50 Years of Reading
The novels and writers that have influenced me
In the argument of Nature vs. Nurture this article probably comes down on the side of nurture, because what do you think the result would be if you exposed a child to a world of books and art from a very early age? I’ve been reading about fifty-two out of my fifty-nine years before that my mother had been reading to me, the Brothers Grimm (not the sanitized Disney versions, but the real ones from a classic book series), I also had access to the library my grandmother left us. She died at age 85 in 1968 and was an inveterate reader and collector of books during her life and left us a lot of first editions of Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Conan-Doyle, Mark Twain, Hemingway, just about any author of the early 20th and late 19th century was in our basement nook, that I could be found reading those books, or on a summers days grabbing Mark Twain and reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or even Innocents Abroad. Here are some of the books and writers that have influenced me.
Rasmus and the Vagabond — Let’s start at the beginning, the fall of 1968 I was in 5th grade and there was a book fair in our school. The length of the hallway was filled with tables of books I scoured those tables looking for the right book to spend my fifty cents on. I found it in Rasmus, a story of an orphan who runs away and falls in with a hobo and they go off seeking adventure and a family for Rasmus. I still have Rasmus. Looking back now I wonder if the plot set me up for something like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road?
Moby Dick — Yes, this was the full-size full-length Herman Melville novel. I read this in third grade neither the teachers nor the librarian believed that I could read and understand the novel. Each week that I had it checked out the librarian asked how much I read and before I could check it out for another week, she quizzed me on what I had read. This got me into an accelerated reading program the highlights of which were Greek and Norse mythology. The downside? Every Tuesday I had to be there by 7:30 AM for the class.
Ernest Hemingway — Not so much for his writing (at least at this point in my life) but for his reputation as a writer. When I was in third grade on day I noticed that a bunch of girls were all gathered around Ricki Lofgren’s desk and I went over to see what was going on and Ricki was drawing Peanuts characters, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and all the girls were “oohing and awwwing” over the drawings I decided then and there that I wanted to be an artist. The one problem with my being an artist is that I couldn’t draw, I took art classes, and drew but nothing satisfactory ever came of it, and to this day I’ve only drawn a couple of things that I’ve liked. When I was about 12 I heard that Ernest Hemingway was an artist, of course I knew of his reputation as a writer, but until then I had never heard of a writer being considered an artist, but I knew I could write it was at that moment I decided I would be a writer.
1984/A Separate Peace — This is maybe a case of the teacher and not the books themselves. I was in 7th grade these were unassigned books from a teacher, Dan Evans, who was ‘progressive’. He brought in things like The Moody Blues, we’d listen to the albums and discuss the lyrics and their meanings, he also brought in slides of famous paintings and ask why they were famous. Of course, we didn’t know but he would go through art critique and go through the reasons they were great pieces of art. He was popular with the students, didn’t stick to the curriculum and encouraged students to think on their own, naturally he was fired at the end of the year, but not before bringing critical thought and art to a bunch of 7th graders. Postscript: This is where I first heard what would later become known as “the Da’Vinci Code, it wasn’t an unknow theory, and kind of well known to art students at the time, just needed Dan Brown to make into a chase to make the theory known to the general public.
Henry David Thoreau — I was a strange kid, walking around at 12 and 13 reading A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, before most of my peers had even heard of Thoreau. I also read Thoreau’s poems, and Thoreau of course would take me to Emerson. It was in this period I was also reading Robert Frosts poems, as well as Walt Whitman and for some reason Dylan Thomas (I must have heard of him in some context).
Romeo and Juliet — The second instance of teachers influence, and it’s a weird one. Freshman English class in high school. I was new to the school, I didn’t know anyone, and I was very out of sorts and my only bright day in school were the English classes. The teacher was a Miss Homrighouse, she was 83 years old at the time and she fell asleep during classes, the very definition of an aged-out teacher. We were reading Romeo and Juliet and I guess I wasn’t getting it. One day after class she called me aside after class and went over the material pointing out that there was a lot of sex and violence in Shakespeare, thereafter I ‘got’ Shakespeare, I started doing better with the material. To this day I don’t understand what she saw in me to single me out to try and help with the material. She never favored me in class, I don’t remember her noticing me more than any other student, except for this one example.
The Teachings of Don Juan — No, not the fictional libertine, but Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Indian of “alternate realities”. My interest in this was because I was interested in “alternate realities” which at the core of these teachings is that there are other realities that can be perceived if we’re just able to alter the thinking patterns we’ve been locked into. Also, an unintended result of Castaneda’s books was as I read others in the series I noticed how Castaneda treated the origin story of how he met the main character, Don Juan, he was treated as a fictional character, I had seen other authors treat fictional protagonists in the same way. When the validity of Castaneda’s story was called into question as to whether it had been a true narrative didn’t bother me because I had noticed Castaneda’s use of fictional device’s, so I never considered the books to be anything except fiction.
Dangerous Visions — Edited by Harlan Ellison. It wasn’t the writing of any one story, but the introductory notes Ellison wrote about his relationship with the writer, the foibles he and/or the writer went through to get the story published, the process the writer went through to create the story. Those notes told the stories of where ideas came from, and to a writer in training they were great examples of how to create from within yourself, your experience, and how to translate those things into stories, even science fiction stories. Dangerous Visions set me off on a Harlan Ellison spree, soon I was reading Shatterday, Love Ain’t Nothin’ but Sex Misspelled, Gentleman Junkie, The Glass Teat, in short anything written by Ellison.
No One Here Gets Out Alive — Not because it’s a superbly written or even the definitive biography of Jim Morrison (that you will find in James Riordan’s Break On Through) but because it’s about a shy, bookish boy named Jim who wanted to be a poet. I saw my reflection in Jim Morrison and his life showed me a path to be a writer that I previously hadn’t seen before.
On the Road — In a famous author, I again saw a reflection. In his early years Kerouac was an athlete that was more interested in art and literature. On my first reading of On the Road I didn’t like it, it seemed old to me. I kept hearing laudatory things about Kerouac’s writing, and it had influenced other writers I liked. I found a biography of Kerouac and read it, and the thing that struck me was that On The Road only seemed old because I had grown up reading the writers that came after Kerouac, the writers that had been influenced by him and the reason his writing seemed old was because I had read writers who had adapted Kerouac’s techniques and that’s why they seemed old fashioned and unremarkable to me. Also, Kerouac’s spontaneous writing and sketching techniques appealed to me, as well as finding literary material in your own life.
Ulysses — In James Joyce I found that an author of fiction could be considered a poet. Joyce’s writing and rewriting his novels until it “sounded” right, I had never considered a book or a novel to be an auditory experience, but the more I thought about the more it made sense to me, that a novelist is trying to recreate life on the page, so even if the reader is unaware of the experience it needs to sound right, the rhythm of the words can poetically create images in the readers mind of the story he’s trying to communicate.
I don’t know how complete this is, in my life this list only takes me up to about age 20–21, and the notes about why each book and/or author influenced me could be a biography of me up until that time. Certainly, since then I’ve read more than up until those times, but maybe the writers I’ve read since then haven’t been as world changing as those on this list, after all the people included here influenced and directed the direction of my life.
I want to thank Jack Preston King for reminding me that I had this article at the back of my mind for a while.