(no subject)
Apr. 11th, 2004 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonAs the twig is bent ...
And actually, I'm cheating here -- a few of these are writers, rather than individual books. So sue me.
1) The Worm Ouroboros, E.R.R. Eddison: Eddison was a fantasy writer in the vein of Tolkien and Dunsany, whose work had a brief revival when it came out in Ballantine paperback in the '70s, and now appears to be forgotten again. He wrote a rich, amazingly authentic and sustained pastiche of Elizabethan prose, and this book, which I read when I was 12 or 13, was probably the first time I experienced the sensual pleasure of language for its own sake. I (thankfully) soon gave up any attempt to imitate him, but I learned an enormous amount from his writing about rhythm, assonance, the sound and flow of prose.
2) S. J. Perelman, the entire ouevre: I guess on the face of it you could hardly find a writer more unlike Eddison, but Perelman similarly seduced me with language, in his case a satirical melange drawn from trashy novels, Hollywood screenplay-pap, Yiddishisms, advertising jargon, and every sort of 30s-40s-50s pop-cultural referents. Again, utterly inimitable, but inspirational. The "Cloudland Revisited" pieces have probably made me laugh harder than anything else I've read in my life, and should be required for any MST3K fans.
3) Another Country, James Baldwin: Not just because this was my first literary exposure to The Big Gay Sex, but also because I read it when I was just emerging from childhood, and still full of my childhood sense that the adult world, with all its adult emotions and relationships and passions, was a big, scary, incomprehensible place. And this book sort of embodied that for me; I couldn't get any felt understanding whatsoever of what was going on with the characters, their motivations and underlying emotional states and so on. But I knew that in order to be grownup I was going to have to figure that stuff out, probably by living through it, and though exciting, the prospect was also extremely alarming. (I guess I made it, eventually, one way or another.)
4) Virginia Woolf, the diaries and letters: She was who I wanted to be (craziness and all), and Bloomsbury (flaws and all) was the social world I wanted to live in, for quite a while. (It suddenly strikes me that fandom is my Bloomsbury. My, my.) Also, I gleaned from her some (though certainly not enough) clues about the management of long and complex sentences, and about description.
5) The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry: This book had an enormous influence on who I was--my beliefs, values, aspirations--when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. I'm no longer that same person at all; but as I think back on this book, it strikes me that there's a fairly direct line in my own head between Wendell Berry and Benton Fraser. Hmmmmm.
6) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte: For the same reason as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_aerye_-- Jane's "demand for selfhood even at the risk of losing love." And because it was my first encounter, during my romantic teens, with the concept that sometimes love isn't the point. (This also, on reflection, strikes me as a very Fraserish book--the story of an orphan, shunned, reviled, and misunderstood, sustained by principle and an ultimately unshakeable determination to hew to her own understanding of who she truly is.)
7) Nairn's London, Ian Nairn: This is not a travel guide so much as a passionate, opinionated love/hate letter to the architecture and cityscape of London, circa 1966. It was almost singlehandedly responsible for guiding me into ten years spent pursuing a dream of working as an architect or city planner; I wanted to be able to see with Nairn's acuity, and to make buildings and public spaces that were worthy of that kind of vision.
8) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson: I spent much of my youth filled with guilt and self-contempt that I was a timid dutiful wussy instead of a crazed wild-eyed burning-brand genius like the good Doctor. Thompson is the late 60s/early 70s for me, with all the apocalyptic craziness, the really unhinged optimism and naive despair, of that impossibly faraway time.
9) The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher: I came across this book when I was just beginning to live in my body, rather than locked up inside my head, and Fisher did a great deal to convince me that this was a gain rather than a loss. She gave me awareness of all my five senses, and taught me a lot about cooking into the bargain.
10) The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin: Dude. Dude. This is slash, pure and simple. I had no idea at the time I read it, of course, no real clue as to why I found the central relationship so powerfully compelling. It's quite an experience to go back and reread this now. (It was actually a toss-up between this and The Dispossessed, which influenced my political views as much as Left Hand of Darkness shaped my slashy proclivities.)
And actually, I'm cheating here -- a few of these are writers, rather than individual books. So sue me.
1) The Worm Ouroboros, E.R.R. Eddison: Eddison was a fantasy writer in the vein of Tolkien and Dunsany, whose work had a brief revival when it came out in Ballantine paperback in the '70s, and now appears to be forgotten again. He wrote a rich, amazingly authentic and sustained pastiche of Elizabethan prose, and this book, which I read when I was 12 or 13, was probably the first time I experienced the sensual pleasure of language for its own sake. I (thankfully) soon gave up any attempt to imitate him, but I learned an enormous amount from his writing about rhythm, assonance, the sound and flow of prose.
2) S. J. Perelman, the entire ouevre: I guess on the face of it you could hardly find a writer more unlike Eddison, but Perelman similarly seduced me with language, in his case a satirical melange drawn from trashy novels, Hollywood screenplay-pap, Yiddishisms, advertising jargon, and every sort of 30s-40s-50s pop-cultural referents. Again, utterly inimitable, but inspirational. The "Cloudland Revisited" pieces have probably made me laugh harder than anything else I've read in my life, and should be required for any MST3K fans.
3) Another Country, James Baldwin: Not just because this was my first literary exposure to The Big Gay Sex, but also because I read it when I was just emerging from childhood, and still full of my childhood sense that the adult world, with all its adult emotions and relationships and passions, was a big, scary, incomprehensible place. And this book sort of embodied that for me; I couldn't get any felt understanding whatsoever of what was going on with the characters, their motivations and underlying emotional states and so on. But I knew that in order to be grownup I was going to have to figure that stuff out, probably by living through it, and though exciting, the prospect was also extremely alarming. (I guess I made it, eventually, one way or another.)
4) Virginia Woolf, the diaries and letters: She was who I wanted to be (craziness and all), and Bloomsbury (flaws and all) was the social world I wanted to live in, for quite a while. (It suddenly strikes me that fandom is my Bloomsbury. My, my.) Also, I gleaned from her some (though certainly not enough) clues about the management of long and complex sentences, and about description.
5) The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry: This book had an enormous influence on who I was--my beliefs, values, aspirations--when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. I'm no longer that same person at all; but as I think back on this book, it strikes me that there's a fairly direct line in my own head between Wendell Berry and Benton Fraser. Hmmmmm.
6) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte: For the same reason as
_aerye_-- Jane's "demand for selfhood even at the risk of losing love." And because it was my first encounter, during my romantic teens, with the concept that sometimes love isn't the point. (This also, on reflection, strikes me as a very Fraserish book--the story of an orphan, shunned, reviled, and misunderstood, sustained by principle and an ultimately unshakeable determination to hew to her own understanding of who she truly is.)7) Nairn's London, Ian Nairn: This is not a travel guide so much as a passionate, opinionated love/hate letter to the architecture and cityscape of London, circa 1966. It was almost singlehandedly responsible for guiding me into ten years spent pursuing a dream of working as an architect or city planner; I wanted to be able to see with Nairn's acuity, and to make buildings and public spaces that were worthy of that kind of vision.
8) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson: I spent much of my youth filled with guilt and self-contempt that I was a timid dutiful wussy instead of a crazed wild-eyed burning-brand genius like the good Doctor. Thompson is the late 60s/early 70s for me, with all the apocalyptic craziness, the really unhinged optimism and naive despair, of that impossibly faraway time.
9) The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher: I came across this book when I was just beginning to live in my body, rather than locked up inside my head, and Fisher did a great deal to convince me that this was a gain rather than a loss. She gave me awareness of all my five senses, and taught me a lot about cooking into the bargain.
10) The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin: Dude. Dude. This is slash, pure and simple. I had no idea at the time I read it, of course, no real clue as to why I found the central relationship so powerfully compelling. It's quite an experience to go back and reread this now. (It was actually a toss-up between this and The Dispossessed, which influenced my political views as much as Left Hand of Darkness shaped my slashy proclivities.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 04:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 04:39 pm (UTC)Dineson is someone I should go back to -- I think I read her too young, or something, and it didn't take, but she deserves another shot.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 04:54 pm (UTC)If you like memoirs, I'd suggest 'Out of Africa', but if you like wild and different storytelling, try "Winter's Tales." She's one of my passions; I so admire someone who had the guts to start over *three times* in her life, not just in her writing.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-12 12:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-12 01:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 04:19 pm (UTC)I also loved your vid idea, by the way--you should so vid Mulder & Dylan. You'd kick their asses.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 04:42 pm (UTC)And I'm delighted you like the vid idea--alas, actually doing it would require wading through five or six seasons of XF, clip-hunting, and I don't think I'm up to it. I'm going to try to talk Lum into it instead. *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 05:54 pm (UTC)fandom is my Bloomsbury.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow, I'm going to have to mull that over for a while, because I can't believe I hadn't thought of it that way, but me too.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 07:38 pm (UTC)And re: Bloomsbury, I can't believe I never thought of that myself until earlier today when I was typing this up. It's for sure something I want to contemplate at more length, when I'm less tired.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 06:14 pm (UTC)And I now recall that both Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy have said S.J. Perelman was a major influence on their own humor writing. I must read him. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 07:35 pm (UTC)There's something about Perelman that reminds me of you, actually--the care in construction of prose (I was going to say "fastidiousness," but that's not quite the right word), and, at times, the weary and yet still lacerating outrage at human stupidity. (Um, my own prose is getting a bit sloppy here, and I must shamble off to bed...)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 08:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-11 08:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-12 01:28 pm (UTC)