The Top Books That Changed Me

            My smart, skilled, and artistically brilliant sister named “the top books that have changed me” in a Facebook post and asked for some other respected reader’s picks. Hers is balanced with a lot of good fiction and non fiction, and shows just what kind of reader she is. They are 

1. The Bible, + everything else

2. The Chronicles of Narnia + This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti 

3. Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend + Psychotic Inertia by Patrick Dodson
4. The Singer by Calvin Miller (yes!!!) + The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
5. Waking the Dead by John Eldredge + The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle (a poem) by Tom Andrews
6. War and Peace by Tolstoy + lots of Dickens
7. Kim by Rudyard Kipling + The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Spear

             See? How's a guy supposed to follow that?

             My list is a little complicated, because I do not believe I could do these justice without explaining not just what books changed me but why. Given my verbosity, Facebook can’t handle the information dump so here it is in blog form.

            Most important would of course be the Bible, because duh. Philosophy, relationship, reality, the frame on which my perception of the world and my life, beyond fiction, hangs. It's worth noting that my favorite translation is the Complete Jewish Bible, translated by David H. Stern, because of the unique Jewish perspective. This is an interpretive translation and, especially in the New Testament it departs from the Greek manuscripts that we have. However, I believe the translation to be reliable because Jesus most likely spoke the Hebrew dialect of Aramaic, not Greek. I believe that Christianity is a Jewish religion, founded by Jews, for Jews. Anyone can be a Christian, but the Jewish perspective provides a clearer understanding of the words of Jesus and the apostles than the Greek  influence provides. I digress.

First books ever: “Little House in the Big Woods” and the rest of the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, with special notice on “Farmer Boy” because of the male perspective. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the remainder of “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis. “The Hobbit” and later, “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. “Watership Down” by Richard Adams.

These were read aloud to me, largely before I could read myself. In a small part I was deterred from learning to read by these because my Dad could dramatize the stories so well, and when I tried to read I spent so much effort deciphering the words on the page that I couldn’t pay attention to the story. When I read, even in my head, the character’s voices were flat, factual, halting, and uninteresting. Dad made Bilbo and Almanzo and Aslan seem like people with feeling and fire in their souls. Why should I learn to read when I couldn’t make the characters do that? Of course, with enough practice I could, and today people compliment me on my dramatic reading. Dad even says that I do a better Rowsby Woof, a character from “Watership Down,” better than he does, but on the whole I’m still not as good as he is.

First time I noticed a physical/emotional reaction to a book I read to myself: “The Indian in theCupboard” by Lynne Reid Banks.

First time I noticed that I was having a physical reaction (slightly different words, completely different concept) “Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” by EdgarAllen Poe.

Both of these authors got my heart racing. Written words. Symbols on a page, translated to symbols for ideas in my head. Lies. Beautiful lies that I knew were not true, but I loved them so much I wanted them to be true. These are stories my father had not read aloud to me, and the voices they grew in my head were the first that I created with the author, not ones that he had created for me, and they were strong and real. With “Indian” I thought, “I wish I could do that” and with Poe I took it a step further and asked “How did he do that?”

First book I was excited to read, and was disappointed: “The Count of Monte Cristo” unabridged, by Alexander Dumas.

I read the Bantam Classic version of “Count” when I was preteen/young teen, and I thought it was amazing. I still do. When I discovered that this gem was abridged, that there was more “Count” that Bantam had cheated me out of, I was righteously indignant and set out to amend my deficiency right away. It turns out they abridged it for a reason; Dumas tends to wander around on barely relevant bunny trails that do nothing to advance the plot, but do modify the characters in disturbing ways. The image of the Count in the abridged version is that of a hypercompetent angel of vengeance who will stop at nothing until his enemies are as completely destroyed as they intended to destroy him. The unabridged version complicates the heroic, righteous image by adding copious, celebrated drug use and statutory rape to the mix which, according to my values both then and now, makes Dantès unbelievable as an accomplished everything and retroactively deserving of every “injustice” dealt him. Special Hell, remember?

First book I loved for the narrative, then discovered I hated for the message: “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells.

There is a lot of good writing by Wells, and a lot of messages in his work that I wholeheartedly agree with. However, the author and I often have different interpretations of his work, and if you do just a little digging, you may find that Wells held some terrifying beliefs, along with some other literary darlings in the same period. That said, I like the idea of traveling centuries forward in time to discover a completely different, dystopian future. I do not like the analogy of the capitalist working class as cannibals who literally feed on the elite, and while I consider myself quite the cynic when it comes to humanity, I do not support the idea that humans are mere animals.

First book I wanted to emulate: “Jurassic Park” by Michael Crichton.

My instructors would probably wince in frustration if I told them I wanted to be like Crichton. They would mourn my lost potential, because with a lot of work I could probably be a poor man’s David Foster Wallace. My aspiration to be a filthy genre writer (“filthy” as in literary writers consider all genre fiction as suboptimal. I want to be like Crichton, not E.L. James. Geeze) is because of public accessibility. I have not gone into deep research, but in three years “Jurassic Park” sold over 9 million copies. In comparison, Wallace’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest” sold 150,000 in ten years. This means that, even if only one in ten Crichton readers are provoked into thinking beyond “ooh, dinosaurs!” and Wallace has a perfect record for inspiring readers, Crichton still beats out Wallace nearly ten times over. Who is the more effective writer? The one worth emulating?

Plus, Crichton is rich while Wallace killed himself in a drunken fit of depression, so there’s that.

The book that changed my entire perspective on reading: “In the Wake” by Per Petterson.

I had to read this book for a sophomore level English class and I hated it. I loathed it. I despised it. It made me want to stab kittens. What I couldn’t understand was that it was nominated for some huge international literary award with a reward purse up in the tens of thousands of euros. It wasn’t a throwaway nomination, either, because the same author’s next book won that award. Obviously, a lot of other people who know what they are talking about saw more in this book than I did, so I decided to figure out why. The reason is because it is brilliant. It turns out I hate it because it is about being depressed, and the author creates that sense of hopelessness so well that it was instantly familiar and my gut instinct was to get out as quickly as possible. After I figured out “In the Wake,” I knew that I had been reading everything all wrong. I evaluated books and short stories based on whether I liked them or not, and this prejudice impeded my ability to learn from them. It also made required reading as an English major borderline unbearable because, if I stop to think about it, I hate most of the stuff they make me read. I read about an OCD lesbian and her dysfunctional relationship with her gay father who probably committed suicide. I read about divorce and insanity and sexism. I read about rape and drug abuse, and all of the horrible things people say about and to one another in veiled, cutting words. Sometimes it strays into child molestation or incest, but on a good day it will be shrouded in enough literary trappings that, if you try really hard, you can imagine that it’s just about some poor woman in a terrible relationship with her mother. And most of it is incredible writing. The subject matter is appalling but the exposition is sublime, and I can learn from all of it. I have my English 2100 instructor and “In the Wake” to thank for that.

There are lots of other books that should be read. “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams is one; “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins is another. If you haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet I highly encourage you to do so. There are others that I hear are really good and I look forward to reading. “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green and “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak are at the top of my list, and if fantasy is your gig then anything by Carol Berg is worth a look. I’m also looking forward to “This is How You Die,” a short fiction anthology and sequel to “Machine of Death,” if I can manage to get my hands on it (hint hint). However, these others, from “Narnia” to “In the Wake,” are the books that impacted me most and will always hold a special place in my heart. Maybe a place with theoretical manacles and oubliettes, but a place nonetheless.