The Topic is short, sweet, maybe not simple. List the Top 10 books that have had the most impact on your life.
Your entire life. From the time you first started reading – or were read to by your parents – to the present moment. Which books (and by extraction, writers) had the most influence on you?
It could be pages memorized at age 25 from a book you haven’t picked up since. Could be authors who jumpstarted you at 13 and now collect dust on your middle-aged shelves. Maybe it’s a book you read last week.
Was it The Pit and the Pendulum, Siddhartha, Rapunzel, Harry Potter, The Color Purple, Breakfast of Champions, Journal of a Solitude, or Watership Down? Some, all, none?
Top 10 books that impacted your life. Slam dunk. Nothing but net.
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss
Watership Down by Richard Adams
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Shining by Stephen King
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
Winesburg, Ohio (“The Book of the Grotesque”) by Sherwood Anderson
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
P.S.
This site is wonderful. I am still trying to get over the trip down memory lane after the Kerouac Goes To War post.
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That was weird. I started down your list, Shawn, and went yup, yup, yup, yup…I thought our lists were going to be identical. But then you diverged. Great list, though.
Thanks for the note on the site.
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ybonesy,
That’s the feeling I got the first time I visited this site.
I thought you people were stealing into my brain at night and carting off small bits of my gray matter. . .
then taking some of the art off of my walls. . .
and stealing my books.
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http://pressposts.com/Art/WRITING-TOPIC–10-SLAM-DUNKS/
Submited post on PressPosts.com – “WRITING TOPIC – 10 SLAM DUNKS”
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Thanks for your great comments, Shawn. And your list is fabulous. You made me remember Rubyfruit Jungle! How could I forget. The Winesburg, Ohio (“The Book of the Grotesque”) sounds intriquing. I’ll have to check that out. Your last comment made me chuckle. I needed that!
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Isn’t that weird about the brain matter. There’s that word again: weird. Do you ever spell it wierd? That *would* be weird. Do you know all the songs to early 70s sitcoms? Brady Bunch, Green Acres, Gilligan Islands?? Did you read the Hobbit out loud with your class in high school and your teacher cried through the sad parts? Did you ever like the artist Rodo Boulanger? If so, then we are stealing (or swapping) brain matter.
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ybonesy,
Uh, can one claim to have truly lived without knowing the words to all of the 70’s shows?
(TV Land is a staple food, right?)
Unlike me, my high school teacher wouldn’t have been caught dead reading The Hobbit; however, we all cried while reading Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” (Both are trips with no turning back: does that count?)
As for Boulanger, I had to look her up, but I really like her work, and I was immediately reminded of the artwork in a book that should have made my list: Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
—-
QM,
“The Book of the Grotesque” hit me very much like O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: not because the stories are similar, but they both gave me that OH MY GOD feeling.
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Don’t know the Brady Bunch. Know all of Green Acres. Is that sad or what? Gilligan’s – well, I know the first verse then pretend to sing the rest – na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, nananananana. Brain matter swap complete.
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Being as how I was now intrigued as to whether there has been an alien abduction of brain matter, I checked out your website. Is it always the photo, then the story? Never the story, then the photo?
And, did you cry while reading The Giving Tree, but then once someone enlightened you to the sexist undertones you never cried again? (And you felt kind of gullible for not seeing it yourself the first time you read it?)
Cool site, btw. For me writing inspires images and images inspire writing. But more in the direction of writing inspiring images, which is why I asked my first set of questions.
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y, et al,
I have been toying with the picture-worth-1,000-words thing for years, and I finally went for it.
My dad is an artist, so I think I have subconsciously gravitated away from associating something I (or another) have written with an image (it feels too forward to presume what I see in another’s image is reflected in what I have written), but the freedom to scour images and have one speak to me makes for really productive writing periods.
As for Silverstein, I have to focus on The Missing Piece and Boa Constrictor, and pretend The Giving Tree was an accidental thing, a bit like The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.
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Great exercise! I listed mine here: http://fluent.typepad.com/fluent/2007/05/books_with_big_.html
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[…] -from Topic post: Ten Slam Dunks. […]
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Shawn, I like this: “the freedom to scour images and have one speak to me makes for really productive writing periods.” It seems like a conscious creative practice.
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10 books that have influenced my life? That’s a challenge.
– The Mad Scientist Club by ??. An old children’s book from my middle school days about a group of boys who build things and just have fun in their small town. Growing up in Silver City was fun, but not as fun as what these guys did.
– 2001, a Space Odyssey, by Sir Arthur C. Clark, and Lost Horizons by James Hilton? Read those in 8th grade in Literature Studies. They were the first books I remember really dissecting at a literature study. I remember thinking it was cool that there could really be a hidden city of Shangri-La in the Himalayas. My lit teacher, Ms. Quinn now would be labeled a liberal. She was very open, and honest. I learned a lot about being open to ideas just from sitting in her class.
– 1984, by George Orwell. A high school literature study choice that I couldn’t finish because it upset me too much (the teacher let me change to another book that I can’t remember). I’ve since tried again to re-read it, and still couldn’t. It was still too depressing. Now I am living in a very Orwellian Venezuela. Ironic eh?
– The Long Ride, by Lloyd Sumtner (?) nonfiction. I found this one in the Silver City public library back around 1979 or so…Lloyd left his home in Virginia one day in 1972 on a bicycle. He returned 5 years later. His first goal was to reach the Mississippi River. His second goal was to cross the Continental Divide, which he did just west of Silver City. He rode to Seattle, climbed Mt. Rainer, flew to Alaska, rode to Denali, climbed it, then to Hawaii, Mauna Kea, then to Australia where he was the first to cross the Outback by bicycle…the voyage takes him around the world where he pedals and climbs mountains. It was influential in getting me interested in traveling by bicycle.
– The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, read that when I was 19 years old and working for the USFS, living in a remote cabin up in Idaho. This book really opened my eyes to the environmental movement, plus Heyduke drove a CJ-5 and measured distance by the six-pack. I also drove a CJ-5 but wasn’t into beer that much, but still thought that was neat because still in my opinion, CJ-5’s are still one of the coolest vehicles ever made.
– Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. The Monkey Wrench Gang introduced me to E.A., but Desert Solitaire reinforced my love for the 4-corners area. Again read in Idaho while living in the cabin. I read a whole string of Ed Abbey books and even got his autograph when he spoke at WNMU.
– Dune, by Frank Hubert. Read this one also when in Idaho, and reread recently in the past year. Excellent science fiction. The whole desert theme again and the good vs. evil.
– Roadmarks, by Roger Zelanzy. Just a goofy science fiction story about time travel, but time traveling in an old Chevy truck. I was just telling my students about this book the other day. I liked it because, again, the main character is the guy who is bucking the trend and doing his own thing. I guess I like that theme. Again I got Roger’s autograph when he spoke at WNMU. I asked him how he got the idea for the book, and him being a New Mexican, he said he was just driving around one day and the road just kept getting more and more primitive as he went along. He just thought about a road going back and forth in time. Interesting concept.
– Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry. I’ve read this one recently in that last 5 years while here in Venezuela. Reenforce my love and romance for the West.
– Anything written by Thomas McGuain. I really like this guy’s fiction. The character is usually some misfit who finds himself in Montana trying to do something noble. Again that whole individual in the West theme.
– Lately I’ve been into nonfiction science history books. Examples; The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, by Diana and Michael Preston. All of these books have a similar theme about how man as always been curious and has pushed the limits to accomplish a goal, be it something as bold as sailing around the world in the 1600’s (3 different times) to learning about the atom and unleashing its power (and the dire consequences afterwards).
– Able’s Island, by William Steig…used to do cartoons for the New Yorker. Started writing in his 60’s. BEST children’s story ever! I love this book. Again, its the whole theme of a character put into an extraordinary situation and prevailing by learning about who he is. Excellent story! I try to read this one every year as a literature study. I want to donate copies to the library here at school (just so I have enough copies).
Well there is more than 10. Some are general and vague, others are specific.
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What is 109 East Palace about? I used to live at 350 East Palace (or something around that block) in Santa Fe.
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109 East Palace. Next time I am in Santa Fe, I need to go check it out. It was the front office for the Manhatten Project. It is where everone had to go to to get their creditials before heading up to Los Alamos during WWII and through cold war until the early 1960’s. It is a book about the social aspect of the Manhatten Project and the why/how Oppenheimer pulled off the impossible. Neat book.
When in the USA, I’ll go to the big book sellers in Albuquerque or El Paso and just meander around. I take a break, buy a coffee, and then meander some more. Last summer I bought 6 books from the science section. 4 were excellent, 1 was interesting and 1 was just weird. I’ll buy more than 6 this summer because I ran out of new books around Christmas.
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BTW 109 East Palace would be a good companion book to Richard Rhode’s book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (an excellent book).
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[…] -from Topic post: Ten Slam Dunks. […]
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