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There's a thing going around tumblr about posting about "Ten books that have stayed with you in some way over your life", and everybody else was sharing their shame, so I thought I'd join in.
(okay I'm not actually ashamed about any of these, sorry.)
There are many more than ten, but in no particular order, the first ten I thought of:
Miss Twiggly's Tree is a picture book about Miss Twiggly, who is an old lady who is ostracized and mocked by the town because she lives in a tree, and is friendly with bears, and sleeps in her hat, and she did what she liked, and liked what she did. But then the town is flooded, and only Miss Twiggly's house is dry and everybody learns important lessons about friendship and being different! I would like to say that this story stuck with me because of those important lessons, but basically the lesson I took from it was that you could be a grown-up who sleeps in her hat and only talks to bears and dogs and lives in a treehouse and I wanted to be her when I grew up. ...I still want to be her when I grow up. (Also it saddens me that this book isn't better-known.)
*The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll with notes by Martin Gardner - I read this when I was probably way, way too young to be the intended audience for the notes (it was the first Alice I ever read) but I think it's the book that taught me that literature is play - that you have to take it deadly seriously without ever taking it seriously at all or you're missing the point.
*The Wounded Sky by Diane Duane (if I'd read any of her original series first they would be on here instead, but I came in via the Star Trek tie-ins.) Diane Duane's philosophy/theology/cosmology still underlies way more of my own concept of the world than I'd usually like to admit. As does her concept of diversity. And the way she writes friendships and partnerships and crew. And in this book particularly, the playfulness with references - this was maybe the first book I read that had the courage to openly reference other works in the genre, to not pretend it was written in a vacuum. These are the books that when I read them, they feel like what I want the inside of my head to feel like all the time.
*Mom's collection of old Peanuts paperbacks, which I read I don't know how many times as a wee one. I re-read a bunch of them recently for fanart purposes and was reminded again to what extent they shaped basically all of my knowledge of life back when I was still too young to really have any other context for them - I mean, I learned about the existence of concepts like "spite" and "depression" and "world war one" and "hi-fi" from these comics.
*Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, edition circa 1970 - okay I did not actually read the entire dictionary, I just read all the prefaces and endnotes and section headings and manually re-wrote the proto-indo-european glossary in the back into an english-to-PIE dictionary (okay and read a lot of the entries too, yes). From this book I learned to see every word not as something to be defined, but as an artifact of millennia of shifting human cultures, and from there to see all sorts of human cultural artifacts that way.
*The Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Briggs - my grandmother had a copy of this, and starting when I was about 11, when we visited twice a year, I would make it a goal to re-read it in that week. It's hard to summarize how this book stuck with me - other than I still pretty much have it memorized! - but it was a book that did folklore in a really *scholarly* way and maybe one of the first books I read that did things like meticulously cite back to primary sources, and the way it was organized meant that reading it through you really got a sense of how the varying sources shaped the information we have to work with, which I think was a really important way of seeing for me to learn.
*A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. le Guin - I loved a lot of things about this, but one thing it taught me was that high fantasy doesn't have to be set in faux-Britain; another thing it taught me was that when there's nowhere left to run from my own personal shadow, to turn around and chase it instead. (I still find myself running from my own shadow quite a lot, but when I recognize that I'm doing it, it's this book that taught me to notice what I'm doing, and how to defeat the shadow when I catch up to it at last.)
*The Number of the Beast - Because all the sex in every possible combination, but also Oz and picnics with Lewis Carroll and Barsoom and flying cars that go to Mars and prized collections of SF magazines in the basement and Pantheistic Multiperson Solipsism. (If there's an entry in here that's My Shame it's probably this one, except that one of the things this book taught me is how to be completely and utterly shameless about the stories I like, SO THERE.)
*My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson is a kids' chapter book that's unfairly obscure. It's a collection of loosely connected vignettes about a pair of siblings who are weird, and whose parents are weird, and who spend most of the time with events spiraling vaguely out of control around them but everything comes right in the end because they as individuals may have difficultly with basic functioning in society, but their relationships with each other are utterly solid. (Although possibly the story in here that stuck with me most was the one about the two spinster sisters who lived across the street, and how they wanted kids of their own, so one of them went to the city for a weekend and came back pregnant and never said anything about it except that they wanted to have a baby, so she had one.)
*Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars - possibly the only YA novel I ever read that actually described Junior High in a way that I recognize from my own experience, and if only for that, it would be one of my favorite books ever, because at an important point in my life it reassured me that yes, there were other preteens just like me in existence, which I'd never had evidence of before, and even if they were boys who lived twenty years ago and in an alternate Chicago and with much better transportation options than I had, I would still take it.
(okay I'm not actually ashamed about any of these, sorry.)
There are many more than ten, but in no particular order, the first ten I thought of:
Miss Twiggly's Tree is a picture book about Miss Twiggly, who is an old lady who is ostracized and mocked by the town because she lives in a tree, and is friendly with bears, and sleeps in her hat, and she did what she liked, and liked what she did. But then the town is flooded, and only Miss Twiggly's house is dry and everybody learns important lessons about friendship and being different! I would like to say that this story stuck with me because of those important lessons, but basically the lesson I took from it was that you could be a grown-up who sleeps in her hat and only talks to bears and dogs and lives in a treehouse and I wanted to be her when I grew up. ...I still want to be her when I grow up. (Also it saddens me that this book isn't better-known.)
*The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll with notes by Martin Gardner - I read this when I was probably way, way too young to be the intended audience for the notes (it was the first Alice I ever read) but I think it's the book that taught me that literature is play - that you have to take it deadly seriously without ever taking it seriously at all or you're missing the point.
*The Wounded Sky by Diane Duane (if I'd read any of her original series first they would be on here instead, but I came in via the Star Trek tie-ins.) Diane Duane's philosophy/theology/cosmology still underlies way more of my own concept of the world than I'd usually like to admit. As does her concept of diversity. And the way she writes friendships and partnerships and crew. And in this book particularly, the playfulness with references - this was maybe the first book I read that had the courage to openly reference other works in the genre, to not pretend it was written in a vacuum. These are the books that when I read them, they feel like what I want the inside of my head to feel like all the time.
*Mom's collection of old Peanuts paperbacks, which I read I don't know how many times as a wee one. I re-read a bunch of them recently for fanart purposes and was reminded again to what extent they shaped basically all of my knowledge of life back when I was still too young to really have any other context for them - I mean, I learned about the existence of concepts like "spite" and "depression" and "world war one" and "hi-fi" from these comics.
*Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, edition circa 1970 - okay I did not actually read the entire dictionary, I just read all the prefaces and endnotes and section headings and manually re-wrote the proto-indo-european glossary in the back into an english-to-PIE dictionary (okay and read a lot of the entries too, yes). From this book I learned to see every word not as something to be defined, but as an artifact of millennia of shifting human cultures, and from there to see all sorts of human cultural artifacts that way.
*The Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Briggs - my grandmother had a copy of this, and starting when I was about 11, when we visited twice a year, I would make it a goal to re-read it in that week. It's hard to summarize how this book stuck with me - other than I still pretty much have it memorized! - but it was a book that did folklore in a really *scholarly* way and maybe one of the first books I read that did things like meticulously cite back to primary sources, and the way it was organized meant that reading it through you really got a sense of how the varying sources shaped the information we have to work with, which I think was a really important way of seeing for me to learn.
*A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. le Guin - I loved a lot of things about this, but one thing it taught me was that high fantasy doesn't have to be set in faux-Britain; another thing it taught me was that when there's nowhere left to run from my own personal shadow, to turn around and chase it instead. (I still find myself running from my own shadow quite a lot, but when I recognize that I'm doing it, it's this book that taught me to notice what I'm doing, and how to defeat the shadow when I catch up to it at last.)
*The Number of the Beast - Because all the sex in every possible combination, but also Oz and picnics with Lewis Carroll and Barsoom and flying cars that go to Mars and prized collections of SF magazines in the basement and Pantheistic Multiperson Solipsism. (If there's an entry in here that's My Shame it's probably this one, except that one of the things this book taught me is how to be completely and utterly shameless about the stories I like, SO THERE.)
*My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson is a kids' chapter book that's unfairly obscure. It's a collection of loosely connected vignettes about a pair of siblings who are weird, and whose parents are weird, and who spend most of the time with events spiraling vaguely out of control around them but everything comes right in the end because they as individuals may have difficultly with basic functioning in society, but their relationships with each other are utterly solid. (Although possibly the story in here that stuck with me most was the one about the two spinster sisters who lived across the street, and how they wanted kids of their own, so one of them went to the city for a weekend and came back pregnant and never said anything about it except that they wanted to have a baby, so she had one.)
*Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars - possibly the only YA novel I ever read that actually described Junior High in a way that I recognize from my own experience, and if only for that, it would be one of my favorite books ever, because at an important point in my life it reassured me that yes, there were other preteens just like me in existence, which I'd never had evidence of before, and even if they were boys who lived twenty years ago and in an alternate Chicago and with much better transportation options than I had, I would still take it.
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(Anonymous) 2014-01-22 07:04 am (UTC)(link)no subject