Influential reading...

[fajrdrako]

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
- Edward Morgan Forster, 1879 - 1970

I have often wondered why so many of my favourite and most influential reading happened between the ages of 12 and 15. Those biographies of Shelley, Jane Eyre, the works of Charles Dickens, The Game of Kings, Lord of the Rings - books that spoke to me with a clarity and strength that I seldom find now, and yet I still find it when I reread those books.

Was it chance, that I found the right books at the right time? Would I be the same person I am, if they never existed?

Comments

[wiredblowfish.livejournal.com]

"Was it chance, that I found the right books at the right time? Would I be the same person I am, if they never existed?"

These are excellent questions. I can totally relate to having profound reading experiences during that period of my life, too.

Poe, S.E.Hinton, Salinger--a few names that come to my mind that blew my mind as a teen.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I agree about Salinger - but who is S.E. Hinton?

[wiredblowfish.livejournal.com]

S.E. Hinton wrote Rumble Fish and The Outsiders which were both made into movies by Copolla (I think). But her book that really moved me was That Was Then, This is Now.

She wrote stories about teenage boys growing up in the 60s and 70s.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much unfamiliar with all of that - must look for those! Thanks for explaining.

[monsieureden.livejournal.com]

This is interesting. I agree I feel the same about many things I read as a teenager. I still have a book or two that impresses me but not in the same way; not that envelopes me like books did back then. I mean Niccolo.. I breathed him.

Hmm.

[filkferengi]

That's definitely a time of being *intense*ly impressionable. Otoh, even books that come along later can have primordial influence. [O hai, Lois. {weg}]

I've always believed that books find the people meant to have them. Recently [i.e., since getting into filk & thinking more about music & processes] this idea has expanded to include music and people. You'd most likely include fandoms. Could you have appreciated Barrowman and Spike [write that plot bunny!] in quite the same ways in your days of being a less-experienced connoisseur?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, an impressionable time. But there was something about me at that age that responded to the historical, the literate and the romantic - especially the latter - instead of attracting me to all the other influences around me, like sports, or sciences. Aside from the romanticism and certain uses of languages, what I seem to gravitate is storytelling - the narrative as entertainment. Fandoms fall into that category. So do songs. (The ones I prefer, anyway!)

I think I would have appreciated Barrowman and Spike at any age, though clearly ten years ago I wasn't intrigued enough by Spike to overcome my resistence to watching Buffy. And at other ages I probably would have understood them differently - no, I can't even be sure of that.

I wish I could have encountered John Barrowman as a young teen. I would have had fewer sexual worries. Sadly that kind of role model just didn't exist... couldn't have existed. For him or for me.

[filkferengi]

It's been said that we only become more ourselves as we get older. Obviously, you'd have been attracted to those things anyway, but the imprint only got deeper, from being exposed to those influences *then*.

At least you're able to appreciate Spike & Barrowman now. Just don't forget to finish writing that young!Aral & Capt. Jack crossover; I'm looking forward to reading it.

;)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

As if I could ever forget Jack or Aral! Two stars in my heaven, gods in my pantheon, heroes in my mind ....

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating.

The books I found between those ages were all sci fi -- and not all of the conventional sort. 1984 I finished only because I chose never to stop partway through a book; but Brave New World I read again and again, and from it learned that not all writing has to be linear and predictable! I'd call "The Hollow Men" sci fi, too. That influenced how I wrote, as well. All of those books did. I taught myself to be a writer, from the age of 11 onward... and these books came to me at that time, these and many sci fi short stories, and in all of that I found that there is not only one way to speak the truth of your imagination.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I don't remember when I read Brave New World or 1984 or A Clockwork Orange. I certainly read "The Hollow Men" and "The Waste Land" before I discovered that I could sometimes like SF - but I don't think of them as primarily SF, because the world they show us is with us now. I think of them as, well, poetry, but if I have to assign a genre, it would be psychological philosophy. Maybe. Or simply insightful beauty.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

Ah. Well put.

I considered things like "The Hollow Men" to be sci fi in its most real sense: it does show here-and-now, but shows it without assumptions. And that is what sci fi did for me, at that age (and still does): it looks at possibilities, without that annoying add-on of "no, wait, that isn't how it should be, that isn't how it is" that I got sent at me whenever I deviated from their prevailing norm in any way, be it how I chose to act, to write, to speak, or to dress. Fah! Give me sci fi: it didn't pass judgement, it just spoke.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Luckily my world did nothing to discourage my imagination or my love of poetry, and left me to make my own assumptions. But except for Reed Richards, science never called to me, fiction or otherwise. History was my passion instead.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

I speak of "science fiction" with a wide doorway in my thought: alternative history is one of my favorite aspects of sci fi. (Right now, I wish I knew enough about recent current events to write the alternate history of what if Al Gore had been given the office of President in 2000... and, since then???) (Also, what if Penn. Senator John Heinz hadn't died in a helicopter crash at the end of the first Bush's first Gulf War... don't think the Republican Party would be nearly as closed-minded and negative as they are now. But we'll never know.)

I am glad that your childhood world allowed your imagination and literary curiosity to flourish. (When I get my time machine, one of the first things on my list will be to go back to about 1955 and sneakily teach you how to read, mia kara.) Science, for me, was the one way that I could get through a day without the never-ceasing knee-jerk responses of "No, that's not how it's done" or variations thereof: the scientific method was logical and objective, and as long as I stuck to it, nobody could laugh at me and tell me I was wrong. Sad that this was such a theme back then. It got to where I had to believe that people had a desire to tell me I was doing things wrong, just to make themselves happy -- that's how friggin often I got that sort of reaction from people no matter what I was doing. Enough to make a kid into a paranoid hermit (and it almost did!). One of the reasons I never tell lies. That, and my apparently natural proclivity for telling only the truth. I had to smile when Captain Jack said to poor newly-dead Owen, "When you've lived as long as I have, you stop making them up," or however he phrased it.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

alternative history is one of my favorite aspects of sci fi.

I don't much like alternative history, except occasionally. It's funin Watchmen. But usually I find it horribly frustrating, along with fantasy-history like Guy Gavriel Kay writes, or even Megan Whalen Turner - evne though they are among my very favourite writers. But I adore 'real' historical fiction, and I read their books thinking, why not make this real history? The fantasy is incidental. Why not make it real classical Greece, or real England in the time of King Alfred, or whatever? It feels like a copout to me: make it fantasy (or alternate) and the writer doesn't have to worry about what it was 'really' like, even as an exercise in imagination. That's what fascinates me about history - one of the things - thinking about what it might really have been like to live in the past.

Alternate history doesn't interest me in the least. Not as fiction, anyway. Speculation can be fun. Maybe.

I've never had much luck with scientific method. I think my brain isn't wired that way. Doing something the same way twice - how boring!

When people told me I was doing something wrong, I just did it right - or went on doing it my own way because I liked that better. It helped when they gave me reasons. My mother was very, very good at giving reasons. Good reasons that made sense to me.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

I can never get alternative history that suits me, either. But neither can I get history written of times and people that I want! Never used to, anyway. It was always from a heterosexist angle, or us-versus-them-and-we-triumphed crap. I like the scenarios of, say, what if Robert E. Lee had accepted Lincoln's request to become head of the Union army, instead of leading the Confederates?

Scientific method is like useful logic. Logic, to be honest, strikes me as useless and ridiculous; boring beyond boring, pointless, caught up in phrasing and wording and totally disconnected from reality. Scientific method is simple and everyday: if this, then that. If that, try this -- see what happens. However, I can see that having that formally tied down to "you have to do it this way and only this way" could put you off as quickly as logic put me off. Bad scientific method turns into pointless rote devoid of content; useful scientific method is your mother seeing that you needed a reason, and giving you one that you could find useful.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

But neither can I get history written of times and people that I want!

Ah, I don't have that problem at all. There is so much history I want to read! And so very little in history now that has not been written about one way or another, though admittedly, there's never enough of it just because the original sources aren't always there. I don't mind reading it from angles that are not mine; the brain adjusts as neceessary.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

But doesn't it bother you to read it written from a viewpoint that imposes modern attitudes onto the events being described? It does me. It makes me think that the author probably has other lacks, as well, and that what I am reading was possibly trimmed and modified more than I'd want.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

doesn't it bother you to read it written from a viewpoint that imposes modern attitudes onto the events being described?

Not at all. It's just another aspect of the history. (An alternate fiction is just as 'imposed'.) You always have to be aware of the writer's mindset - why he was writing, when he was writing - that's true of the original sources, too. Otherwise we'd have no history at all, just archaeology, and that would have the mindset of the archaeologist imposed, too.

I love history, both the actions that happened, and trying to figure out what happened, and the historiography, seeing what was written about it, and trying to match the two pictures, or the different pictures produced by two historians.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

I think my mistake, here, was to try to verbalize something that I have not ever "assembled" into articulate units in my thoughts, yet. Sorry. I mispoke and spoke incompletely, just about all of that.

I do like your take on it, and how you say it.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The thing is, history isn't just history. Not ever. A good example is Maes Howe, a burial mount in Orkney. It was created long, long ago by mysterious people and filled with treasure. In 1101 a bunch of Scandinavians who were on their way back from the Crusades found it, broke in, took the treasure, and wrote all over the walls. So now when a tourist like me goes to see it, we don't just see the early edifice with its solar allignment and burial chambers, we see the 12th century graffiti and it's as if layer on layer of the past is photographed. The plundering is part of the story, and a part, to my mind, that makes it all the more interesting.

So it's the same if a 19th century writer makes people of the middle ages out to be like their version of people - meek women and brave knights, say - it's like archeological layers.

And the same with books of today.

You have to read everything with discrimination, but that doesn't make it less interesting or exciting.

(And then, of course, there are some really, really bad books out there.)