me like the books below did. Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works may be a fabulous tour-de-force of psychology, but lesser books had made more indelible points first. Here, then, a slightly amended version of the list I gave to Lance. And yes, it's more than 15 books.
Before I can even remember:
1 (tie): the Lorax by Dr. Seuss; the Wump World by Bill Peet; Who Really Killed Cock Robin? by Jean Craighead George. (I was a passionate environmentalist long before I'd ever heard the word.)
2 (tie): the Snarkout Boys & the Avocado of Death, and/or Young Adult Novel, by Daniel Pinkwater; Don't Care High, Son of Interflux, and No Coins Please, by Gordon Korman. (The line between activism, entrepeneurship, and withdrawal is far less important than the requirement that any of them be as fun and genially preposterous as possible.)
Before high school:
3: The Stand by Stephen King. (People in power will kill rather than admit their fuuckups. Horror is easier to write convincingly than happy endings, though both are possible.)
4: The 1983 to 1988, plus Historical, Bill James Baseball Abstracts. (Life can always be asked more questions, and math, research, moralism, anecdotes, and bad puns can be deployed together to answer them and find new questions.)
5: The Real Campaign by Jeff Greenfield. (Not the book that _should_ have spurred my precocious fascination with politics, but the book that did, bless and curse it. Excellent preparation as well for the most realistic and irritating aspects of the TV show the West Wing.)
6: The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover. (Language and names are among the purest sources of joy, and a person who builds entire worlds in his head and with dice is a person who doesn't really need friends. As I had almost no friends at the time, it took me years to see the book's cautionary aspects.)
During high school:
7: The Postman, by David Brin. (Sometimes the way to great deeds and usefulness starts with putting up a good enough false front.)
8: Is This It?, by Bob Geldof. (Sometimes the way to great deeds and usefulness starts with having no idea what you're getting yourself into. Okay, usually.)
9: How I Saved the World, by Philip Slater. (There are great and accidental heroes, and I love them, but sometimes the villains have astoundingly good points to make too. A first warning, perhaps, that I was a radical in the making.)
During college:
10 (tie): Black Boy by Richard Wright, Warriors Don't Cry by Melba Beals, Member of the Club by Lawrence Otis Graham. (Somehow I'd gone to de-facto segregated schools for 12 years without quite believing that racism is real.)
11 (tie): Shut Up and Let the Lady Teach by Emily Sachar, My Posse Don't Do Homework by LuAnn Johnson. (I figured out I was supposed to become a teacher by the fact that I kept putting myself into the teacher memoirs, trying to think how I'd handle the situations.)
12: World Hunger: Twelve Myths by Francis Moore Lappe. (I'd wanted, on some level, to be a vegetarian since first watching Charlotte's Web at the age of five and realizing that Sausage = Dead Wilbur. Then again, Sausage also = Yummy, and my mom cooked meat in some form almost every day, and did a very nice job of it. Lappe's book told me the Unauthorized! Uncensored! version of Wilbur's actual life, and that wasn't even the most jarring bit. I gave up meat, and learned that I was the sort of person who could do that for a good enough reason, even though neither Morningstar Farms Grillers Prime, nor Morningstar Farms Sausage Crumble, nor even Quorn's rather good fake turkey, had been invented to make it easy yet.)
13: Coming of Age in New Jersey by Michael Moffitt. (My first realization that, as a socially tone-deaf bookworm, I could treat human interaction as something to study! And analyze! And become good at! Which I usually am now, as long as the parameters of my subprograms are not exceeded.)
Post-college to now:
14: Equal Distance by Brad Leithauser. (How to put this ... at 23, the protagonist Danny seemed a startlingly half-accurate portrait of me -- in his shyness, his not-really-being-used-much idealism and environmentalism, his amused curiosity, his lack of direction, and several harder-to-summarize ways. His best friend Greg seemed a startingly accurate, though dissolute, version of Greg Stolze, who, two years ahead of me in school, was the charismatic, funny, theatrical nerd I remembered that I'd always wanted to be. At 26, on re-reading, I found I'd turned much more into a not-drunk version of Greg. I'm not much like either character at 35, which is good since at 35 that would be creepy and arrested-developmenty, but the transformation at the time may not have been an accident.)
15 (tie): No Logo by Naomi Klein, and Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken/ Amory Lovins. (My favorite non-fiction save-the-world books. It's possible that my favorite non-fiction save-the-world book would be Jim Hightower's Swimming Against the Current if my social interaction subprograms didn't so rapidly overheat their hardware with excessive use; a future energy-efficient upgrade is not impossible.)
Preparation for later:
16. Prisoner's Dilemma by Richard Powers. (This is what my middle-age mental breakdown will look like. At least it, and my children, will be entertaining.)
17: Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo. (My decline into shambling, irascible uselessness, once my family leaves me, will also be entertaining. Except to the payment-accounts managers whose bills I throw away unopened because business-class mail is annoying. But it's hard to keep myself from doing _that_ already.)
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"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Queer as Folk" should be mentioned, although they're tv shows. "Buffy"'s messages of friendship, pop-culture snark, and supremely ballsy plot contrivance ("Hey! Buffy has a younger sister even though we've made it clear for four years she doesn't! We'll explain later!") are well-celebrated.
But "Queer as Folk", the U.S. version, gets far too little critical credit for being -- not just smartly written, full of vivid characters and fake local color and just-on-the-edge-of-realistic moral dilemmas -- the single best long-running demonstration that happy endings can be great Art. The expectation of Apocalypse is written deep in my soul, a product of books, of 4th grade bullies, and of enough years below the poverty line that the world crashing down on me personally has never been hard to imagine ... but you know, I have my friends and my cats and my wife and my tutorees and my new electronic drums and my fictional online baseball team (the Iowa City Drenched Wombats), and I'm happy. I have two young kids and I read them Daniel Pinkwater books, because I expect them to be happy too.
I also expect them to die of bird flu, to be murdered by refugees from global-warming flood plains, to be rounded up into concentration camps, and to have their charred corpses taxed at absurd rates so the government can help buy some banker's new designer towel. But that's no reason why, by the end of that particular narrative arc, they can't emerge wiser, kinder, and having better sex. Also, while my kids are boys, I hope they know that doesn't prohibit them from dressing like Debbie as played by Sharon Gless.
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Anyway, those were my answers. I'd be delighted to hear yours.
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Member: Brian Block
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