The Gamechangers (part 1): Fiction and Literature

 I was perusing my book pile and my book lists, matching this year's reads for upcoming entries, when I got to thinking about the desert island bookshelf -- those books I hoped would travel with me into exile if I'm ever sent. Since digital book files are so small, I should be permitted a rather large shelf - and it is larger than I thought... but smaller, too, after a lifetime of reading. So here is the first edition of books that changed me as a writer, a reader, a thinker, and a human being!

P.S. I recognize in advance that some of my choices might seem strange... but I once won an award for being the weirdest kid in my class (maybe in the school's history, even?) so I have earned all forthcoming strangeness and celebrate it!

This is a rip-your-guts out book... made so by, well, all the guts that get ripped out in its pages! This is not quaint, distant, nineteenth-century warfare delivered in the precise, dry voice of A.J.P. Taylor. This is hot lead and horse sweat and gore, immediacy and shit, cannon smoke and splashing through mud that's one-part corpses... and it made me understand how a reader can be transported into the center of a story, even if the center is a grotesque and painful place to be.

I will always remember buying this book from a pretentious shop in Oglebay. I was young and excited to find the title and the clerk lifted a dark brow at me and sneered as if he saw a revolutionary instead of a blue-jeaned girl and sarcastically said, "A little light weekend reading?" As I've noted in other posts, Rand will get you in trouble. The organization that studies her work ought to sell innocuous book wrappers... but I suppose they'd see that as cowardice. I came to Rand because I am a rabid fan of the rock band Rush and their drummer, Neil Peart, cited her as an influence. I'm no Howard Roark or John Galt myself, but I still find Rand's writing beautiful and I return to her every year to be renewed by the language as if by a deep breath of fresh air.

Malaparte's interpretation of the Second World War is painful and the beauty of his language almost lures the reader into sympathy with the Germans at times. I include this book in my list because it is an artful demonstration of how thin the borders are between poetry and prose and because I can never forget its description of frozen horses...

At the same time I discovered Kaputt, I was reading Life and Fate - a vast epic that can encompass entire nations and then shrink down to a single viewpoint. It is also a painful read, but necessary, all the more so because it was initially suppressed.

Long before I studied nineteenth-century British literature in graduate school, a teacher and dear friend gave me Middlemarch. I've been taking it with me as a I grow and I can measure that growth (somewhat) by how my responses to various characters have changed. If ever you need to be placed back into sympathy with your particular community, Middlemarch is a good path back to peace!

An independent study on the influence of museums on literature introduced me to Our Mutual Friend and helped me to make friends with Dickens. [I realize its blasphemy to say so, but I Great Expectations is still as delicious to me as Miss Havisham's wedding cake!] It also set me on the road to my dissertation. Of course, the dissertation I wrote is not now the dissertation I wish I had written, but I cannot lay that fault at the door of the convoluted plot that and (un)dead folk inhabiting Dickens' work.

The same teacher and friend (and protector) that gave me Middlemarch also gave me Prince of Tides. As someone who has survived a domestic situation not too far distant from that found in its pages, I find it a hard read now, but I treasure it still and include it because of the beauty of its language.

This book found me in a small used bookstore that I once frequented and which is now just an empty storefront and, young as I was, I chose it because the cover had a flying horse on it. I didn't know it at the time, but Helprin's work is what is now popularly known as magical realism and I once got into a fight with an unpleasant Spanish teacher when she told me I needed to stop reading fantasy and read about real people. Well, Helprin's work rings with real people, real beauty, and real pain. Wait for the first cold night of winter and then do yourself a favor and take this one into the warm covers with you. Like its protagonist, Peter Lake, you might arise the next day quite changed!

I adore dear Wilkie, even if he is often overshadowed by his friend and more famous collaborator Dickens. I was introduced to him in graduate school and found his work to be a sort of grown up Scooby Doo: fun and merry and just a bit sinister at the edges. I had the fun and privilege of writing (badly) about Collins and this work in the final chapter of my dissertation. He deserved better than my poor prose, certainly, but he taught me a great deal about atmosphere and I repaid in what coin I had!