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11 April 2006
Can we talk some more about books? So, this MeFi post is about the differences the Guardian found in men & women's selections for most influential books. That's fine. But what I want to know is, bunnies, what's yours?
I haven't read much 'women's fiction,' not out of any conscious avoidance, but just because in my zen approach to book buying rarely does a girl book jump out at me.
As for guy books: Salinger's Catcher in The Rye, Richard Price, Mordecai Richler, James Ellroy, John Sayles, Jim Dodge, Trey Ellis, Jay McInerney, Benjamin Anastas, Jim Carroll, Hubert Selby, Jack Kerouac, and the rest of the usual suspects..
Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids) was a watershed for me, specifically in the way it talks about the societal ramifications of religion.
The idea that the belief, however implicit, in an afterlife reduces moral accountability and actually diminishes respect for life is hardly original to those stories, but as a lapsing Catholic, that was the first place I came across it, and it impacted me deeply. It's also one of the most no-bullshit treatments of bisexuals and bisexuality I've ever seen, which I appreciated.
It's populist Canadian SF, but I make no apologies for being lowbrow.
just because in my zen approach to book buying rarely does a girl book jump out at me.
You know, jon, some people would say that's pretty much a textbook case of how ideology runs taste. But anyway: PICK ONE BOOK. That's the question. I want to talk about books not gender. BOOKS.
I'd be interested in the definition of a "guy book" and a "girl book". I have many female friends who love Catcher in the Rye or Jack Kerouac for example.
One book? God that's tough. But I'd have to give the nod to Salinger and Catcher.., since it let me know that the ghosts knocking around my head saying that there was something deeply wrong with the world and people (myself included) weren't just illusion but that that's ok, that's just life. Just about all the other influential books (Underacheiver's Diary, Ladies Man, Basketball Diaries, etc) in my life have been an exploration of what that validation implies, I guess.
Keijo, I definitely think there is, though it isn't strict. I'd love to talk about it, but MeCha won't let me post a separate thread yet. (Poopyheads.)
Most influential? To me personally? To other authors?
Gauging "influentialness" is the trap that makes Rolling Stone reviews unreadable.
But here goes (books influencing to me as a writer).
- Clear and Simple as the Truth Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner
- Watunna: An Orinoco Creation Cycle Marc de Civrieux
- Norse Gods and Giants Ingrid and Edgar D'Aulaire
Oh wait, on preview, one book?
Forget it. I had about twenty, but I won't narrow them down. I love book threads and would post them all, but I don't want to step all over the thread.
Picking one influence is a limiting exercise, one that I'm not very comfortable with. But I guess I can try.
If the question is which book has been the most influential to me, then I'd say Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.
Though, I only came to that conclusion when previously asked this same question - I had never really thought of that book, or any other, as having the most influence on my life before I set my mind to picking one.
Divine_Wino: I just finished Confederacy of Dunces on Sunday night. Great book. I finished it while on the toilet, which I felt was somehow appropriate.
The Crying of Lot 49 was, on balance, a huge negative influence on me. It nourished and reinforced a teenage paranoia and lack of self confidence, that I'm still getting over today. Gravity's Rainbow had a similar effect, but Lot 49 really primed the pump. I wish I hadn't read Pynchon until I was in my twenties. His books are fantastic, but I don't think I should have been reading them when I was.
As far as positive influence, I honestly don't know: at 32 I'm only just starting to sort out what aspects of my character are in fact positive. Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza maybe?
as per the Guardian article, I don't believe this crap. I am sorry to say that I have absolutely no respect for the so-called unbiased statistical studies of such profound subjects as gender. C'mon. But I guess that is another topic and a wholla lot other discussion.
To your question. I will complain as much as the others before about selecting just one book out of the ones I love (and it is a long list). However, one book just leaped into my mind as I read your post, so I will give it to you: Tender is the night, Scott Fitzgerald. Why? The 20's, the unrestrained, decadent, elegant culture, the brewing and expanding revolution, the philosophical, ideological and political revival. I would have liked to be a woman in those times. And also, because I happened to be reading it when the news of my father's sudden death reached me. Curiously, the book and the event have somehow fused together in my thoughts.
Oooh, positive and negative. Good division. I'll go for:
Positive: Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First. As with other people's influential books, it was the first book that made me understand that at least one other person had been where I was before. The book is made up of interlinked stories of Catholic girls on the verge of being Bohemians instead. And they screw up a lot, mostly for wanting things they don't yet comprehend. Actually, I should read that again.
Negative: Catcher in the Rye. It taught me just how subjective taste really is. Before reading it, I thought most well-respected novels had to have something to them. But this book, which I've read more than many books I love, just to keep giving it a shot, really made me understand that some folks are just plain crazy.
Also, yes, I just broke my own rules. But I think 2 or 3 is fine, I just don't want a list like jon's of like 20 people. Thanks for playing.
Because I read it at such a young age, Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" was a huge influence on me.
I was a pre-teen in the 70s, and a lot of the ideas in that book were things I was just beginning to understand about being an adult: the lure of nostalgia (the part where they find Illinois on Mars), the idea of one culture sweeping away another, the idea of one's identity shifting, the threat of nuclear war, the building up of illusions when one is lonely, etc etc... it's such a weird mix of stuff that somehow fits together.
(I think that book is also what ruined me for Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica type science fiction. To this day the only sci-fi authors I like are Bradbury and J.G Ballard, and in movies I prefer things like "Gattaca.")
Most influential would be either Little Women, which was the first "big" book I read, or "The Crying of Lot 49" which I read just after Lolita (it's chock full of allusions to Lolita), which taught me a lot about deep humor and the power of connection. I recently re-read it and was less impressed.
In my recent past (the last 10 years) I'll pick a book which I would have thought was a throwaway, but which I think of constantly and recommend almost as much: Famous Long Ago: My Life and Times with the Liberation News Service by Ray Mungo.
Negative:
The History of Sexuality Vol 1 by Michel Foucault. A great book worthy of serious consideration, but I was too young to treat it with the restraint that it, and decorum, demands, when I read it the summer before college. I probably would have been a lot less of an asshole if I hadn't ever read it, and certainly if I hadn't followed it to Anti-Oedipus.
It seems very strange to me that I have almost no sense at all of any particular book that is profoundly important and influential in my life. Books in general are easily the most important and influential things in my life, both emotionally and intellectually. Why don't I have one or two beloved books the way most people do? My favorite novel is War and Peace, but I don't have any sense that it was enormously influential. Godel, Escher, Bach was very intellectually influential to me, but that still seems very limited in comparison to the broad spectrum that makes me who I am and what I care about. It also seems relatively lightweight compared to the books I read in college. Taken collectively, the "great books" I read in college are tremendously influential and important to me, but no single book stands notably above the rest.
In fact, I just now have become aware that at this point in my life I have the (unexamined) sense that having in one's life a single beloved and influential book is in many ways immature. I associate this with infatuation, with something that is as much about projection and desire and narcissism as it is quality. Young, bright people tend to have one or two beloved and deeply influential books; but it seems to me (from my own experience of this as well as observation of others) that such books tend to be those which validate, not challenge, a young person's views and passions and fears about the world. Books about alientation—an adolescent obsession—show up on most peoples' lists. Catcher in the Rye is a common example; and Ayn Rand's books are notorious examples of a stunted, perpetually adolescent alienated worldview.
I don't neccessarily think that finding pleasure in validation is immature. In some ways it undoes the adolescent sense of being the *only person EVAR* to feel a particular way. Not to mention that coming to realize that other people are as screwed up as you is a really important part of being able to relate to others, and that, too, is fundamentally validation.
I read much more fiction than non-fiction, but the word influential calls up non-fiction first. . .
Non-Fiction: Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia. Gave me a very useful way of looking at art of all kinds. Honorable mention to Drinking, A Love Story, Caroline Knapp.
Fiction: The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner. Gave me a love for the non-linear. Honorable mention to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, same reason.
Well, kmellis, there's a difference between beloved and influential. A big difference. I'm very fond of Little Women, but it's influence in my life far exceeds its worth as a romance. I actually prefer Jo's Boys (one of the sequels about which few people talk), but I would never list it as particularly influential.
That said, I know you mentioned that your own sense of this is unexamined, but still, it strikes me that your own views here are all about validation. You've validated your own lack of a particularly influential book, and you've suggested not simply that your own situation is defensible, but that those who can name a single book are immature. Strong words, indeed.
Probably the book that was most influential to me was The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier. I read it when I was about 12ish? I think and it was the first book I'd ever read that felt real to me.
I think as I've gotten older I've become less and less influenced by books, for whatever reason. And that's maybe partly why I never really got Catcher in the Rye. Didn't read it till I was about 25, so was over the whole adolescent alienation thing.
For fiction, I'd say The Count of Monte Cristo. I first read it in 7th grade. I'm not sure why it resonated with me so strongly, except perhaps because Dantes was the most human character I had ever encountered in a story. Almost an antihero. As far as nonfiction, The Diary of Anne Frank. I probably read that when I was about 10. It would be surprising if that book didn't have an impact on a young Jewish girl. Special mention goes to a short story by Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing. I don't think any other work of literature has ever influenced me so much.
Didn't read it till I was about 25, so was over the whole adolescent alienation thing.
Well, I read it at 14, so it naturally synced with my adolescent growing pains and coming-into-awareness. But the other favorites of mine sort of functioned as a primer in the idea that bafflement and disgust at human foibles need not translate into alienation. Holden Caulfield dosen't neccessarily have to grow up and become Travis Bickle.
Also, Douglas Adams' Hitchikers Guide series which I didn't read till I was about 19 (and then read in one literary crack binge of a weekend) taught me about the absurdity of the universe which is a good way to leaven all that wounded idealism and alienation.
When I was in grade school, my mother and I fought against the school board to get them to allow me to purchase Fahrenheit 451 at the school book fair. They thought it would be too disturbing for me to read it because I was so young. So I'm going with that book, because I have a neat story to go with it.
I'm sorry omiewise, it's probably not appropriate, but I'm still laughing at your negative. Possibly because I would say that as far as influences go I might have to cite Deleuze's work overall as having a major impact (both positive and negative), and because some people might've thought I was that guy too.
No, go on ahead. It actually took me a bit to think of the most negative, and why. Both books are also among the most influential in positive terms, but they both made me more of an asshole when I could ill afford it. Now, or course, with the Singularity of Perfection that's my present personality, they just make me better.
I love Catcher in the Rye. It stood out clearly against all the other teen pap that we were forced to read in high school. And it lead me to Franny and Zooey, which contains the line, "There isn't anyone who isn't Seymour's fat lady," a philosophy I try to adhere to. (It's basically the same as the Quaker tenet that "there is that of god in everyone.")
To Kill a Mockingbird made me want to be Atticus Finch, which is not a bad thing. The Sun Also Rises made me want Brett Ashley and travel the world collecting lovers.
As a former lit major, I guess my picks should contain less low-level required reading but *shrug*.
"You've validated your own lack of a particularly influential book, and you've suggested not simply that your own situation is defensible, but that those who can name a single book are immature. Strong words, indeed."
I don't think that what I'm doing, or even what you think I'm doing, is finding "validation" in the same sense as in the context of what I wrote. The most obvious difference is that validation is an inherently external thing. When one constructs a theory that supports one's own prior, unexamined beliefs, that may be intellectually suspicious, but it's not validation.
Everyone who can name a single most influential book is most certainly not immature; but a common personality trait of the immature is to find external validation for one's predispositions. And it's my personal observation that the intellectually immature-but-enthusiastic are more likely than not to have a single book (or film, or pop song!) that is beloved by them and is seen as revelatory. The intellectual immaturity I see as related to this character trait is that of oversimplification, the desire for too-easy and greatly overreaching comprehension.
As to dame's point about how moving from a sense of tragic uniqueness to a group identity of alienation is positive, I disagree. Yes, discarding the tragic uniqueness narcissism is a step forward. But being part of a subculture of alienation is a cure worse than the disease—it combines a still-present and comforting sense of personal exceptionalism with the comforting sense of belonging. In this it is the very essence of adolescent immaturity. It's an immature sense of self built around a group, not individual, identity which is coupled with the intoxicating sense of being deeply aggrieved.
But kmellis, where is it inherently alienating? Half my point is that acknowledging everyone's screwd-up-ed-ness is one of the better ways I've found to move forward. Or are definig screw-uped-ness differently?
And yet most other angsty writers, like Plath or Dickinson, make me want to scrape my eyes out of my head. Go figure.
Well, I think the conversational, vernacular tone of Salinger undercuts the angst with an implicit acknowledgement that it's all just life rather than some monumental THING.
Don DeLillo's White Noise, mostly for the sentiments expressed in these excerpts. He made me jealous for a relationship about which I could say that if the person died, "I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her*."
Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. She writes that every day is a god, and was my first peek into deistic thought. She disturbed me greatly when I was an evangelical, because she most certainly isn't but has a firm sense of what is holy, and disturbs me now that I am an atheist, for the same reason. It's sixty pages long, and I've read it every few months for the last few years. I find something new every time.
Salinger's Franny & Zooey, for Seymour's Fat Lady, as was mentioned up-thread.
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