I’ve got some serious posts in the mental hopper, but they will have to wait. I’ve got two lectures this morning, followed by a flight up to Northern California; my wife’s niece is graduating from high school up in Sutter County this afternoon, so we’re on the road yet again. (The current plan, however, is to spend every single night of the month of June in the same bed — something that by my calculation, I haven’t done since last October.)
So today’s post is a meme: name five works of fiction (no, Shakespeare doesn’t count, nor does the Bible for those of you who call it “fiction”) that have changed you and how you see the world. What five novels, plays, or short stories (no films, no poetry) have impacted your world view, perhaps altering how you live and how you think? Here are mine, in no particular order:
1. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee. I read this novel in 2000, some two years after getting sober and forswearing, at last, my habit of seducing students. There are few characters in literature with whom I identified more than the narcissistic, self-destructive middle-aged protagonist of Coetzee’s Nobel prize-securing masterwork. And as a story about what I didn’t want to become, but might, and as a story about the necessity of humiliation before redemption, it was immensely impacting. I still re-read it every year.
2. The Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen. I read this play in college, right about the time I was starting to explore academic feminism. Though I think Hedda Gabler is probably the better play, Doll’s House shook me to my core because again, as with Disgrace, I saw in the main male character unpleasant elements of myself. There’s a little bit of Torvald Helmer in many men; his self-righteous posturing and paternalism, his obsession with control — it was all too familiar to me. And of course, I’ve always believed that Nora makes the right choice, the only possible right choice, when she leaves her family at the end of the play.
3. The Queen and the Rebels, Ugo Betti. I don’t know if anyone stages Betti anymore, but his plays were often done at the small Carmel, California community theater with which I was affiliated throughout my childhood and adolescence. There are many great works about the existential crisis of how it is we are supposed to live in the face of death and our own apparent impotence — but this play, which I first saw when I was fourteen in 1981 — rocked me to my hyper-sensitive teenage core. My mentor and second mother, the marvelous writer and director Marcia Hovick, played the central role of Argia, the prostitute who pretends to be a queen — and dies for it. Her final scene before she goes out to meet the firing squad is imprinted on my consciousness permanently. Life is absurd, the existentialists remind us — and the correct response to absurdity is grace, determination, and charm. Not a Christian play, but a spiritually compelling one.
4. Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller. No, it’s not a great book. In fact, it’s a pretty awful book. But when I first read it in 1993 (everyone was reading it then), I cried. And the reason it’s on this list was that I remember being so annoyed with myself for being so deeply moved by what was such evident schlock. I read it to take breaks while studying for my oral qualifying exams in medieval history; I’d go from Duns Scotus on the immaculate conception to Waller’s purple account of a middle-aged affair in 1960s Iowa. The point is, I was humbled by this book. More than anything else I’ve read, the Bridges of Madison County undermined my intellectual snobbery by showing me, very clearly, just how susceptible I was to third-rate literary manipulation. Before I read Bridges, I made fun of people who liked to read Judith Krantz or Stephen King or Barbara Cartland. The copious tears with which I am embarrassed to say I stained my copy of Waller’s bestseller taught me a good lesson about vanity and elitism. I have, it should be noted, never re-read it.
5. The Sea, the Sea. I’ve read most of Iris Murdoch (both my parents were fans), but this is by far my favorite. Again, the protagonist grabbed me — a curmudgeonly, obsessive director who has rented a remote English cottage with whom (and no one else) we spend almost the entire book. Murdoch’s work is often challenging and difficult; this is the sort of book I’ve read four times and come away with a different sense of what she’s writing about on each occasion. But as someone prone to obsessiveness, and (more so when I was younger) prone to a rich fantasy life that is often disconnected from the messy mundanities of “real life”, The Sea, the Sea was a delight and a warning. And it did a nice job of curing me of my tendency towards unrequited romantic fixations.
I could think of many other books and writers for this list. I could easily just say “everything Coetzee and Doris Lessing have ever written” and be done with it. Why I don’t have any Italo Calvino or Robertson Davies on here is also a puzzle. But I look forward to seeing what others come up with.
funny – i read Disgrace in grad school and HATED it. different strokes, as they say!
Here are my five:
1) Deep River by Japanese author Shusaku Endo (1993) – About a group of Japanese tourists who go to India for various reasons. The most striking story is that of Mitsuko, a lone young woman, and her encounters with a former flame, Otsu, a chubby loner who had abandoned the Catholic priesthood because of personal spiritual conflict and traveled to India to search for a clearer manifestation of God. Mitsuko ridicules Otsu for going on such a quest – she jokes that he is looking for the “Onion”. She eventually learns that this quest isn’t as futile as she initially believed. Oddly enough, I first learned of Endo through an episode of the Japanese Iron Chef, which had Endo’s favorite chef as a challenger.
2) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – I first read this in high school. Truly a nightmarish dystopia – the imagery haunted me for days after reading the book.
3) A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift – I don’t know whether this entirely appropriate for this meme or not, but this is deep satire: the kind that was clearly made to outrageously offend a sizable number of people, but at the same time shock the rest of us to the point where we can no longer guffaw or honestly snicker, but can only give a labored chuckle. This sort of work appeals to my impish side. Also read this in high school.
4) The Painted Alphabet by Diana Darling – This adaptation of a Balinese folktale incorporates a number of modern-day trappings (cars, motorcycles, television, and the like), so much so that they transform this tale into not only a story about an ascetic’s struggle against evil forces in the form of two powerful witches, but also about the encroaching forces of modernity upon a society that is often romanticized but misunderstood by the West.
5) The Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson – A relatively “light-hearted” adventure that immediately appeals to computer geeks. A lot of pre-Windows computer and encryption history is included in the story about a treasure hunt for WWII gold in the Philippines. Just the ultimate “square-as-uber-cool” book.
Having given my five books, I must say that I’m a bigger fan of non-fiction, but that would defeat the purpose of this meme, wouldn’t it?
Hard to pick just a few. I’m going to lump sequels together.
Father Melancholy’s Daughter and Evensong – childhood and adulthood of a female Episcopal priest, who is first the daughter and then the wife of men who suffer from depression. Stuff that lingers in my mind from those books: the husband’s description of the father, “he lives by the grace of daily obligation,” the priest protagonist’s discussion of the anger in the Psalms.
A Wrinkle in Time: I loved Meg, and, one thing that stuck with me from this, the part where Meg gets given her faults as a present, and the idea that the same trait can be both fault and opportunity.
Lord of the Rings trilogy: The whole hobbit protagonist, small and weak character as hero thing.
Wuthering Heights: When I first read it in junior high school, my attention was caught by Cathy’s progression from wild and free running child to being, as I read it, enslaved to a role of lady to which she was ill-suited. Later I read it after the death of someone I loved, and identified more with Heathcliff’s unresolved grief.
The End of the Affair: Chilling final line.
I find films are more life changing, but these books have also influenced my life
1)Jean Paul Satre’s Nausea
The possibility of slipping into ‘nothingness’ kept me motivated through my first degree -it was the first book I read for it. I was determined never to become part of the ‘flabby masses’ so it worked as far as weight control went too… hee, hee, hee
2)Julian Barne’s The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
A bloomin’ good, insightful and uplifting read.
3) E.M.Forster’s Howard’s End
Poor old Leonard. A story of bravery, cowardice and adherence to one’s own integrity in the face of immense change
4) Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin
May, combined with Nausea and other miserable views of life, have contributed to the boout of deppression I experienced in my final year of uni. At least it was an elloquently and inspired deppression.
I will have to try Disgrace, sounds interesting, where on earth do you find the time to read the same novel every year,run marathons, keep your blog up, mentor teenagers, have a green, vegan lifestyle, a good marraige, church actvitities and work!!! that’s what I’d like to know
In which Craig reveals himself to be a shallow idiot.
1. Beowulf
As much as I love the story on its own merits, I had to include it here because it so deeply imprinted a love of fantasy on me. That might just be because I was so young when I read it (well, a modernized translation), but it stuck all the same.
2. The White Ship, by H. P. Lovecraft
I won’t even try to explain my reasoning. It probably only makes sense to me. That’s assuming it count at all, being only a few pages long (yeah, Hugo included short stories, but it’s *really* short).
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
This is more or less what cemented my thoughts on the necessity of intent for a person to be deemed guilty of a crime, as well as, of all things, on the entire video game “controversy,” specifically with regards to fantasy/reality line. Of course, I seem to recall games being described here as “unholy,” or something equally Thompsonian, so I should probably stop there.
4. In a Grove, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Okay, I’m cheating. I really wanted to include Rashomon (and its “subjective minds color objective reality” goodness). In my defense, the story concepts are identical and, if the wiki synopsis is correct, In a Grove pretty directly inspired Kurosawa’s film.
5. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Frederich Nietzsche (I know, another iffy one)
Long story short, Zarathustra (combined with Darwin’s Origin of Species) largely broke the literalist/fundamentalist conditioning hammered in by thirteen years of private school. Oddly (ironically?), the concept of the ubermensch also helped harmonize religion and science in my mind; initially, I decided it was a good term to describe religion’s potential to quiet the baser aspects of humanity, next deciding that the evolution of true sentience made such transformations imperative, and, finally and most recently, wondering whether religion in general would count as an evolutionary stage, highlighting flaws in the species that we could actively overcome instead of waiting around for the environment to force change upon us*. That line of thought also coincides with my creationist -> theistic evolutionist -> materialistic evolutionist trajectory, now that I look at it in writing.
*If that seems like a half-complete thought, that’s because it is. I did say “recent.”
1. Hunt for the Red October/ The Pacific Vortex. I don’t remember which I read first, but by the second, my affair with reading was solidified… none of the latter books would have ever been read.
2. Narcissus and Goldmund.
3. Les Miserables.
4. Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
5. Oh the Places You’ll Go
1. First and foremost, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. I read my father’s copy of the Nobel Prize edition when I was a young teenager (there is now a better translation available), and I was blown away. There were then relatively few books with a female protagonist, and this book and this protagonist resonated with me. This also started me on the path to becoming a medievalist. I have spent my entire professional life in medieval studies.
2&3. Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Strictly speaking these are poems, albeit long narratives, written before it became fashionable (or even possible) to write prose fictions. I met both of these works in my sophomore survey of Brit lit and fell in love at first sight. They solidified my decision to become a medievalist and to specialize in Old and Middle English. I have taught both of these works numerous times, read them even more frequently, and written about them, and every time I did/do, I have come away with something new.
4. The Lord of the Rings Again a work I have taught and written about. Like Professor Tolkien, although on a much less distinguished scale, I am a philologist both by nature and training. To create an entire world by means of philology, amazing!
5. Hard to pick a fifth, but perhaps Brave New World, which, given the new reproductive technologies, is perhaps more relevant now than when it was written. This, too, I read as a young teenager picking through my father’s library, and it made a substantial impression on me.
1. C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia: My first encounter with the Christian God, though I didn’t know it at the time (age six). All of Lewis’ fiction speaks to the painfully sweet longing I have always felt for something sublime that hovers just beyond reach of our understanding – what he calls “Joy” – which I was too young to identify as God or the transcendent. But I knew it was out there…
2. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead: Yes, I know everything that is wrong with this book, but it taught me that you could find a unifying philosophy to make sense of everyday life instead of just reacting to your own and others’ emotions. As a novelist, I also find it a liberating example, in that Rand saw no contradiction in combining serious ideas with slam-bang action.
3. Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde (short story): Because I’ve always been afraid of ending up like the title character, a life-of-the-party woman who finally feels safe to express her emotions when she lands a husband, and realizes that all she wants to do is drink and cry.
4. George Orwell, 1984: Required to read this in school when I was eleven, I concluded that there must be a God because human beings were hopeless – all of us, myself included, would break under sufficient pressure and do terrible things. Having discovered original sin, I promptly forgot about it for another ten years.
5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccini’s Daughter (short story): Original sin rediscovered. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who think there are two kinds of people in this world, and people who don’t. How over-concern with moral purity leads to projection of one’s own sins onto others, leading to oppression. Hawthorne saved me from nihilism when my moral perfectionism (Ayn Rand again) came smack up against my own flaws. God accepts us as we are.