mdunnbass (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mdunnbass) wrote,@ 2009-09-04 10:41:00 |
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15 Books meme
The meme instructions say to list 15 books that impacted your life somehow, and I think it must have also said to ramble on about either the plot of the book or what it meant to you, since that's what I seem to have done. A bunch of my flist did this meme 2-3 weeks ago, and I followed suit, writing up my list in bits and pieces over a few weeks. Enjoy.
15 Books that impacted me and my life, roughly in chronological order of when I read them.
Holly's birth story to come later, possibly today, but probably not.
No Worries,
Matt
The meme instructions say to list 15 books that impacted your life somehow, and I think it must have also said to ramble on about either the plot of the book or what it meant to you, since that's what I seem to have done. A bunch of my flist did this meme 2-3 weeks ago, and I followed suit, writing up my list in bits and pieces over a few weeks. Enjoy.
15 Books that impacted me and my life, roughly in chronological order of when I read them.
- My side of the mountain - Jean Craighead George
The story of a boy who reads Henry David Thoreau, and runs away to the catskills to live life in the wild as Thoreau did at Walden Pond. I first read it when I was around 10 or so, and it's one of the main reasons I joined the Boy Scouts, and it introduced me to nature. - Green Futures of Tycho - William Sleator
YA sci-fi novel about a kid who finds a time machine that fits in the palm of your hand, and what he does with it. Possibly the first real sci-fi I ever read, and much of it is still seared into my brain. - then again maybe i won't - Judy Blume
This is probably the only judy blume I've ever read, and for all that it stuck with me. It's basically about a boy on the verge of puberty trying to come to grips with himself, errr, well actually, even the alternate meaning holds true here. - Choose Your Own Adventure (various authors)
I owned maybe 80 or so of the original books. There was a bookstore in Avalon, where my grandparents had a beach house, and I was stuck for several seeks every summer as a kid. No friends nearby, nothing to do (NJ beaches don't count as anything to do. Trust me. Especially for an Irish kid that lobsterizes after 3 minutes in the sun.), and rarely some cousins. There were 4 jigsaw puzzles that I had done multiple times, and a piano right next to the TV. Grandparents TV-watching trumped my requests to play the piano 9 times out of 10. So, I entertained myself instead by walking the dozen or so blocks down to the bookstore (usually while my cousins were exploring the surf shop a block away), and using what little pocket change I had to buy more Choose Your Own Adventures. It gave me something to do that didn't involve the beach. - Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank (a.k.a. Henry Hart Frank)
Had to read this for 8th grade English class with... what the hell was her name again? I dunno. She was albino blonde, and old, and I vaguely remember a story about her having enormous closets and a cat, but that's all. Anyway, it's the first post-nuclear holocaust story I remember reading, and it was almost an extension of the My Side of the Mountain story (though for very different reasons), since it was all about people getting back to the basics of living, because everything and everyone outside their small florida town was destroyed, until the end, when helicopters full of rad-suited government types show up with Geiger counters. - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Do I even need to explain? Douglas Adams' sense of humor was godlike to me. There were certain chapters that I would read over and over again. I especially liked chapter 12 of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Seriously. - Enemy of the People - Henrik Ibson
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
These next 3 should all be classified as one, because I read them all within a month of each other, and I think the combination really hit me hard. All of hem in some way deal with the injustices of life, and being misunderstood or held responsible for something that wasn't your fault, usually through the stupidity or indifference of others. That's my biggest fear/phobia, and I guess reading all three of these at a very emotional and impressionable (read: 15 year old) and stressful (read: high school) time was too much for my fragile psyche to handle. Throw in a series of epiphanies from reading these three books, a highly stressful overworked 2 week time frame, and a minor volcanic eruption of emotions taken out on an innocent wall, and you get a minor nervous breakdown, and a very different me on the other side. - Sons and Lovers - D H Lawrence
I had to read this for my senior year english class, and I despised it. That said, the main character has this f***ed up relationship with his mother, and towards the end of the book, she dies. Just a few months before I read this in late 93/early 94, my grandmother died, and she was a big part of my childhood, and I had apparently been keeping everything in. So, when I got to that part of the book at like 11:30 one night, I just started bawling, and for the first time since diapers (not counting walking in on my first girlfriend f***ing a friend of mine a year previously) I cried myself to sleep. I have not read a word of D.H. Lawrence since, nor to I ever plan to. - Magician: Apprentice - Raymond E Feist
Aside from a YA/children's book called "Castle Perilous" that my grandmother had given me, Magician: Apprentice was the first fantasy novel I had ever read, and certainly the first Epic Quest style fantasy. And I have to tell you - it rocked my world in just about every way. This was mind blowing. Up until then, I was basically only reading Tom Clancy books as fun, and this was a welcome change. I rapidly swallowed up the entire Riftwar Saga, as well as the three follow-up novels, and then the eventual Serpentwar Saga as well. (I've since read almost everything Feist has ever published, for better or worse). I followed up Feist with Robert Jordan's long and arduous Wheel of Time, which seemed far superior in plotting, characterization, and world building. At least at first. Aside from being my introduction into the subgenre, this is also the book that made me really start to think that "Hey - I could do this. I could write my own fantasy stuff..." - A Game of Thrones - George R R Martin
If Feist's work convinced me I could, Martin's work convinced me I shouldn't, because if you can't do it this well, don't bother wasting people's time. As much as Robert Jordan seemed light years above Feist in craftsmanship and maturity and ability, George R.R. Martin was that far above Jordan and then some. The Song of Ice and Fire series, started here with A Game of Thrones, is so intricate, and realistic (in terms of people's foibles and grudges and lives) that it makes Jordan look as juvenile and hackneyed as Eragon's author Christopher Paolini. I cannot heap enough praise upon this book or the series, although I do have 2 quibbles. First - it is so richly populated, and so many people are referred to by multiple names, that I have trouble keeping them all straight. Second - He has no qualms about killing off major characters. At all. Hell, the entire 4th book was like a major attrition just to pare down the cast. Much better than Jordan's bloating, which seemed to go on and on with no attrition at all... - Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
I won't go into my dislike of Orson Scott Card the public personality (racist, bigot, zealot, loudmouth, etc), but I will say he can certainly take a simple, minor idea (a battle school in zero-grav for children) and make it into first a compelling short story, and then flesh it out further into an amazing and transformative novel. I've always felt that I liked novel- (or serial-) length fantasy, but only short story length sci-fi, but this is definitely the first major sci-fi novel that hit me hard, and made me want to read sequels. That the sequels themselves were sour detracts not one iota from the original. - Foundation - Isaac Asimov
This is such a seminal work that I can't not include it. The concept of psychohistory is so amazing, and Asimov is a master at generating incredibly compelling characters with tiny broad brush strokes. Sure, the style 50 years ago when this was written is different than today's, so the dialogue and some of the technology are campy, but the story in itself is too compelling for the other stuff to prevent suspension of disbelief. I loved this book, and unlike the Ender series, I devoured and loved it's sequels as well. - The Stand - Stephen King
The Stand is definitely one of Stephen King's best works. I could easily have put the Gunslinger on this list instead. or It. or Christine. or (my personal favorite) The Drawing of Three, or the entire damn Dark Tower Heptology (is that a word?). But something about the Stand really stands out (pun not intended). Despite it's enormous size, King's trademark copious character backstories, it's sometimes meandering beginning, or it's enormous cast, I really don't think a single word of this story is unnecessary. And my god is it strong. The miniseries version starring Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Bill Faggerbakke, Gary Senise, and others was fantastic, and fairly faithful (I only saw the last half), and a far better adaptation than almost any other King work, but the book is just so all-encompassing that you can't put it down. Also, I got fired from my very first job about 70 pages before I finished reading it, so that might have something to do with it's emotional impact on me, I dunno.
Holly's birth story to come later, possibly today, but probably not.
No Worries,
Matt
