gimme that!
Apr. 11th, 2004 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sigersonI'm horking this meme from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kassrachel for my own nefarious purposes. Ten most influential books; not just those you loved or remember, but which actually shaped you. (Well, that's my take on it, anyway.)
1. A series of Greek Mythology for Kids. I read them till the covers fell off. Lumped in with this is the story of Perseus, which my Papa Frank read to us when we were...must have been three or four.
2. All of Sherlock Holmes. Aaaaallll of it! Right down to the Nicholas Meyer and August Derleth pastiches! Not only does this have something to do with my eclectic learning and desire for knowledge, but I'm pretty sure it skewed my taste in men permanently.
3. Bloom County collections. Since Dad runs a paper, he gets the collected comics sent to him as promotional gifts--and Bloom County became the staple of reading. In fact, I've been told that I was reading them at age three. Not that I got all the jokes...some of them took until college...but it developed my inner Opus. (And my outer Binkley.)
4. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Just out of college, and it made me feel that despite things going wrong--despite horrific things--there were still ways to come out well, to break the enchantment or change oneself.
5.The Dragonlance Chronicles/Legends series. Shut up. I loved them. Took the realm of fantasy out of the deep language of Tolkien and made it just right for my formative junior-high mind. I still think my humor can be largely traced to Fizban.
6. Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton. Forced me to take a good long look at my Neopagan beliefs, and question what they were built on, and whether that mattered...Probably led me to my current academic dreams.
7. Dreaming the Dark by Starhawk. Helped kick-start those Neopagan beliefs to begin with. Showed me that I wasn't alone...
8. A collection of T.S. Eliot poetry that belonged to Dad. (I wonder if he wants it back.) It's a paperback collection that I take with me to most new places. The Waste Land influenced my thoughts--and hideous early writing--through most of highschool and college. Ash Wednesday, though I do not claim to understand it fully, has come to be a statement of faith for me. I read it aloud about once or twice a year, just to myself and the room.
9. There's a children's book titled Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I only read it once, when I was about seven. It's about a little girl after Hiroshima, and that she gets very, very sick and folds cranes to make a wish to get well. She dies before she finishes a thousand. I had never encountered death in fiction before. I can still see the illustrations, from the one time I took it out of the library and the single time I read it.
10.The Fairy Books, collected by Andrew Lang. I owned a few and checked out the rest from the library. Such a wide range of other stories! The same theme over and over in some, and wildly different cultures and ideas in others...I wish I had a collection of the illustrations.
In part, this is inspired by having read _The_Da_Vinci_Code_ this morning, and...um...well...
I really disliked it. Well written, engaging...I guess. But me reading it is like Star Trek watched by a physics geek. I winced every time he described a single symbol as if it were absolute truth, with a singular, universally agreed meaning; I put the book down to do a one-minute rant about the Murrayite theories being disproven for a long while now, and...well...You see, I love stuff about the divine feminine. Love it. But I don't like stringing unrelated symbols together, Frazer-like, until they seem to make a Big Story. And it didn't help that I figured out about half of the clues before the protagonists did.
Sigh. Is this part of the same tendency that scorned Snow Crash? Or is this pedantic irritation? Or does the book just plain suck?
kassrachel for my own nefarious purposes. Ten most influential books; not just those you loved or remember, but which actually shaped you. (Well, that's my take on it, anyway.)1. A series of Greek Mythology for Kids. I read them till the covers fell off. Lumped in with this is the story of Perseus, which my Papa Frank read to us when we were...must have been three or four.
2. All of Sherlock Holmes. Aaaaallll of it! Right down to the Nicholas Meyer and August Derleth pastiches! Not only does this have something to do with my eclectic learning and desire for knowledge, but I'm pretty sure it skewed my taste in men permanently.
3. Bloom County collections. Since Dad runs a paper, he gets the collected comics sent to him as promotional gifts--and Bloom County became the staple of reading. In fact, I've been told that I was reading them at age three. Not that I got all the jokes...some of them took until college...but it developed my inner Opus. (And my outer Binkley.)
4. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Just out of college, and it made me feel that despite things going wrong--despite horrific things--there were still ways to come out well, to break the enchantment or change oneself.
5.The Dragonlance Chronicles/Legends series. Shut up. I loved them. Took the realm of fantasy out of the deep language of Tolkien and made it just right for my formative junior-high mind. I still think my humor can be largely traced to Fizban.
6. Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton. Forced me to take a good long look at my Neopagan beliefs, and question what they were built on, and whether that mattered...Probably led me to my current academic dreams.
7. Dreaming the Dark by Starhawk. Helped kick-start those Neopagan beliefs to begin with. Showed me that I wasn't alone...
8. A collection of T.S. Eliot poetry that belonged to Dad. (I wonder if he wants it back.) It's a paperback collection that I take with me to most new places. The Waste Land influenced my thoughts--and hideous early writing--through most of highschool and college. Ash Wednesday, though I do not claim to understand it fully, has come to be a statement of faith for me. I read it aloud about once or twice a year, just to myself and the room.
9. There's a children's book titled Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I only read it once, when I was about seven. It's about a little girl after Hiroshima, and that she gets very, very sick and folds cranes to make a wish to get well. She dies before she finishes a thousand. I had never encountered death in fiction before. I can still see the illustrations, from the one time I took it out of the library and the single time I read it.
10.The Fairy Books, collected by Andrew Lang. I owned a few and checked out the rest from the library. Such a wide range of other stories! The same theme over and over in some, and wildly different cultures and ideas in others...I wish I had a collection of the illustrations.
In part, this is inspired by having read _The_Da_Vinci_Code_ this morning, and...um...well...
I really disliked it. Well written, engaging...I guess. But me reading it is like Star Trek watched by a physics geek. I winced every time he described a single symbol as if it were absolute truth, with a singular, universally agreed meaning; I put the book down to do a one-minute rant about the Murrayite theories being disproven for a long while now, and...well...You see, I love stuff about the divine feminine. Love it. But I don't like stringing unrelated symbols together, Frazer-like, until they seem to make a Big Story. And it didn't help that I figured out about half of the clues before the protagonists did.
Sigh. Is this part of the same tendency that scorned Snow Crash? Or is this pedantic irritation? Or does the book just plain suck?
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 07:01 pm (UTC)Haven't read the Da Vinci Code, so can't speak to its goodness or lack thereof. But I'm sorry to hear that you didn't dig Snow Crash, which I love. (I figure it's really rare to find Sumerian mythology in a piece of cyberpunk, you know? :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-04-12 06:34 am (UTC)I've been reading that again lately, for the third time. I love Snow Crash. I brought it with me to read while I sat around at Anime Boston.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-12 08:26 pm (UTC)Re: DaVinci Code - First pulp fiction I've read in a while, and I loved it. Absolutely, it's terrible from an academic point of view. As you point out, symbols with secret, singular meanings are lame, and the book is based on seriously dated ideas of a single Goddess-worshipping pre-Christian world. Plus, isn't it a bit weird how even in the contemporary world there are only "the Church" and those who resist her? I mean, where are all the Anglicans in England? How about a geeky, super-liberal gay German Lutheran? Or an Hispanic convert to evangelical Christianity? You get the idea. Still I thought the book was really fun. Since I have not discovered a trove of better researched religion-infused academic mysteries, I was just glad to be in one - even if its religious intellectual history, semiotics and European demography were weak.
Thanks for making me think about this!
no subject
Date: 2004-04-13 03:55 am (UTC)Which reminds me. It's been maybe seven years since I read Snow Crash. I might check to see if I like it, now that there's time and distance...
Wonderful that you browsed through eeblet! I'm going for first the Master's, then, if all's well and my head hasn't popped, the PhD. Thanks to you too!
no subject
Date: 2004-05-05 06:27 am (UTC)I couldn't get past the second chapter of the Da Vinci Code, despite everyone at B&N hounding me about it for the better part of six months (they all loved it). I just found it intensely dull.
As for the meme, or #1s would be the same! My copy of Bulfinch's mythology went absolutely everywhere with me, as a small, dogeared, blue security blanket.
Anywho, I'll go friend you now. Try Snowcrash again, maybe? it's an awesome book, a personal favorite.