What are five books that changed your life?
Inspired by Ms. Genevieve.
These books would be in random order as they are all significant. I picked five broad, essential categories that should seem obvious, when you look at it. No, there's no Homer or Kierkegaard or Derrida or Donna Tartt. These are the books that got me to those authors.
One would be The Stranger by Albert Camus. I first read this story in university on my birthday, actually. It was assigned for an existentialism class. I'm sad that I loaned it to someone in my dorm and it was never returned. I actually don't feel too much of a loss for that particular volume, much like Meursault would not care, either. This book put its teeth in me instantly. It still has, in my opinion, one of the greatest opening lines in all of Modern literature. "Mom died today. Or was it yesterday?" I really don't know how to describe what the book means to me. It's a very sad story. You have to live your own life and that life is absurd. The Absurd became a great relief to me and still is. If life is absurd, then there is much more freedom, but also a much greater sense of personal responsibility for and to your own self. Before I fell in love with Kierkegaard, I fell in love with Camus and this book did it for me.
I actually started my classics major as a Junior. I took a whole year of ancient Greek in one semester. It almost killed me, but it challenged me in ways I never thought possible. I was pushed and I pushed myself through so many personal barriers. I'd never cried over a language before. There is the story that if you haven't cried while learning ancient Greek, you haven't really learned it. This book was a cause of a whole semester of troubles and I'm very pleased that it was. Classics would change my life dramatically. It affects everything that I do now, though I would be reticent to call myself a "classicist" anymore. There was a time when ancient Greek was a part of a standard education. Now, it's considered a bit esoteric. But, because of this book, I can translate the New Testament when I want, my grammar is much better, and I understand how language works. It really is an amazing book.
This is a fairly new book in my life, but it truly has made a difference. It showed me what writing can actually be. Anne Carson is a classicist by training and it informs her writing in the most amazing ways. The story is a contemporary retellling of the story of Geryon and Heracles. In this story, they are teenagers and have a very convoluted relationship. This series of poems by Carson somehow opened the floodgates for me, teaching me how classics bleeds into contemporary literature in a way that is alive and sensual and so very powerful. The book gives me the energy to push myself further in my writing, to take that chance and to not feel like what I'm doing is so very odd. If anything the Greek myths tell us that strange things happen and happen in very odd ways. Why should those stories be left in their world that is over two thousand years old?
This book was one of the first hardcore, flat out theological texts I ever read. Granted, I probably should not have started here, but I did and I was blown away. This book, published in 1919, is considered to be "a bombshell dropped on the theological playground." It completely changed European theology in the wake of WWI and altered theology forever. It took theology from being an esoteric science and translated it into a radical and subjective and wholly encompassing way of thinking. It demanded a new reading of the Bible, a new understanding of the Church, and a new understanding of the relationship between God and the individual. It is not a book of the Christian Right. It is not a book of archaic institutions. It did for theology what Marx's
Communist Manifesto did for politics. Taking from Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski and a ton of other modern thinkers, Barth offers God to be something wholly Other, something radical and different. This book is certainly not for the conservative believer.
Yes, my father read Poe as bedtime stories for me as a child. "The Raven" is our special poem. This isn't the same volume, of course, but he instilled a love of reading in me. It took a long time to realize that as I wandered away from Poe and only recently returned and realized how such a damn good writer he is. I think Poe, whose birthday I share, got into my blood at such an early age (we're talking seven, eight years old here), that I never really understood or thought about it until much later. Perhaps, if I paid more attention to that voice earlier in life, I'd further along in my own literature. My mother taught me how to read, but early on, my father taught me what to read. And Poe was my introduction to real literature before I knew it WAS literature. And my dad instillled a love of stories and reading inside that will never leave. Later, we attempted to read
Moby Dick, but that we got tired of that one. I was only eleven at the time.
