OK, y'all talked me into it. (silkstone's open call)
These influenced me for various reasons. They are not necessarily my favorites, but they moved me in some way so as to shape who I am today. They are in the order in which I read them.
1. An unremarkable biography of Abigail Adams. Then one about Dolly Madison. ~I was eight. Adored going to the library and finally getting into the section on chapter books. Loved the biographies, especially about women.
2. A coffee-table two-volume picture book set of WWII that my parents kept hidden on the top shelf of the coat closet. We kids were mesmerized by it, reading about the battles, horrified by that one photograph of the bloody soldier's body whose arm was not attached.
3. A Lantern in Her Hand (Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1928) ~Strong, proud pioneer woman--just a remarkable saga about courage and loyalty.
4. Little Women/Jo's Boys (Louisa May Alcott) ~Loved Jo best. Who didn't?
5. The Black Stallion and Satan (Walter Farley) ~Surprising nuance in the relationship between the boy and the trainer and their two favorite horses.
6. The Nest (short story, author unknown) ~This one felt impactful even at the time. I was in middle school and so was the protagonist. He wanted to bring a friend home for dinner and called his mom from a pay phone to ask. She worried, wondered about the appropriateness of the friend. He was kind of rough, not a good influence, she thought. Lots of interior struggle on the parts of both the mother and her son--like an Ian McEwan moment--and ultimately the boy decided to bring the kid home. The mother saw what her son saw in the friend and realized how mature the son had become. He'd flown from the metaphorical nest of his mother's decision making and had learned judiciousness of his own. Very powerful.
7. All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque) ~I'll never forget the part where the protagonist looked through the wallet--family photos and all--of the soldier he'd just shot. Wow. War is just a ridiculous game of chess where a country's kids are the pawns, I thought. Still think it.
8. Exodus (Leon Uris) ~My first exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust. The graphic details made me sick.
9. On Writing Well (William Zinsser) ~Snuck it off my boss's shelf at my first job out of college. Used to pretend I was out of the office and sat in the dark reading it. Still can't believe a book on writing was compelling enough to read from first page to last.
10. On the Origin of the Species (Charles Darwin) ~Brilliant, insightful, incisive. Still the best source for evolution.
11. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) ~I read this on the bus to a Florida Spring Break in college. Everybody else was drinking beer and flirting madly. I was becoming sensitized to both workers' and animal rights in one fell swoop. What a nerd.
12. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (William Styron) ~He spoke for me.
13. Why Globalization Works (Martin Wolf) ~There's nothing new under the sun: We've always had globalization. And it's a good thing.
(Yes, I see there are thirteen. It's a crime that I teach little children math.)
(FYI: Nos. 1-11 were read before I turned 23. Nos. 12 and 13 were read in my forties. Apparently my sensibilities were unassailable in my thirties.)
(I treated this exercise rather breezily. Let the record reflect that under the influence of truth serum or given a time machine, I may in fact come up with different, more relevant titles.)
(Oh, and as long as we're taking notes, Nos. 2 and 10 were not read cover to cover. But they were pored over.)
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How I could forget this one I will never know:
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (John Taylor Gatto)
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Oh my, I just thought of another one that would certainly supplant one of the foregoing if I had to choose. I'll just add it here so I don't have to mess with the numbers. But don't let this seem like an afterthought, please. This one was Huge.
Native Son (RichardWright) ~Bigger Thomas killed a woman. But was it his fault? This book was my introduction to THE major philosophical topic of humanity: How responsible are we for our own actions? Free will, racism, poverty, social justice, personal responsibility: It's like it was written just yesterday.
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OK, cross my fingers hope to die stick a needle in my eye, these are my last two. I swear!
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Ambrose Bierce) ~A clinic on stream-of-consciousness. I'm still not over the ending.
A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) ~As definitive an account as the subject allows for, which, according to Zinn, is not much. History, as it turns out, is a messy endeavor to record.
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And that, my friends, is how my brain works. Can you tell I think out loud?
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Comments
I've made my living all of my life as a writer, all non-fiction sadly, and want to encourage others the best way that I can: which is with this book.
My favorite lesson? "Don't bother the reader."
Sums everything up for me.
r
The WWII book. In my house, it was a turn of the century medical school text book, with grainy photos of people with various diseases, some of the genitalia. Much of my after school entertainment in sixth grade was spent poring over this with friends, who would diagnose one another. Good times.
What I realize about myself is that each of these influential books triggered an association to a whole host of similar books. In other words, I read in clusters; I get hold of an idea and have to exhaust it. Exodus brought with it all things Jewish and Holocaust; Darkness Visible was just the opening of my Depression Phase, where Noonday Demon and Kay Redfield Jamison books were devoured; Gatto's book sent me jumping into John Holt and Alfie Kohn. And I haven't even included all the books about physics I've read--anything to do with Einstein or Oppenheimer. I struggle to understand that stuff and can only explain it (to myself even) when I'm in the throes of a book about it. After the fact, it's gone.
Your inclusion of a short story jolted me into remembering that in a list of most influential (as opposed to best) I might have included The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, which helped shape the way I see humanity to this day.
Oh and I love your willingness to bring in what must seem incidental by literary standards, like the coffee table book, but are just the kind of contingent stimuli that really imprint on our psyche.
Darkness Visible. Dark, oh, yes, but offers a way back to the light more effectively for me than Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up.
All Quiet and The Red Badge of Courage gave me my first glimpses of war without romance, which is what all books about war should be.
Odd little collection? It's spontaneous, Lainey. I've a feeling that some of our other lists here would be odder, too, had they not been thought out so carefully. Wonderful list, and I have a strong suspicion we'll find an even more interesting addendum from you bef0re the day is done! (r)
I, too, thought about The Jungle--stopped eating meat because of that book.
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perkins_(author)
Or you could read "War Is A Racket" by General Smedley Butler, also dealing with the reality of globalism:
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_Plot
which all sounds old and irrelevant until you see whos been calling the shots for 100 years
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00006424
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?id=N00009638&cycle2=2008&goButt2.x=10&goButt2.y=4
I know all about globalization because it is the same people backing the UN, IMF, World Bank, WHO, Education the large foundations, the intelligence community, media and even medicine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rockefeller
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson." -Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." - David Rockefeller, Baden-Baden, Germany 1991
The point is that this book opened my eyes to an alternative viewpoint; hence its inclusion on my list. I do appreciate the links, though, and probably will follow them up. I like to see all sides.