Which books define you

The Essential Ellison a 50 Year Retrospective edited by Harlan Ellison. Anytime I've read Ellison, I've learn new things about literature and the world around me. He inspired me to look beyond what I thought I knew about the world. Im grateful to have found his stories which have touched my life in so many ways.

The Star Rover by Jack London. That Jack London could so unexpected a book as this. It also gave me a new appreciation for classic literature.:)
 
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As a negative, I would say that Anne McCaffrey's Ship That Sang was my ah ha moment when it comes to quality vs popularity. Despite it being SF and full of SF objects and situations, some books simply don't do anything at all to satisfy my desire to read about the novel situations and solutions that the future is likely to bring. I became much more wary about screening books before reading them after that. Previously I had been working my local library's SF section, reading most everything as I came across it.
 
Hmmm. Very interesting question.
From young age to late teens:
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
The Princess and the Goblin
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner
Tintin, especially Secret of the Unicorn, The Seven Crystal Balls
Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein
Moorcock, starting with Elric of Melnibone, and The Knight of the Swords
Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve by Danny Abse
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
 
dannymcg said:
Also many years ago me and a mate had a few large scale maps of London and Home Counties taped together.We spent several days with different colours highlighters and hand written post it labels plotting out the Martian advances exactly as described in WotW. Great fun and a bit scary when you saw how quickly the different columns spread
..
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Every kid should have a friend like that.
 
dannymcg said:
A few hundred feet from my childhood home was a large abandoned pond surrounded by thick woodland. One field further away was two deep gullies , again heavily wooded. In between was a maze of old coal mine extract pumping tunnels. These were blocked off by girders but the bolder kid could gain access. Many a time I had my Rogue Male hide out planned in there!
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There's a deeply eroded ditch or gully near here, in a pasture area, about eight feet deep at the deepest I suppose, and though I'll never see 60 again, I can still get a little of the "old, good feeling" (as Hemingway's Nick Adams thought it, in "Big Two-Hearted River," didn't he?) when I look into it and think how one could hide there if pursued. I guess I'm not totally out of touch with boyhood yet, nor do I want to be.
 
dannymcg said:
I like seeing these old threads being revived!
War of the Worlds
Rogue Male
The 39 steps
And Dune - quite a few have picked this and LOTR
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For someone new to the chrons there is truly a treasure trove of old posts to explore. I love the suggested posts that show up at the bottom, it's like crawling head first into the rabbit hole.
 
Extollager said:
Those are all standouts for me except Dune, which I probably read in high school 40+ years ago.

But I wanted to ask a question about Rogue Male. Many years ago I was talking with another comp teacher, and it turned out we both had the kind of Geoffrey Household-moment sometimes when rolling along on a car trip -- Where and how could I hide in this landscape if I were being pursued?

I've wondered if that's a common mental scenario, for males especially.

Other guys relate to that?

And, of course, do we have women readers who get into the same scenario?

Possibly relevant -- dannymcg, do these interest you?

Topographic Romance - Fancyclopedia 3

Cartographic Romance - Fancyclopedia 3
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I'm not familiar with rogue male, but I'll have to look it up. I haven't necessarily found myself looking for hiding places, but I do tend to pick out defendable positions in locations where I spend a lot of time, work, home, etc.
 
Female reader: yes I note hidey holes in the terrain, the patterns people form in blindly getting from one well known spot to another, how best to blend with any crowd and be invisible in plain sight.

But I don't know that anything I read prompted me to develop and establish these habits.

I just always wondered what / who was hiding just out of sight, where might I slip off into another world...


I have to say I've expanded my tbr pile from some of today's suggestions :)
 
"Define me" is a tough concept to grok.

Having had a profound affect on my world-view, maybe?

La Morte d'Arthur, Homer's Odyssey (in prose form), Captains Courageous, Twenty Kiloleagues under the Sea, Treasure Island, Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Count of Monte Cristo, Three Musketeers, Tale of Two Cities, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn; all of which I'd read by the time I was ten years old.

It's looking like the theme would be, "Balls-Out in the face of adversity!"

Later, the Other, Hilarious writings of Mark Twain; and I have a certain affinity towards Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Okay, that might "define" me, somewhat.
 
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hopewrites said:
Female reader: yes I note hidey holes in the terrain, the patterns people form in blindly getting from one well known spot to another, how best to blend with any crowd and be invisible in plain sight.

But I don't know that anything I read prompted me to develop and establish these habits.

I just always wondered what / who was hiding just out of sight, where might I slip off into another world...


I have to say I've expanded my tbr pile from some of today's suggestions :)
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I went through a phase like that - teenage years - wondering what was hiding just out of sight.
However I think Jaws had a bit to do with it. One of those who only paddled for a couple of summers after watching it!
 
Discworld and The Invisibles are the two straight off the cuff answers to this for me.

Not only have they give me a huge amount of artistic enjoyment and inspiration, but they affect how I see life.

Discworld made me both more cynical and more idealistic, and generally of the idea that most people are capable of great foolishness but are still worth rooting for.

The Invisibles made me less sympathetic to conflict and those who drive it, regardless of their reasons for it. Although of course, most of those swept up in it are still worth rooting for ;) But not all. Some are cannibals, and you shouldn't let in the cannibal just because he's using a knife and fork.
 
Extollager said:
But I wanted to ask a question about Rogue Male. Many years ago I was talking with another comp teacher, and it turned out we both had the kind of Geoffrey Household-moment sometimes when rolling along on a car trip -- Where and how could I hide in this landscape if I were being pursued?
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Yes, quite often: I wonder if it's another generation's version of the "What would I do in a zombie apocalypse?" that was popular a couple of years ago. It's a great book, by the way.
 
Jo Zebedee said:
which book could you imagine not having read and your life would be poorer for it
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Oh, dear, this is a longer post than I intended.

  • The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, by Angela Carter: this collection of short stories touched my soul, as pretentious as that may sound, linking the fairy tales in children's books to the darker folk tales I'd grown up with;
  • The Crow Road, by Iain Banks: the tales that old car could tell), and also his Whit: set around my childhood home, (in fact, much of his writing, with or without the M -- the least effective pseudonym ever, to quote his own words);
  • The Canterbury Tales, particularly The Knight's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer: had to read the latter in the original Middle English for 'A' Level, and fell in love with the realism of the characters, despite them not being an easy read (the modern translations seem to lose some of the flavour);
  • 1984, by George Orwell, The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Schindler's Ark, by Thomas Keneally: three books I read in my late teens, with which I have a love/hate relationship - I couldn't imagine not having read them, but all three left me horrified, and Schindler's Ark--which I had to read for 'O' Level--had me and half the class in tears as we had to read aloud and discuss it;
  • Ringworld, by Larry Niven: not a particularly great read, but the idea of exploration, oh my; and The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin: an amazing tour de force, again about exploration, but more about people, and it got under my skin;
  • The Book of Skulls, by Robert Silverberg: another I read in my late teens, and one I rejoiced in, even though the story is stilted and flawed, as it subverted the genre for me, and I saw representation, of a sort;
  • The poems of Sorley MacLean, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Liz Lochhead: I love poetry - Aphra Behn also springs to mind (who could not be inspired by someone whose CV reads poet, prostitute/courtesan, agitator, spy? (Anais Nin (another favourite, shh!) followed in some of her footsteps, in many ways)) and Maya Angelou because...Maya Angelou;
  • Persuasion, by Jane Austen: her final completed novel and her most complex, and the one I've returned to several times, unable to understand why it hasn't had a miniseries;
  • Last, but not least, and not a book, but a short story, which I read in Asimov's the year I turned 18, is Boobs, by Suzy McKee Charnas: it's about transformation, about what's under the skin not being the same as everyday appearance; it took me years to understand why it spoke to me the way it did, as I did not have the emotional vocabulary, but one short story meant more than whole books, and possibly kept me sane(ish), and certainly changed my life, thereby defining me.
All set to a soundtrack by Django Reinhardt, but that's another story...
 
I am defined by The Oxford English Dictionary.

Seriously. My first name is an adjective and my last name a noun. Also seriously, many otherwise poker-faced Brits get a fit of the giggles when introduced to Randy Money.



Anyway, fascinating subject, Jo, and the responses have been various and thoughtful, with this one so far a glaring exception. So, looking back, the following are books I remember as establishing some kind of personal first:

Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. Fed and maybe sparked my interest in the America of the 1920s. Since I was growing up in the 1960s, I was living through parallels with the earlier decade.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Read this at least 3 times when I was 10 or 11 years old, not realizing that the different copies in the school library were all of the exact same book. Didn’t matter. I found out all about the life of the castaway and Friday, and enjoyed every reading. I think this is the one that initiated my love of fiction along with a series of books about the Power Boys, a Hardy Boys knock-off.

The Sign of Four & The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These locked down my love of fiction. The ease, comradery and loyalty of Holmes and Watson spoke to me, as did the familiar but still somewhat exotic time and place of Victorian London. I suspect, if I could summon the objectivity, I’d find Doyle had a profound and singular (*cough*) impact on my phrasing and sentence structure.

Agatha Christie. For a time after reading the Holmes stories, probably the main author I went to for entertainment. Especially in her early works, her plots and circumnavigations of reader expectations were ingenious and I remember them as often written with an underlying authorial glee that may have established in my teenage mind the thought that writing is fun. While she didn’t deal in characters so much as types, as I was growing up I came across some of those types and because of that familiarity found it easier to relate to the individual.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck & “The Foghorn” by Ray Bradbury. Both made me cry, dragging me to at least recognize the quality of empathy, a quality I’ve since found in a good deal of both men’s writing.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I hated this book passionately. By the end of the book it nauseated me to just think of reading it, but it was required so I read on. I think maybe I disliked reading something narrated by a character I couldn’t like and, maybe, feared I was too much like. The impact has stayed with me though I’ve never brought myself to reread it.

Is Sex Necessary? by E. B. White and James Thurber; My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber; Getting Even by Woody Allen. All of these proved to me written works could be as funny as anything I saw at the movies and fueled the irreverence starting to appear in my teenage self.

Watership Down by Richard Adams and The Other by Thomas Tryon. Books my sister gave me, and so special for that reason since she was often a guide when I was young. She couldn’t read the Adams, started laughing every time she remembered it was about rabbits. Not a problem for me. I was awed that the writer could make me care for rabbits. Rabbits! Really? How do you make a reader empathize with rabbits? As for The Other, besides Poe’s stories and some stories in mystery anthologies, I don’t think I’d read much horror. I remember being completely immersed in the novel for several days during one summer vacation and from there looking into other writers who wrote scary stuff.

The Rape of the A*P*E (American Puritan Ethic) by Alan Sherman. More fuel for irreverence. Sherman was a well-known stand-up comedian, famous for his hit song, “Hello Mudder, Hello Fadder.” This conglomeration of facts and opinions regarding sexual hypocrisy in the U.S. is probably so deeply rooted in both a Playboy and a ‘60s mind-set that it’s no longer readable. Still, Sherman had the comic’s knack for pointing out the silliness of our behavior and attitudes and I think that aspect has stuck with me.

The Tomb and Other Stories by H. P. Lovecraft. Not even the best collection of his work, there was a morbid, macabre outlook here that affected me – and scared me – more than Poe. I was hooked on the weird and from here branched out to Machen and Blackwood, among others.

LOTR by J.R.R. Tolkein & The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. These works share a sense of loss of a grander era, in Tolkein deeply mourned as a time of greater dignity, honor and nobility of spirit, in Faulkner maybe a little of that but also a clear-eyed view of the cost of the privileged Southern lives on those less privileged as well as the moral cost of slavery. Still, what sticks with me is the overarching melancholy with which the work of each writer is infused. There is a kind of grandeur in their historical perspective and their language that I hadn’t found in other fiction.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. A large compilation of Borges’ work. Possibly the first time I realized how deeply language informs one’s perspective. The simplicity and even courtliness of Borges’ language disguised the intricacy of his thought; I recall his writing as often producing an Escher-like shifting of perspective. I really should reread at least some of his work.


Randy M.
 
Reading over the answers to this post made me remember so many books I have loved and treasured, from Jack London's works to Ann McCaffrey to Harry Potter and more. But, the question of "which books DEFINE me" is a different one, and I had to sit with that question for a bit.

And such a smattering it is. Here is the short-list of what I feel were both the most impactful at the time of reading those whose impact have lasted the longest. Some I re-read often, most I do not, but all have had a profound influence on me as both a writer and as a person:

Bridge to Terabithia: Ohjeeze, this one ruined me as a girl. Never re-read it! I was a voracious reader as a child but this was the first book that truly hit me emotionally regarding the mortality of life, and tragedy as a personal burden. Great practice for when my own life was marred by insurmountable tragedy in my 20s.

Dune: Again, I read this young, possibly when I was 12 or so? Anyway, it blew me away with how ~worldbuilding~ could be done in a story. I was a Star Wars and a Star Trek fan (this was the 1970s) so I was no stranger to "strange, new worlds!" but somehow the act of reading a story like that brought home for me the power of an author to create reality from scratch. I think a lot of fellow SFF fans get that same headrush when they first read Tolkien, but for me, it was Herbert.

The Plague by Camus: I reread this often. It's hard to express what this book means to me, how much it has influenced me as a person. Camus's writing is sharp and cuts deep, and his exploration of "the human condition" in this book far surpasses any other fiction he did (I'm looking at you, "The Stranger"). Brilliant work by a brilliant mind.

Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters: This is a funsies historical romance/adventure novel from the mid-1970s that my mother loved, and bequeathed that love to me. Outside of being a cracking good yarn, this book took standard tropes of the romance genre and upended them -- the delicate, pretty, "fallen lady" was the sidekick, and the main character was the stout, wise-cracking "old maid" character. I treasure this book for showing me from a young age that tropes are meant to played with, and that female characters that would be considered unlikeable in other circumstances can be fantastic heroines if written well.

Sadly, like others, I was very taken with Mists of Avalon when it came out, as it was full of powerful female characters and most importantly was told from a sympathetic, female perspective. In that sense, I will always carry that book with me...but Bradley as a person ruined that and I actually threw away my old, treasured copy of it, right into the trash. Will never recommend her writing.

Shambala: Path of the Sacred Warrior: You did not specify "fiction" so I have to throw this on the list. I am an atheist who practiced Buddhism for many years, and this book bridges all of that. It is a fantastic spiritual guide for those who don't believe in the supernatural. You asked for books "you carry with you in some way" and this is a book I very literally always carry with me -- hard copy in my backpack, digital copy on my phone.

A few honorable mentions are Ender's Game, Frankenstein, Watership Down, Earthsea trilogy, His Dark Materials trilogy, Neuromancer, A Distant Mirror, Madame de Sevigne's Selected Letters, The Seven Storey Mountain, and just about everything by CJ Cherryh.
 
A single volume of scientific information for kids that a friend and I used to regularly read together and discuss. It really drove home my love for scientific knowledge. Unfortunately the title of the book is long gone from my memory.

Love by Leo Buscaglia - It opened my mind to what love is and what it could be. It put me on a course of being a more loving individual.

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck - Although the religious/spiritual aspects of the book didn't resonate with me there were a lot of other things that did. His definition of love is my favorite and the one I use in my life these days.

Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book by Bill W - I'm not an alcoholic but I've lived with several of them and that book helped me move myself along a path of life that is much more rewarding than I knew previously. Although I credit a lot of that to attending Al Anon meetings the book itself definitely helped me on that journey.

Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body by Riane Eisler - It taught me a lot about the history of the relationships between the sexes and provided an excellent list of other books to read to continue my feminist knowledge.

Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller - I found it gave me a better understanding of how we might have evolved as humans and where our drives and motivations are centered. It has an excellent bibliography that set me on a journey of learning more about the brain and behavior.

Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel by Virginia Morell - Although I've always thought that animals were more aware and intelligent than many people give them credit for this kind of cemented that in my mind and gave me more information to base my belief on.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman - This book has really lifted my spirits and given me more hope for the future of human beings. I was a great book to read during the pandemic.
 
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Another thread revival from asp3 - nice one - but have you breached Baylor's IP rights doing this?

I somehow missed this old thread of Jo's and its a nice thread idea. Books that most define me, without whom I would not be me. Hmm...

The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology - Cooper, Bloom and Roth
Collapse - Jared Diamond
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker
Hegemony or Survival - Noam Chomsky
Rogue Herries - Hugh Walpole
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
 
The Hobbit - Tolkien
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
HHGTTG - Douglas Adams
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson
IT - Stephen King
At the Mountains of Madness - Omnibus 1 - H.P. Lovecraft
Planet of Death - Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle
Deathtrap Dungeon - Ian Livingstone
Red Plenty - Francis Spufford
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
The Illuminatus Trilogy - Robert Anton Wilson
 
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