That Ten (Make That Twenty) Influential Books Thing

Some friends have tagged me in one of these Ten Life-Changing Books things making the rounds on social media. I believe the rules of the game are No Apologies, No Explanations. I can hang with the former but not the latter, so I decided to blog it up here. The more I thought about it, ten grew to twelve, then twenty-five, then settled back to twenty. 

Some rules and caveats. These are not my twenty favorite books - or a list of Twenty Books Everyone Should Read - but an attempt at mapping out the books that altered my trajectory (a) for the better, (b) still so alter. That last one is important. Books that radically changed my worldview but subsequent information and experience rendered less impactful (Howard Zinn, Tom Robbins, Daniel Quinn, The Tao of Pooh, State and Revolution, many others) are not included. Leading me to a different point (c) they had to hold up under questioning. With the exception of number twenty, I've read each book here at least three times. And finally (d) presented in reverse chronological order. I like the idea of working backwards to see how things went from #1 (1983-ish) to #20 (2016). Plotting coordinates on the map of my life.

And away we go!

20.

A wholly absorbing wonderful story with unforgettable characters about the foundation of British Hong Kong. Too much to get into in just a capsule review like this, but a true masterpiece that deftly covers an astonishing amount of ground. Clavell always referred to himself as "only a storyteller" and dismissed fanciful interpretations of his work. I'm willing to take him at this word, there, but if any of his books rise to something more - an insightful take in imperialism and colonization that - miracle of miracles - resists Marxist cliches - it's Tai Pan.

19.

I read sections of it many times while working at the Rhode Island College Writing Center 2000-2003, but I never read it cover to cover until I did the King's Highway business in 2012-2013.

This:

"For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room - no more child's desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study. For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

"A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity. I got another desk (and) put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three year old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover.

"Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."

had and continues to have a profound effect on how I look at life, art, drink, drugs, writing, personal allocation of time, and external validation. Not just the quote above but the unquoted context around it.

18.

I was a bar manager for the VFW at this point in my life (2009) and we had boxes of donations sitting around the place left over from previous (mis)management. As I was cleaning some of that out, I found this book. For no particular reason I started reading it right there in the room where we had all the donation boxes. Holy moley, what a treasure trove. 

The short story, properly executed, may be my favorite of all written art. (S0 many favorites: Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited", Sam Lipyste's "The Wisdom of the Doulas", "Two Guys and a Girl" by Tobias Wolff, Norman Mailer's "The Language of Men," anything by Bobbie Ann Mason, so many more and still more to come in this countdown) These aren't just properly executed; they're perfectly executed. I literally have not looked at life the same way since reading them. This is not an experience unique to Among the Missing - I basically read in order to look at life a different way - but always appreciated when it occurs. That's magic worth noting, and revisiting.

I've yet to read any more of the man's work, which is ridiculous. I will, though.

17.

Although this is a book about architecture, it explains neatly the situation across a variety of disciplines and arenas.

"The creation of this new type of community (the compound) proved absolutely exhilarating to artists and composers, as well as architects, throughout Europe in the early 20th century. We're independent of the bourgeois society around us! (They became enamored of this term bourgeois.) And superior to it! It was the compounds that produced the sort of avant-gardism that makes up so much of the history of 20th century art. The compounds - whether the Cubists, Fauvists, Futurists, or Secessionists - had a natural tendency to be esoteric, to generate theories and forms that would baffle the bourgeoisie. The most perfect device, they soon discovered, was painting, composing, designing in code. The peculiar genius of early Cubists, such as Braque and Picasso, was not in creating "new ways of seeing," but in creating visual codes for the esoteric theories of the compound.

"Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie - and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the 20th century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of the clerisy, to use an old term for the intelligentsia with clerical presumptions."

Essential info for the disingenuous times in which we toil. As is:

16.

Similarly, although this is about events in Baltimore in the 1980s, you can't fully comprehend understand contemporary American cops and robbers (even if you've seen the author's other masterwork, The Wire) until you've read this book. Which is not to say that I, having read it, comprehend things fully - far from it - only that it's a vital piece of the conversation. When books like this exist out there, it's unforgivable to ignore them in favor of the platitudes offered up in such abundance in 2018.

Led Me To: The Corner, Homicide the TV series (a show very much worth your time), a re-evaluation of the movie Clockers, and a renewed and ongoing appreciation of "It Takes Two" by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock.

15.

Space precludes everything I find awesome about A Moveable Feast, but if you want to see a bunch of quotes from it paired with 70s Batman illustrations, I've got you covered. And if you want to see a grown man cry, watch me read this book. 

As for Papa Hemingway, I'll just say this: if you like Hemingway's work in any way, you need to read it. If you're not, you might find it interesting, you might not, but you'll definitely get a hell of a lot clearer sense of the man than anywhere else. Not just a love letter from a friend but a very insightful and ego-free representation of Hemingway's last 20 years.

Fun fact: At the end of his life, Hemingway's insistence that the FBI was bugging his phone led partially to his being committed to the electroshock hospital, and (it is argued in some quarters) it was the electroshock that played a part in his suicide. Of course, now we know, the FBI really was bugging his phone; Hemingway was right! So, thanks, J Edgar Asshole, for directly contributing to an American treasure's blowing his brains out.

14.

A writer (and his hard-drinking Australian friend) try and re-create Cook's travels in the early 21st century. I've read better books on Cook (Captain Cook: The Seaman's Seaman - no jokes please - by Alan Villiers), by Horwitz, too (A Voyage Long and Strange), and in the writer-recreates-famed-figure's-footsteps (many), but this one makes the list as the one that led me to my ongoing Age of Sail preoccupation.

I became a Star Trek fan somewhere around 1980 or so, but it took me to reading this in 2003 to realize how much Roddenberry based so many aspects of TOS on Cook's voyages (and crew, and redshirts.) 

13.

Keillor - even before the an alleged * pattern of sexual misconduct over many years - is a polarizing writer. Whenever I tell fellow English majors (or just heavy readers in general) I'm a Keillor fan, I'd say about half of them react like I just told them I was a flat earther. His long-running Prairie Home Companion on NPR is, to some ears, anathema. I get it, truly. But if there was one book I'd say not only rises above whatever else you think of the guy but is also a worthy contender for American canon, it's Wobegon Boy. 

* "Alleged" not to characterize the complaints as dubious - I have no idea what did or didn't happen. I'm a Keillor fan, though, so I for one would appreciate some sensible closure on the subject.

I read this (or listened to it, rather, on audiocassette) on my 2nd visit to Chicago in 2002. (My 3rd was 2 years later when I moved here). I revisited it (this time on audio-CD) on a recent work trip. Not only does it hold up, it thrives. 

12.

Read this name aloud: Patrul Rinpoche. Patrul Rinpoche? Patrul Rinpoche. 

There! You've just been saved from rebirth in inferior realms. Don't say I didn't do anything for you.

I read this (and Jean-Claude Carrier's book-length interview with the Dalai Lama, Violence and Compassion) a hundred times apiece back in the late 90s. I'd say this spell of Buddhist reading peaked (at least outside the classroom; there was a Zen and the Art of the Literary Experience class still to come) around 2000. Wonderful meditations in here. 

11.5

I thought about including The Psychic Soviet by Ian Sevonius or Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord here but decided against it. Well, kind of. 

11.

This is a terrific and moving work. I haven't actually read this one in awhile. I read it a lot in 1998 - 2003 and again in 2006 or 2007. But I've thought about this quote a lot over the years: 

"I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight."

Truth. It makes me wonder, too, what the thirty-eight to (blank) stage is called. It might even be in Anagrams. Homework for myself. 

10.

Here's another I also haven't read in at least 10 years. Many other opinions of mine have evolved in the past decade; I really should read this again to see what I think of it. But its place on this list is assured either way, as it had such a profound effect at the time I read it. The basic ideas it imparted on me I still believe.

I saw this quoted in a review on Goodreads: "[The book] not only explodes some pervasive beliefs, it affords an invigorating reading of American culture through the last three decades." Hear, hear.

9.5

Crikey, almost forgot this one. I paired a bunch of quotes from it (mostly) with Trek photos if such things float your boat. 

9.

Vonnegut was my favorite writer through various stages of late adolescence and throughout my 20s. But, he hasn't held up too well for me since. The exception is this one (and its kinda sorta sequel Timequake) which is a masterpiece. It's been reviewed and analyzed a million ways in a million places by many more mindful than me. You yourself have likely read it; you likely love it.

The first time I read it I was 18, which seems unfathomable to me, not just being 18 but it seems both too old/ too young for me to have first read it. I got it from the North Smithfield Library - the same place from which I checked out The Stand (the Expanded edition) and a dozen other King books only 18 months before - and read most of it in one afternoon in the park directly behind it. 

Well, it's a park now (below) - it was a bit more rough and tumble in 1993. Where that bridge is in the picture( on the right used to be a rotted-away causeway left over from the Industrial Revolution. You used to have to cross it to get to the other side, and there was no fence and lots of loose stones and a precipitous drop. 

Having set the scene to such a tedious degree, there I am propped up against the library side of said-causeway reading Slaughterhouse Five. Dog Star Omnibus has come unstuck in time!

8.

Oops. I read Brief Lives after Slaugherhouse Five, for sure. I screwed up my chronological backwards journey goes. 

If you haven't read Sandman, you're probably sick of hearing people tell you you should read it. I sympathize. My personal advice would be to override your desire to start from the beginning and read these two things: first the Sandman special above-right (collected in Fables and Reflections, tho you can pick up an inexpensive copy of the Special alone easy enough) and then the Brief Lives tpb. 

Orpheus is an ancient story and has been continually rediscovered from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo right down to the present, as this work bears witness. Gaiman adds both a new twist to the old tale and a sequel. It is a pivotal chapter in the whole Sandman saga that Gaiman wove over seventy-odd issues, but it also works completely as a standalone tale. It's that most improbable, once-in-an-age sort of things: a re-invocation of ancient myth in modern guise.

7.

We've reached 1992 in my countdown. I went to URI that fall and went to the bookstore to get my books and walked out with mostly stuff that wasn't on my book syllabus. This was one of those off-syllabus books.

An essential narrative of the American experience, but definitely worth reading for anyone, white or black, American or non-American. It did a number on my head back then - race politics in this country have become so weaponized that it's sometimes difficult to learn about the past without the distorting lens of 21st century narrative. An account like this (or many others, to be sure) told in the author's own voice and free of such a lens is critical.

6.

I couldn't even begin to describe my love of this book. I've read it so many times over the years that every sentence has become a Zen koan that explains why I love anything. I talked about my love of short fiction up there with Among the Missing; it all could very well have come from my love of The Pat Hobby Stories. They are the Pink Panther Strikes Back of literary short fiction. 

"'Authors get a tough break out here,' Pat said sympathetically. 'They don't want authors. They want writers--like me.'"

5.

I can't say Brave New World was my first dystopian-future book I read. Marvel Comics (and 1984, and many others) got to me first, there. It - like War of the Worlds or The Time Machine or another book still to come in our countdown - is a fascinating look at the British Empire looking at itself. The Victorian and Edwardian eras produced such fascinating literature. Very clear-eyed on many of the contradictions of Empire but still maintaining more than a whiff of a completely outdated (to modern eyes) sensibility. 

Brave New World Revisited is something else entirely. More than any other, it opened my mind up to the possibilities of mass conditioning through media and the knowing application of that through the 20th century. My ongoing interest in its radically increased pace in the 21st is a direct result of reading this (entirely by accident) back in 1991.

4.

A ww2 vet becomes involved in a scientific experiment that successfully establishes contact with a mirror Earth on the other side of the sun. Cool idea - like the Mars Needs Woman sort of stories of this era of sci-fi, made somewhat obsolete by improved technologies, but who cares. What has stuck with me over the years is how much reading this book provided me with a useful, Cold-War-specific (alas) morality. 

It's a very moving book that I read every few years. I love updating the film I'd make from it in my head. Same goes for:

3.

I had to read this in 11th grade English, so we're at the 1990-1991 mark here. Here's another one that had a deep and long-lasting effect on my philosophical attitudes. 

I was always spellbound by the whole experience at Shangri-La, and in particular, the attitude of the protagonist, Conway, but there was always something else tugging on my mind about it, too - a darker undercurrent. I finally read a take on it (David Mamet from his book The Secret Knowledge, excerpted below) that spoke to this dichotomy: 

"In this beautiful fantasy, a British civil servant is blown off course and crashes in the Himalayas. He is rescued and taken to a mysterious, inaccessible lamasery in Tibet. Here he discovers a perfect land - all its inhabitants are artists and philosophers, there is no disease, a person can - indeed, live as long as he wishes and there is no want. The people of the Valley for millennia devoted themselves to the care, physical, material, and sexual, of the folks on the Mountain.

"This is a sweet tale by a great storyteller. It is also, less admirably, a fascist tract. For Mr. Hilton's paradise (he understands, if only subconsciously) can exist only if there are slaves. Here we see the progression from good ideas to horror. The sweet ideas are encumbered in execution by the realization that someone, finally, has to do the work; their adamant practice will quite soon reveal this: "Oh, we will need slaves."

"These slaves may be called (various thing) but they are chosen not for their odious qualities but for their supine or defenseless nature. And they are enslaved to allow the elite not only exemption from work but exemption from thought.

"Originally they are enlisted (fellow travelers or "useful idiots") or convinced (taxpayers) in order to allow the ideological and exemption from toil and the malleable exemption from thought. As the money dries up, the ideologues are easily supplanted by tyrants and the malleable chained to their oars. History provides no counter-example. A country which will not work will fall.

"Our hero in Lost Horizon discovers, midway through the book, that it was no accident which led him to the lamasery; he, like all the inhabitants, was originally kidnapped - chosen for his "readiness" to unquestioningly accept this new, changeless, and perfect life."

Mamet's take provides a whole new spin on the last lines of the book, "Do you think he will ever find it?" Is it a subversive book, after all, looking ahead out of empire and past the war on the horizon? Or an eloquent rationalization of it? I have spent a good portion of my life trying to work that out.

As such, not too bad for a meditation given to me 27 years ago. Come to think of it, I'm still thinking about Ivanhoe, too. I guess Mr. Brodeur for 11th Grade English was all right.

2.

Now we skip all the way back to 1984, the actual year not the novel, when I first read this. It was the first reading assignment in a special reading program in Frau Scharnweber's class. We had to traipse across Rhein Main AFB where they then hooked us up to machines and fed us ingenious potions to make us even smarter, levitate objects with our minds, or set them n fire.

Why Flowers? It could easily have been The Stand in the 6th and 7th grade, a few years later. But this was the first book I consciously remember telling people was my favorite book, the one I tried to engage adults about, etc. It's still a great book. I'm probably due for a re-read actually. 

Years and years later I saw the much-heralded movie and was quite disappointed. The movie in my head while reading it is much better. 

1.

Speaking of firsts here are two of the first non-kindergarten-y books I remember reading over and over. 

You ever read The Babysitter's Guide book? It rocks. There are pictures and descriptions in there that I still mentally reference in 2018. I remember looking at this - and Terror Castle - a lot in 1983, so thereabouts is where we end this little reverie.

Terror Castle is one of the best Three Investigators books of them all. I was in love with that series in elementary school. They started making movies based on them a few years back, but the franchise stalled. Too bad. The Terror Castle movie that was made strays signifcantly from the text, but it had its moments. (Ditto for the Skeleton Island one. I actually quite liked that movie, though; they nailed the spirit of it all quite nicely.) 

~

And in the background of at least #s 1-8: comics both newspaper (The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County) and four-color (all the Marvels and half the DCs).

There you have it, my friends. The full story. I'm sorry I can't just answer a question like a normal person.