Ten most important books
Wed, Apr. 7th, 2004 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterAs seen on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck's LJ:
My ten most important books... not my favorite books, half of which aren't on here, but the books that changed something in me.
Organized in vague chronological order.
1. E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan
2. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
3. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
4. Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game
5. Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel trilogy
6. Richard Ellmann's James Joyce
7. Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, ed. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow
8. Watsuki Nobuhiro's Rurouni Kenshin
9. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time
10. Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature
1. E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan -- I can't remember when I read this, but I think it was the first "big person" book I read with chapters and no pictures. Obviously, I liked it, and it sent me down the entire bookworm thing.
2. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths -- the book I read most obsessively as a kid, along with any other Greek myths I could get my hands on. Looking back, I think this is when I started loving (or realizing I loved) things like legends, myths and fairy tales, tales that were embedded in people's subconscious and tales that could and should be rewritten and retold.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- I picked it up in sixth grade, and it filled a hole in myself I was only half aware I had. I'd been looking for something to replace the fairy tales and myths I read as a kid, and aside from a few YA books (Narnia, Madeleine L'Engle), I didn't know what could do that. Then I read Lord of the Rings and found what I had wanted -- magic and bittersweet endings and Eowyn. I found Terry Brooks in the school library after this, and an entire new world of genre fiction awaited. I also pretended to be Eowyn for years afterward. I think Eowyn is the basic template for my tortured heroine thing.
4. Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game -- Read it the summer of seventh grade (I think) in summer camp, and I think I walked around in a daze for a few days afterward. Looking back now, I think this was the book that made me realize books were a way to empathize, because I severely overidentified with Ender for a while, and it made me think about memory and point of view, especially in the way it ended.
5. Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel trilogy -- I really don't like Mercedes Lackey, and she's one of those authors who have definitely not held up well, but these were the first books I read with gay protagonists. Not only were there gay protagonists, after the first few seconds of mental disconnect -- I'm from somewhere so homogenous that I thought Princeton was a haven of diversity -- Lackey had me adoring Vanyel and rooting for him romantically. This book is why I didn't have a giant freak out when I found slash and yaoi online (unlike some of my friends, who couldn't get around the whole But the GWing pilots aren't gay!).
6. Richard Ellmann's James Joyce -- I read this for my Joyce paper junior year in high school. We were all supposed to write a critical biography on an author of our choosing, except at first, my English teacher had wanted us to do some sort of internet research. Being stupid, I went online, looked, and saw James Joyce had lots of links, so I ended up picking him, despite not understanding or really liking the one story of his I'd read ("Araby"). Then I found this in a university library. I think it may have been the first book I read for criticism that I understood and liked. All the other books for criticism for previous honors papers had been sort of read just to have something for the bibliography and to quote. This book made me really think about Joyce's books, which I didn't really understand, made me try to piece them together and actually analyze them, and it made me like it. This is when I started really thinking about style and words in a book, as opposed to plot and character, and I think this is when I really started to understand literary criticism.
7. Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears -- I read this around junior year high school and was promptly scared out of my mind. Then I reread it and couldn't stop. The fairy tales here were closest to the fairy tales I read -- I used to have this one book with 365 fairy tales, one for each day, and most of them were unbowlderized and scared the hell out of me. The stories in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears made me uncomfortable because they weren't safe or romantic, with happy endings, and they restarted my interest in fairy tales and rewritten fairy tales in an academic way. I found Endicott Studios online and the essays there and other people who wrote about these things and talked about them. This was my reintroduction into the land of Story and story retellings. If I hadn't gotten into East Asian studies and anime, this is probably what I would have written my thesis on.
8. Watsuki Nobuhiro's Rurouni Kenshin -- I watched my first bit of anime in junior year of high school, and then a friend gave me this to read. Then it was Good Morning Call, my first taste of shojo manga. Technically anime was my first introduction to this entire other world of film and literature, one not really based on the western canon, but manga was the one that really caught my attention -- text, not image, is still my drug of choice. It was this entirely different thing, with another grammar and style and tradition. Then I found all the shonen ai stuff in shojo manga (and the incest). By the time I got to college, I knew I wanted to learn Japanese so I wouldn't have to read them in translation. So I learned Japanese, got interested in Japanese culture, went on to EAS, and went on to my thesis, which was informed by four years or so of shojo manga. So while I haven't reread Rurouni Kenshin for a while and while it in itself didn't hit me as hard as some other things, it started me down an entire academic path.
9. Robert Jordan -- ok, everyone's going to laugh at this. I sped through the first five or six books, then read the seventh, then gave up in sheer disgust. It's probably not the first book or series that I've disliked, but it's sort of a symbol of when I started reading non-epic fantasy and when I stopped being interested by Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan. So they were the books I read and grew out of and the ones in which I marked the growing out of as a conscious thing, without the regret that comes with growing out of childhood favorites. I started being a picky reader and stopped indiscriminately reading anything with a fantasy cover. I started paying more attention to things like style and prose and characterization, as opposed to plot alone.
10. Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature -- it's not really this book, but the class in which I read this, which I loved to pieces. I had to take Chinese classes back in high school, it being a bilingual school and all, and I was interested in the literature. It was just -- all in Chinese. And my Chinese isn't that great. So it was very humiliating not to know the vocab and pronunciations and to make stupid mistakes in class, to know that I could make interesting remarks in English, but not in Chinese, and I retaliated by being a complete slacker. In college, I stopped being interested in the western canon, partly I think because I felt I had read enough of it back in high school (well, obviously not enough, but I had exposure). I wanted to know about the other stuff, and I ended up taking a class on Chinese literature. And I loved it. Loved loved loved it. Loved learning a new canon and new tropes in a way that the teachers had kind of explained in high school, but not in English. I loved learning about the differences, on how the language itself influenced the aesthetics of the literature, and I loved sort of watching another literary tradition that I wasn't familiar with grow.
Not included here are books that were important but I can't remember -- the first book I didn't finish. The first book (or article) of criticism that I disagreed with and figured out that it was ok to disagree completely, even if the author was published and I wasn't. The first book that made me realize non-fiction was interesting and that things like scholarship and citations and style mattered as much in non-fiction as they did in fiction. The first book that I realized was being written with an agenda in mind.
heres_luck's LJ:My ten most important books... not my favorite books, half of which aren't on here, but the books that changed something in me.
Organized in vague chronological order.
1. E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan
2. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
3. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
4. Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game
5. Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel trilogy
6. Richard Ellmann's James Joyce
7. Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, ed. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow
8. Watsuki Nobuhiro's Rurouni Kenshin
9. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time
10. Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature
1. E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan -- I can't remember when I read this, but I think it was the first "big person" book I read with chapters and no pictures. Obviously, I liked it, and it sent me down the entire bookworm thing.
2. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths -- the book I read most obsessively as a kid, along with any other Greek myths I could get my hands on. Looking back, I think this is when I started loving (or realizing I loved) things like legends, myths and fairy tales, tales that were embedded in people's subconscious and tales that could and should be rewritten and retold.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- I picked it up in sixth grade, and it filled a hole in myself I was only half aware I had. I'd been looking for something to replace the fairy tales and myths I read as a kid, and aside from a few YA books (Narnia, Madeleine L'Engle), I didn't know what could do that. Then I read Lord of the Rings and found what I had wanted -- magic and bittersweet endings and Eowyn. I found Terry Brooks in the school library after this, and an entire new world of genre fiction awaited. I also pretended to be Eowyn for years afterward. I think Eowyn is the basic template for my tortured heroine thing.
4. Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game -- Read it the summer of seventh grade (I think) in summer camp, and I think I walked around in a daze for a few days afterward. Looking back now, I think this was the book that made me realize books were a way to empathize, because I severely overidentified with Ender for a while, and it made me think about memory and point of view, especially in the way it ended.
5. Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel trilogy -- I really don't like Mercedes Lackey, and she's one of those authors who have definitely not held up well, but these were the first books I read with gay protagonists. Not only were there gay protagonists, after the first few seconds of mental disconnect -- I'm from somewhere so homogenous that I thought Princeton was a haven of diversity -- Lackey had me adoring Vanyel and rooting for him romantically. This book is why I didn't have a giant freak out when I found slash and yaoi online (unlike some of my friends, who couldn't get around the whole But the GWing pilots aren't gay!).
6. Richard Ellmann's James Joyce -- I read this for my Joyce paper junior year in high school. We were all supposed to write a critical biography on an author of our choosing, except at first, my English teacher had wanted us to do some sort of internet research. Being stupid, I went online, looked, and saw James Joyce had lots of links, so I ended up picking him, despite not understanding or really liking the one story of his I'd read ("Araby"). Then I found this in a university library. I think it may have been the first book I read for criticism that I understood and liked. All the other books for criticism for previous honors papers had been sort of read just to have something for the bibliography and to quote. This book made me really think about Joyce's books, which I didn't really understand, made me try to piece them together and actually analyze them, and it made me like it. This is when I started really thinking about style and words in a book, as opposed to plot and character, and I think this is when I really started to understand literary criticism.
7. Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears -- I read this around junior year high school and was promptly scared out of my mind. Then I reread it and couldn't stop. The fairy tales here were closest to the fairy tales I read -- I used to have this one book with 365 fairy tales, one for each day, and most of them were unbowlderized and scared the hell out of me. The stories in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears made me uncomfortable because they weren't safe or romantic, with happy endings, and they restarted my interest in fairy tales and rewritten fairy tales in an academic way. I found Endicott Studios online and the essays there and other people who wrote about these things and talked about them. This was my reintroduction into the land of Story and story retellings. If I hadn't gotten into East Asian studies and anime, this is probably what I would have written my thesis on.
8. Watsuki Nobuhiro's Rurouni Kenshin -- I watched my first bit of anime in junior year of high school, and then a friend gave me this to read. Then it was Good Morning Call, my first taste of shojo manga. Technically anime was my first introduction to this entire other world of film and literature, one not really based on the western canon, but manga was the one that really caught my attention -- text, not image, is still my drug of choice. It was this entirely different thing, with another grammar and style and tradition. Then I found all the shonen ai stuff in shojo manga (and the incest). By the time I got to college, I knew I wanted to learn Japanese so I wouldn't have to read them in translation. So I learned Japanese, got interested in Japanese culture, went on to EAS, and went on to my thesis, which was informed by four years or so of shojo manga. So while I haven't reread Rurouni Kenshin for a while and while it in itself didn't hit me as hard as some other things, it started me down an entire academic path.
9. Robert Jordan -- ok, everyone's going to laugh at this. I sped through the first five or six books, then read the seventh, then gave up in sheer disgust. It's probably not the first book or series that I've disliked, but it's sort of a symbol of when I started reading non-epic fantasy and when I stopped being interested by Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan. So they were the books I read and grew out of and the ones in which I marked the growing out of as a conscious thing, without the regret that comes with growing out of childhood favorites. I started being a picky reader and stopped indiscriminately reading anything with a fantasy cover. I started paying more attention to things like style and prose and characterization, as opposed to plot alone.
10. Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature -- it's not really this book, but the class in which I read this, which I loved to pieces. I had to take Chinese classes back in high school, it being a bilingual school and all, and I was interested in the literature. It was just -- all in Chinese. And my Chinese isn't that great. So it was very humiliating not to know the vocab and pronunciations and to make stupid mistakes in class, to know that I could make interesting remarks in English, but not in Chinese, and I retaliated by being a complete slacker. In college, I stopped being interested in the western canon, partly I think because I felt I had read enough of it back in high school (well, obviously not enough, but I had exposure). I wanted to know about the other stuff, and I ended up taking a class on Chinese literature. And I loved it. Loved loved loved it. Loved learning a new canon and new tropes in a way that the teachers had kind of explained in high school, but not in English. I loved learning about the differences, on how the language itself influenced the aesthetics of the literature, and I loved sort of watching another literary tradition that I wasn't familiar with grow.
Not included here are books that were important but I can't remember -- the first book I didn't finish. The first book (or article) of criticism that I disagreed with and figured out that it was ok to disagree completely, even if the author was published and I wasn't. The first book that made me realize non-fiction was interesting and that things like scholarship and citations and style mattered as much in non-fiction as they did in fiction. The first book that I realized was being written with an agenda in mind.
Tags:
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 10th, 2004 04:14 pm (UTC)I say this, but my reading vocabulary of classical Mandarin was about 500 characters at its peak, and I've lost a lot! I think I need to take a course and read at least a little in the orginal.
(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 11th, 2004 01:22 am (UTC)I actually haven't read many different translations, sadly, and my classical Mandarin sucks ;). Too many years of not paying attention in class! But I love reading it in the original, because none of the translations really capture the succinctness of it, and the parallelism and the way they can express so much in just five or seven characters.
I really love Chinese poetry ^_^.