Twenty-One Books that Shaped Me

I've been ridiculously remiss in these last few months of the year about migrating reviews over here from LibraryThing and even missed out an edition of Packing for a Reading Retreat. I'm working on a Reading Retreat post for tomorrow, but in the meantime, I give you the twenty-one books that have most shaped my life. This post is based on a meme that floated around Facebook and LibraryThing a few weeks back, and is divided into two halves: the eleven books that have most stayed with me (ten positive influences and one negative one) and the ten books with which I did not connect. For each book, I give a brief explanation of why I included it in the list.

Eleven Books that Have Been Important to Me

1.) The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
My dad read LotR (and The Hobbit) to me when I was very small (five or six). It's probably the first mythology of any kind that ever meant anything to me and was certainly my first introduction to "grown-up" fiction in any sense. I have many memories of being read to at a young age (and of having my own books), but the nightly LotR reading probably instilled in me the idea that curling up with a good book is one of the Best Things.

2.) The Little House on the Prairie books, Laura Ingalls Wilder
These were read to me (Mom, this time) so many times and I read them myself so many times that the events within them became a permanent part of my mental furniture.

4.) Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
Probably the first book that I felt proprietary toward. I loved it, I read it over and over, I carried it around in my pocket, I had parts memorized. When I discovered that a nice hardcover edition on my grandfather's shelves was abridged OMG, I started (but did not complete) a comparative study between the abridged version and the complete text, making notes about how the abridgement altered the meaning of the book. I was about eleven. What a snot I must have been.

5.) Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
This was required reading at some point in middle school (sixth grade? seventh grade?), and I hated it. I could tell it was going somewhere awful, I couldn't escape being taken there with it, it traumatized me, and it made me feel trapped, scared, and depressed. That was the first time a book had ever made me feel that way (and it was one of the few times school ever made me feel that way, too). It may be the only book I have ever truly resented being made to read, and just the thought of the stupid thing still makes me feel a little sick to this day.

6.) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Aside from just loving the story (which I did), this one is important because it was probably the first "classic" I read entirely of my own choosing and with no prompting from anyone else. I didn't struggle to read it, but it did require more "work" to get through than most things I read on my own at that age (about fifteen). For a kid who'd been reading way above her grade level for always, discovering that leisure reading could still be fun if it was also challenging was probably really important.

7.) Various Robert Heinlein books, including Time Enough for Love and I Will Fear No Evil
Heinlein gets a lot of flak for the way he wrote women (I don't disagree now that his female characters are problematic), but in my late teens his female characters who were smart and beautiful and unabashedly sexual (not sexy but sexual) were like a revelation to me.

8.) The Art of Fiction, John Gardner
A required text for a creative writing class in undergrad. Forever shaped the way I think about writing, reading, life, and what they're all for.

9.) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Romances can have substance! They can be worth reading after you already know who gets together with whom! I have much more complicated feelings (still positive) about P&P now, but that was the revelation then, some time in college.

10.) The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
In the summer between the two years of my masters program, I devoured HP 1-5 (all there was at the time). And rediscovered that reading can be pure, unadulterated fun. Thank heavens.

11.) A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
I would sooner give up any other ritual at Christmas (or any other time of year) than I would my annual reading of this brilliant little piece. Puts me in the perfect mood for Christmas, always, and straightens me out with the world and with myself (if necessary). An annual spiritual balm for me since high school.

Ten Books with which I Didn't Connect

1.) The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
I wanted to maneuver Holden Caulfield off a bridge even when I was his age.

2.) The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Could never work up any sympathy for (or interest in) any of the unlikeable characters mooning around in SL.

3.) Ulysses, James Joyce
What a brilliant writer Joyce was (The Dead, be still my heart). And what an amazing feat Ulysses is. But I could never warm to it. What a wretched reading experience it was (twice).

4.) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
I always (I've read it at least three times) feel mired down in an impenetrable jungle of unintelligible murky images when I read Heart of Darkness.

5.) The Russians
I have not yet given up! I am determined to read at least one mammoth Russian novel before I die. I've tried Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and Doctor Zhivago. I just can't get into them. I have read some shorter works (The Death of Ivan Ilyich--three times! like Heart of Darkness, it was perpetually assigned to me throughout high school, undergrad, and grad school--Fathers and Sons, The Overcoat, some Chekov).

6.) The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens
Die faster, Little Nell. Lord.

7.) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Like The Scarlett Letter, my chief problem with GoW was that I couldn't muster up any sympathy for the characters. That's a lot of ridin' around in the back of an old truck with the fambly if you don't care a lick for anyone.  And don't even get me started on the everlovin' turtle.

8.) The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
The allegory drives me nuts, and I just never warmed to the world. I wonder if there's a division between Tolkien and Lewis fans--like if you love Tolkien you're less likely to love Lewis.

9.) Animal Farm, George Orwell
I have heard some people describe this as the only book they had to read for school that they loved. Not me, boy. I found it both disturbing and tedious, which might be the worst combo ever.

10.) Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut
It's supposed to be funny, right? I don't get it. 

Not Until They're Twenty-Five

I'm engaging in a reread of the Harry Potter series this summer, something I enjoy doing every few years.  I read Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets in quick succession, and was struck, as I always am on these rereads, by how really brilliant HP1 is and how exciting it would be to read these books for the first time as a child.  I never had that experience--I was sixteen when the first Harry was published, seventeen before it was published in the US.  And I didn't read any of them until I was nearly twenty and didn't quite realize the appeal until twenty-three.  I suppose there might be an argument to be made that I came to Harry Potter at exactly the right time for me--during a summer in grad school when it was a thrill to rediscover how purely enjoyable reading can be.  But I still return to that feeling that reading them at the age they were intended for would have been such a treat.  Which inevitably leads me to a question: how might one share the Harry Potter books with children today?

One of the things I love about the Harry books is that they allow the children within them to grow and that the books themselves progressively "grow up" in vocabulary, style, and incident as Harry and co. get older themselves.  This was almost certainly a great thrill for those children lucky enough to be the right age to start Harry when he first came out and interested and/or readerly enough to stick with him through book seven.  An eight-year-old who started with Sorcerer in 1998 would have been just the same age as Harry himself when she read Deathly Hallows in 2007.  How cool is that?

But this very "growing up" of the series is what I fear would make giving Harry to children today problematic.  Suppose there is an eight-year-old of your acquaintance whom you think would enjoy these books.  If she is a strong reader, she should be able to read HP1 on her own; if not, she should be able to enjoy it thoroughly if read aloud to her.  Unless quite easily frightened, our eight-year-old (let's call her Rose) should be able to enjoy the small nastinesses, the sort-of scary monsters, and the kind-of creepy villain of Sorcerer's Stone without being upset by the book.  The same is probably true of Chamber of Secrets and maybe even Prisoner of Azkaban. 

But how many installments until you're afraid that the books are too old for Rose?  It won't take her ten years to get to Deathly Hallows without J.K. Rowling's writing pace to slow her down, especially if she is really caught up in the story.  How would you feel about little nine-year-old Rose reading about ethnic cleansing, children wiping their parents' memories to protect them, murder-by-snake, and kindly old men raising children so that they will be prepared to sacrifice themselves to save the world at seventeen?  Those are only a few of the things of which my nightmares were made after I read HP7  at twenty-six.  (M and I recently rewatched HP7: 1 & 2, and during the scene where Voldemort murders Charity Burbage, I muttered that any future children of ours would not be watching the movie until they were at least seventeen.  That age got revised upward as the evening progressed.)  I can't quite see letting Rose read Deathly Hallows before the teen years, but nor can I see telling Rose she can't read the rest of a story with which she has fallen in love.  One could try to steer Rose clear of Harry altogether until she is thirteen or fourteen, but Sorcerer's Stone is just too perfect for the eight-to-eleven set not to share it at that age.  And a thirteen-year-old might find the first two or three books too young for her, both in content and in style--and that might put her off the whole series.  What a shame that would be.  So, what to do?

I've heard the theory that one should let her children read whatever they want; that if they are old enough to comprehend a book, then they are old enough to deal with a book.  Maybe.  I've also read a good deal of theory about the prevalence of evil people, horrible situations, and tragedy in books written for older children and young adults--that dealing with such things in literature is an important part of children's development and their ability to deal with whatever is happening in their lives.  I'll buy that.  There's probably also something to be said for the notion that adults perceive horrors differently from children, that adults overestimate the effect unpleasantness in stories will have on kids.  I was an avid and strong reader from a very early age and have no recollections whatever of my parents forbidding me to read any particular books; nor can I remember being really, truly disturbed by anything I read as a kid.  I read a lot, I think, that was a bit beyond my comprehension and was unsettled by some of it, but struggling to find meaning in the books I didn't really understand was probably an integral part of my growing up.

All of which, I suppose, argues for letting Rose read the later Harry Potter books when she thinks she's ready for them.  She'd probably read them under a blanket with a flashlight if her parents forbade them anyway.  Better to be prepared, maybe, to know that your baby is going to show up at the side of your bed at three in the a.m. terrified of whatever twist her unconscious put on Dementors and Nagini and Killing Curses. 

And no one can protect Rose from growing up forever.  What a shame that would be.

Are you from the PAST?

I was born in the early eighties into a family with a mother who worked in an office, one grandmother who was the vice-president of a local bank, and another grandmother who was responsible for the bookkeeping and all money matters for her church.  Our houses were filled with books, and you were generally more likely to walk into a room of people reading than of people watching television.  Abortions and hormonal birth control have been legal all of my life.  That a woman should have professional responsibilities outside of the home, that she should have control over the reproductive functions of her body, that she should read whatever struck her fancy, were all such normal, self-evident ideas that it didn't occur to me even to think about them until I was somewhere in my teens.  And I can honestly say that I have never thought that my femaleness--its very fact alone--has ever been a cause for others to dislike me or behave condescendingly toward me or form any opinions about me at all.  Until now.

I am not naive enough to think that this experience was universal for women my age, or even for those born a little later, a little more solidly into the post-Roe-v.-Wade era.  And I know that the fight for women's equality--in popular culture, in politics, in the job sphere--have been going on all my life.  And once I started to emerge a bit from the shelter of family life, I certainly saw it.  But suddenly I feel it.  Suddenly I feel like there are people out there who will think a certain way about me because I am a woman, and not because they have met me, or read what I've had to say, and come to a thinking conclusion.  And some of those people appear to be the same people who think they ought to be the President of the United States.  The president.  The face of the nation.  The singular embodiment of our country and the democratic ideals for which it stands.  When Rush Limbaugh called an accomplished, intelligent young woman a slut before a national audience because he didn't like her politics, Mitt Romney, one of the forerunners for the Republican nomination for president, responded to the incident by saying that Limbaugh's words "were not the language [he] would have used."  That Limbaugh would say something so distasteful, nasty, controversial, and off-point does not surprise me in the least.  That so many people are trying to defend his statement, that a potential presidential candidate would so obviously fail to condemn it, saddens me, frightens me, and, frankly, makes me feel like shit.   

And this is what I thought we had moved past as a society, this putting down of women, this shaming of women through their sexuality, this infantilizing of women, consciously or unconsciously, solely because they are women.  That there is work still to be done in our culture if we want men and women truly to stand on equal ground, I have always known.  But certain entrenched attitudes which reveal themselves in language, in jokes, in "glass ceilings," cannot help but take time to work themselves out, and while I don't like these things, I rarely see any maleficence, any nastiness, in them.  They are unfortunate, and have great potential to harm, and should be worked against.  But unintentional, culturally ingrained misogyny, while destructive and potentially insidious, is a far cry from hateful, shaming speech; from denial of access to health care; from removal of autonomy over one's body. 

At first I thought that the nastiness of Limbaugh's invective was just an isolated incident--something that was exacerbated by the Republican Primaries and was blown out of proportion by the real (potentially not-nasty) concerns that some have over the question of whether birth control should be required to be covered by health insurance plans.  But since the Limbaugh storm, it seems that every day I read about some similar (if not quite so shockingly blatant) attack on the strides women's equality has made.  A new proposed bill in Arizona would allow employers to request to see women's prescriptions for contraceptives so they can determine whether women are using the pills for birth control or other medical reasons.  Because of Arizona's employment laws, employers would be within their rights to fire women using the pill for contraception.  Eat your heart out, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

But, the bill almost certainly won't pass, right?  And there will always be some people whose beliefs are out of sync with prevailing national attitudes, right?  Well, how about this New York Times article about the re-release of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which is touted as erotic?  The article made me increasingly cranky the more I read.  It suggests that the book is something to "pass around" in womenly spaces like exercise classes and school groups, that the book is teaching mothers how to be sexual again, that there is something slightly shameful in reading about sex, that more women may be reading erotica now because they can "hide" their reading on e-readers, that it has taken a book of this sort to get women reading.  All these suggestions paint a picture of a culture that feels like something out of Marilyn French's The Women's Room.  I don't know about you, but my world is not defined by a series of circles of women, I never stopped reading, and I don't need to pass around a dirty book in secret with my girlfriends to feel fulfilled at home with my husband.  What is this, 1955?

All I can say is, "Push back."  Don't let people get away with conflating their political views with misogyny.  Don't let them treat you like children or some kind of second class citizen.  If you start to feel shameful or dirty or bad because of what some people are saying, stamp those feelings out.  There is no denying that being a woman will have some bearing on how your life unfolds and how others interact with you, but what you think, how you behave, are so much more important than what's between your legs.  As for what you do with that, it's between you and, well, you.  No government officials or media pundits need apply.  And if you have a father or a grandfather or a brother or an uncle or a boyfriend or a husband or a son who has always treated you as a thinking, feeling, competent human being because it never occurred to them to treat you any other way, take a moment to give thanks for the positive influence they had on the person you have become. 




The title for this blog post comes from The IT Crowd.