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Ten Life Changing Books
Apparently this is being done on Facebook, but I don't do things like this there.
1. Peter Pan J. M. Barrie -- I read it when I was six. I re-read it when I was seven. It was the book where I realized I didn't need to move my lips to read. It was definitely a game changer.
2. Anne of Green Gables (and the rest of the series) by L.M. Montgomery -- About six months after my revelation while re-reading Peter Pan, I tried to check Anne of Green Gables out of the base library. My parents had taken us to see the musical, and I wanted to read the book. The librarian tried to stop me. Mom told her to let me read what I wanted. It took me most of the summer and two renewals. At the end of the summer, I took out Anne of Avonlea (the second in the series and the only other one the base library had). I read it in two weeks. By the time I was 8, I tested out as high school level for reading, and I attribute it to Anne.
Later, Anne of the Island showed me that girls went to college and won honors and had adventures in cities far from their homes. (Okay, I was a little shaky on Canadian geography back then.) This was cemented by the book Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster. Many people remember it as a book about a May-December romance (from the description of Uncle Jervis in the book it's more like May-August), but I remember it for being about college and dorms and girls learning math and science and the importance of literature as a tool for understanding your culture and...
3. From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg -- A girl runs away from home with her brother and figures out how to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and have adventures around New York. That was absolutely my kind of heroine; she even investigates a statue purported to be by Michelangelo.
4. Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle -- The one I read had one abridgement that was explained in a detailed note. It left out most of the Mormon stuff in A Study in Scarlet. There were several of the more famous short stories in there, too, but it wasn't under any of the titles that Conan Doyle released the collections under. I still wish I could find this series of books. They were larger than average -- maybe 8x11? -- but kept the text to the regular size. There were definitions of strange or difficult words in the margins and footnotes explaining things like differences in dress from the present day. I had three other books from the series and later bought a fifth.
5. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle -- The first science fiction, for a given value of sci-fi, that I ever read. I read Podkayne of Mars at around the same time and enjoyed it, too, but A Wrinkle in Time was the first book that I understood to be an analogy for modern political tensions -- it was the height of the Cold War -- which makes it the more important book.
There are surprisingly few from my teenaged years. I read C.S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet series and many books for assignments, including several plays by Shakespeare, most of which I loved. (Hated Henderson, the Rain King with a mighty passion, though.) None of them "changed my life" as much as I enjoyed them and as much as they confirmed me as a reader. I also read translations of The Koran and the Bhagavad Gita on our way to Belgium when I was seventeen.
6. Tremendous Trifles by G.K. Chesterton -- Specifically, the essay entitled "A Piece of Chalk" which contains the phrase -- and I truly hope I'm not paraphrasing -- "white is no more the absence of color than virtue is the absence of vice." This was the book that got me reading essays and opinions as well as fiction and, at that point very few, science for the layperson books.
7. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. It wasn't the first Asimov I read, but it was pretty close to the first. It was another five years before I read the Foundation series. This one amazed me. There was another planet with three sexes (intellectual, parental, emotional), though the sexes appeared to be gendered as well, and two states of being. That stunned me. It was the first adult science fiction I read. I can look back on it now and shake my head that the Intellectual was gendered masculine and the Emotional as female (and cheer a little that the Parental also seemed to be gendered masculine).
It was the first time I realized that I read science fiction books and liked them better than romance novels. Although, to be fair to my friends, most of us read mysteries for fun rather than romances.
8. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges -- A college roommate suggested it to me. She made it clear later that she hadn't liked the book much herself, but thought that I might. She was right. The first story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" still gives me chills. I can't even explain how much I loved and feared it the first time I read it.
9. Bricks to Babel by Arthur Koestler -- Other than the pamphlet he wrote opposing the death penalty, which appears in full, this book is an anthology of short bits of his much longer books. Some are fiction, some are science, and some are philosophy. All of them made me think. I'd taken a philosophy class in college, but Koestler is why I read philosophy for fun.
10. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin -- I had gone with an acquaintance on a one-day excursion from Heidelberg to Bonn. We'd run out of conversation by the time we were catching the train back, so we stopped and picked up books from the very limited English language selection at the train station. I don't remember what she picked. I chose this one. From the first words I was sucked in so deeply that I ended up getting off the train in Karlsruhe and having to call my family to let them know that I was going to be later than expected because I had to catch another train back to Heidelberg from there. When I finished it, I started it over again from the beginning. Helprin's use of language, his vibrancy, captured me and has never really let me go. This is his only novel which comes under the rubric of "magic realism." The story goes: Helprin's father hadn't understood all the fantasy elements, so he decided to write books his father could appreciate. I've enjoyed his other books, but none of them stretch my soul the way Winter's Tale did.
1. Peter Pan J. M. Barrie -- I read it when I was six. I re-read it when I was seven. It was the book where I realized I didn't need to move my lips to read. It was definitely a game changer.
2. Anne of Green Gables (and the rest of the series) by L.M. Montgomery -- About six months after my revelation while re-reading Peter Pan, I tried to check Anne of Green Gables out of the base library. My parents had taken us to see the musical, and I wanted to read the book. The librarian tried to stop me. Mom told her to let me read what I wanted. It took me most of the summer and two renewals. At the end of the summer, I took out Anne of Avonlea (the second in the series and the only other one the base library had). I read it in two weeks. By the time I was 8, I tested out as high school level for reading, and I attribute it to Anne.
Later, Anne of the Island showed me that girls went to college and won honors and had adventures in cities far from their homes. (Okay, I was a little shaky on Canadian geography back then.) This was cemented by the book Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster. Many people remember it as a book about a May-December romance (from the description of Uncle Jervis in the book it's more like May-August), but I remember it for being about college and dorms and girls learning math and science and the importance of literature as a tool for understanding your culture and...
3. From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg -- A girl runs away from home with her brother and figures out how to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and have adventures around New York. That was absolutely my kind of heroine; she even investigates a statue purported to be by Michelangelo.
4. Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle -- The one I read had one abridgement that was explained in a detailed note. It left out most of the Mormon stuff in A Study in Scarlet. There were several of the more famous short stories in there, too, but it wasn't under any of the titles that Conan Doyle released the collections under. I still wish I could find this series of books. They were larger than average -- maybe 8x11? -- but kept the text to the regular size. There were definitions of strange or difficult words in the margins and footnotes explaining things like differences in dress from the present day. I had three other books from the series and later bought a fifth.
5. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle -- The first science fiction, for a given value of sci-fi, that I ever read. I read Podkayne of Mars at around the same time and enjoyed it, too, but A Wrinkle in Time was the first book that I understood to be an analogy for modern political tensions -- it was the height of the Cold War -- which makes it the more important book.
There are surprisingly few from my teenaged years. I read C.S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet series and many books for assignments, including several plays by Shakespeare, most of which I loved. (Hated Henderson, the Rain King with a mighty passion, though.) None of them "changed my life" as much as I enjoyed them and as much as they confirmed me as a reader. I also read translations of The Koran and the Bhagavad Gita on our way to Belgium when I was seventeen.
6. Tremendous Trifles by G.K. Chesterton -- Specifically, the essay entitled "A Piece of Chalk" which contains the phrase -- and I truly hope I'm not paraphrasing -- "white is no more the absence of color than virtue is the absence of vice." This was the book that got me reading essays and opinions as well as fiction and, at that point very few, science for the layperson books.
7. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. It wasn't the first Asimov I read, but it was pretty close to the first. It was another five years before I read the Foundation series. This one amazed me. There was another planet with three sexes (intellectual, parental, emotional), though the sexes appeared to be gendered as well, and two states of being. That stunned me. It was the first adult science fiction I read. I can look back on it now and shake my head that the Intellectual was gendered masculine and the Emotional as female (and cheer a little that the Parental also seemed to be gendered masculine).
It was the first time I realized that I read science fiction books and liked them better than romance novels. Although, to be fair to my friends, most of us read mysteries for fun rather than romances.
8. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges -- A college roommate suggested it to me. She made it clear later that she hadn't liked the book much herself, but thought that I might. She was right. The first story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" still gives me chills. I can't even explain how much I loved and feared it the first time I read it.
9. Bricks to Babel by Arthur Koestler -- Other than the pamphlet he wrote opposing the death penalty, which appears in full, this book is an anthology of short bits of his much longer books. Some are fiction, some are science, and some are philosophy. All of them made me think. I'd taken a philosophy class in college, but Koestler is why I read philosophy for fun.
10. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin -- I had gone with an acquaintance on a one-day excursion from Heidelberg to Bonn. We'd run out of conversation by the time we were catching the train back, so we stopped and picked up books from the very limited English language selection at the train station. I don't remember what she picked. I chose this one. From the first words I was sucked in so deeply that I ended up getting off the train in Karlsruhe and having to call my family to let them know that I was going to be later than expected because I had to catch another train back to Heidelberg from there. When I finished it, I started it over again from the beginning. Helprin's use of language, his vibrancy, captured me and has never really let me go. This is his only novel which comes under the rubric of "magic realism." The story goes: Helprin's father hadn't understood all the fantasy elements, so he decided to write books his father could appreciate. I've enjoyed his other books, but none of them stretch my soul the way Winter's Tale did.