Goodreads Bookshelf
Books that fit a time, books that transform a person's world
Looking all the way back to the Boys and Reading conference, over a week ago, I want to go to that well one more time. Probably my favorite speaker of the day talked about the impact that books and writers can have on a person's life. I think most English teachers will tell you that certain books have really spoken to them, and that's what this guy was talking about: books that you feel almost as if they were written just for you, as though they were just the thing that you needed at a certain point in your life.
Have you had such books or authors in your own life? I'd be curious what or who they were. These aren't even necessarily books that have remained favorites--though they certainly might--but they're books that were important in your development. Here's my list, at least as it occurs to me this morning:
The Bible (didn't see that one coming, did you?) It's true, though. My family was religious and there was a whole lotta Bible reading going on in the Sherck household. I can't claim to have read the whole thing, but I've found that I know it better than many Christians I've talked to. The Bible shaped my early beliefs and in a lot of ways it was the Bible that started to turn me away from Christianity.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien This was one of the first works of fiction that I read that just completely captured my imagination, and it opened up a world of fantasy (and through that, science fiction) to me. I think I first read this in 5th grade and over the next 6 or 7 years I read Tolkien's masterpiece several times and hundreds and hundreds of the genre he inspired.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins This book not only made evolution comprehensible to me, it also raised interesting ideas about culture and furthered my skepticism toward religion, particularly as it lead me to additional books and essays by Richard Dawkins.
The Historical Figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders This was the first of several books I read that tried to get at who Jesus really was. What was most significant was the way that it transformed my understanding of the Bible as a historical document rather than a religious one.
The poetry of John Keats Keats' poetry came at just about the right time in my life. Keats as a young poet was struggling with a lot of the ideas and the desires that I was working through myself.
Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman This book was so fascinating to me because it helped explain the social world around me as it examined the history of our public dicourse and theorized about the effect that the form of discourse had on its content, and in turn the effect that both had on us as people. In short, it got me thinking and got me reading non-fiction.
On the Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann translation) I read these for, of all things, a political science seminar on Nietzsche. It wasn't just Nietzsche's ideas that were fascinating (though they were), it was his style as rendered by Kaufmann. It half-consciously influenced my writing style for a year or so.
Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn I picked this book up randomly while working in a bookstore, and the title struck me because I'd just read Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and I was interested in some response to it. Instead, I got something far different which transformed my way of thinking about a number of issues.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Brought me back toward fiction after a lot of non-fiction, got me thinking "gee, I think I'd still like to teach English!"
These are the first ones that came to mind--what are your books?