books that shaped me

[intertribal]

This is a necromancy of an old meme I found on Torque Control.  I've often tried to make lists like this - this one seems structured enough to work, so I'll give it a shot. 

6
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
The Owl and the Pussycat, Edward Lear
People, Peter Spier
The Lion and the Gypsy, Geoffrey Patterson
The Prince and the Pauper (abridged), Mark Twain

8
The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
The Jungle Book (abridged), Rudyard Kipling
Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf etc., Catherine Storr
Fairytales, Terry Jones
Nothing to Be Afraid Of, Jan Mark [a hidden gem]
The BFG, Matilda, The Witches etc, Roald Dahl
A lot of Goosebumps, R. L. Stein [particularly Ghost Beach, It Came From Beneath The Sink, Welcome to Dead House, and especially Be Careful What You Wish For and The Ghost Next Door, which made me cry]

10
Little House on the Prairie series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink
Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis
The Far Side anthologies, Gary Larson
Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie
A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L'Engle
Insane amounts of Greek mythology

12-13
The Song of Roland, Unknown [shit fucked me up!]
Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and Congo, Michael Crichton
1984, George Orwell
33 Things Every Girl Should Know, ed. Tonya Bolden
Ophelia Speaks, ed. Sara Shandler
She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb
To Kill a Mocking-bird, Harper Lee

14-15
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Macbeth and Hamlet, William Shakespeare
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer [shit fucked me up, volume 2 and 3!]
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Animal Farm, George Orwell

16-17
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen
Dubliners, James Joyce
Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, Annie Dillard
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
The Shining and Pet Sematary, Stephen King
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

18
Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih
Macho Camacho's Beat, Luis Rafael Sanchez
The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Discourses on Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli
Night Shift, Stephen King

I think one thing that's interesting here is how my independent fiction-reading drops off totally in high school - while they shaped me, all of those books were assigned (except for Heart of Darkness, sophomore year).  The only thing I read on my own time was Stephen King.  And I retained nothing out of my first semester English/Lit class in college.  I know we read books but I have no idea what.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

missed this post originally.

A Wind in the Door was a big one for me, too--and The Silver Chair

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

It's weird, right, they're both sort of bridesmaid-instead-of-the-bride books.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Maybe? With the Narnia books, there are so many that I think different people have different ones they gravitate to (or away from). And yeah, a wind in the door--that bit at the end where she sang the Echthroi into being--I just LOVED that. And the three Mr. Jenkinses, and the story of Calvin's shoes. And Progo, and Louise the Larger.

Man, I haven't read that book in ages, but look at that! That's how much I loved it.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that part at the end was the best for me. Although what really stands out to me about Wind in the Door is that it introduced me to mitochondria. And I could not believe that they existed after reading it, I was like, oh, come on. Then I got to 9th grade biology class and there actually were mitochondria and I was like, whaaaaat.

That's true about Narnia. There's some books in the series that I'm just like... eurrgh (Magician's Nephew, Witch and the Wardrobe, and the Last Battle especially) but Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Silver Chair, I loved them so. It's almost like they're not part of the same series, because I think they're stylized so differently (not as allegorical? more about journeys?).

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I wonder if she knew the thing about Mitochondria having their own DNA--that they're evolutionary guests that just happen to do us the favor of providing us with energy. I guess she probably did, huh.

Yeah, I think you're probably onto something about journeys and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Silver Chair. For me, the latter sorted my nine-year-old existential crisis out. "We babies can create a play world that beats your real world hollow," said Puddleglum. The power of the imagination to create BETTER. Which isn't about delusion, but about true creativity, generative creation ... which ties back to the Wind in the Door. I loved that ending so much because instead of trying to X the Echthroi, Meg opened up the door for nothingness to become ... something.

Where she does all the big-thing small-thing pairs: sea sand and solar system, butterfly and behemoth--it was like a mandala, it was like a way of putting everything in the whole universe into those few lines. I honestly can't think about it without, to this day, getting choked up.