My Most Influential Books

[thedeadlyhook]

This'll be another post sometime (most likely from toysdream, because it's one of his hot topics), but I hate memes. I believe in convergence, which is something different, but the way meme has been coopted by current pop culture is just plain inaccurate, as a concurrent thought everyone shares. Actually, the entire LJ "meme" thing is enough to prove that, because an LJ meme is actually the close cousin to a chain letter, a spin the bottle party game. The actually academic meme concept is, I think, full of it. (I'll let Toys elaborate more because he does it better.)

Why I'm Talking About This: Because I gacked this particular "meme" from redredshoes whose own various interesting thinky thoughts about "most influential" versus "most important" lit that particular fire in me that flares up in my every time someone publishes a list of the "Best" or "Most Important" films or what-say-you. Because hello, such a list can never take into account all the ways in which art is "influential" - globally, Birth of a Nation was a hugely influential film, because of the political fallout that came from it here in the U.S., but because is it a film that everyone today should see for its "message"? Uh, no. Criteria for judging "influence" is something I can get into long arguments about, because no matter what kind of judging body you assemble, you're never going to get one that can see all the angles, that can defend their choices across the board as having taken everything into account. Which basically reduces any "best of" list to one of personal preferences, based on whatever parameters you felt like setting up. Period.

That said, I did go ahead and compile my own personal list of "Most Influential Books." (Because of course you're reading this because you want to know about me, right?) My criteria was "how long a shadow did it cast on my psyche?", so you will, perhaps not so surprisingly, notice a lot of children's books here.

The The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (illos by Jules Feiffer)
The Chronicles of Narnia (series), by C.S. Lewis
Danse Macbre, by Stephen King (essays on horror)
Friday, by Robert Heinlein
Miss Hickory, by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey (illos by Ruth Chrisman Gannett)
Far Out the Long Canal, by Meindert DeJong (illos by Nancy Grossman)
The Headless Cupid, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Pet Semetary, by Stephen King
All My Sins Remembered, by Joe Haldeman
Splinter of the Mind's Eye, by Alan Dean Foster
Modesty Blaise (series), by Peter O'Donnell
Flame and the Flower, by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

Not a top ten, obviously, but a top thirteen, and that's counting the Narnia and Modesty Blaise series as single entries. It's leaving a lot of stuff out, too, needless to be said, such as Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach (for its wonderful surreality and IMHO status as a forerunner of Harry Potter), E.L. Konisburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankwieler (to which I can trace my lifelong love of museums), Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins series, and other suchlike, plus a lot of comic books that really should be there - my brother's original Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Avengers issues, Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe, etc., and a hell of a lot of nonfiction, but there you have it. This is pretty much a map to my developing brain. If I was really going longer, I should really be giving notice on Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and other works, such as Deenie (there was a worry for awhile if I might not have scoliosis, the topic of that book - I just had terrible posture) and Forever (ooh, a losing your virginity story) as also incredibly influential. Not to mention Blume's adult book, Wifey, which I was too young to read when it came out. I still remember standing in the drugstore to look at that, the illict, furious blush of reading about no-kidding bow-chicka-bow porn-style sex from an author who I'd previously relied on to tell me Important Life Lessons without talking down to the teen me. Blume seemed to be going through her own sort of '70s revolution with that book - there was a passage I remember about how bronze its heroine was, skin and clothes, that seemed oh-so-'70s - and I'm kind of insanely curious to revisit it now. Wonder how it will seem without the looking-through-my-fingers quality?

Of the individual tomes I've named: Flame and the Flower is there because it's the first no-kidding there-is-sex-in-this-book romance novel I ever read, not counting surreptitious peeks at my cousins' copy of Sweet Savage Love. (For the record, I learned about sex from my cousins. My reaction (at thirteen) - ewwwww!) Splinter of the Mind's Eye, technically my first exposure to fanfic, since that's what it was, in retrospect. That was a hot book too, full of sexual tension between Luke and Leia and actually foreshadowed a lot of the later dynamic between Luke and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. Modesty Blaise, one of my guiding spirits. All My Sins Remembered, the Joe Haldeman book that made a bigger impression on me than The Forever War, since the story is so personal, of an agent whose identity keeps getting replaced to suit each job and eventually loses himself somewhere in the process (more relevant now than ever, that I think about it - how the job becomes your identity, and if you change jobs all the time, who are you?). Miss Hickory - helped me with my early processing of the idea of the world being a place not all of fairness and light. Still a surreal book that defies description. Grim and strange and unsettling, yet oddly life-affirming. Read it when I was very young. Never forgot it. Far Out the Long Canal - the "quest" journey from a very personal perspective. A young boy learning how to skate. Scary and lonely and visionary. Amazing stuff. And I have a lot of things to say about the importance of good children's ficiton to developing minds, and the ridiculousness of various parent and teacher efforts to sanitize children's entertainment, but that's not a topic to get into here (that's a novel's worth of talk, one of my hot buttons).

But the one that really gets me when I go back through this list is Pet Semetary. Not only is this, in my mind, King's best book because it's so tightly written and intensely personal, with none of the rambling, where-was-I quality that often characterizes his later works (stepping outside of my train of thought here to mention how disappointing later episodes of Kingdom Hospital have gotten - quit yer rambling and focus, would you, godammit, focus!... gah, just watch the Lars von Trier versions), but because it came at a time I think I was still processing a lot of my own ideas about death. Plenty of that in my family while growing up, oh yes, strong strain of cancer all the way through the mother's side, and I'd been in a one-parent household for seven years when I read this book, based on the publish date of my copy. It had a huge impact on me, the proof of which came when I opened a page at random this morning while compiling this list and found something very like my own prose style staring back at me, in the scene where Louis's daughter cries in advance over the idea that her cat might die. Uh, and did I just write a frighteningly similiar scene in which Graciela sobs over the possibility of bad things happening in "Bad Trip"? Yes, I did. All completely unconsciously. But I guess that's the real acid test to proving an influence - how much of it are you ever aware of?

Footnote: one very good thing to come out of this is that it made me get off my butt and place that Amazon book order I'd been idly considering. Soon I'll be receiving a package of worn ex-library copies of these to place on my shelf, where they really do belong.