I enjoyed reading this. Everyone should stop to write a piece of their reading history today. I think the world IS so often as it it told in the books! Whether it's the actual facts or the emotional landscape, books, especially good literature, reveal something we need to know about living in the world.
Here's a tiny piece of my own reading life. In college at about age 19 I started tearing through D.H. Lawrence's books--starting with Sons and Lovers--soaking up so many aspects of his writing, but really following the long and sometimes contradictory conversation from novel to novel about LOVE. Love in many forms, often outrageous, often painful, self-absorbed, self-sacrificing, chafing against the "real world," expansive, reductive, all the ways we recognize and negotiate this feeling. Love may only be an emotion, but the world outside is certainly shaped by it again and again.
Last summer, 30 years later, I was in crisis, and the center of it all was love and my own relationship to it. I instinctively returned to Lawrence, re-reading and listening to four favorites--Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover--and picking up a couple of novellas I hadn't read before. Did these books, written about 100 years ago, contain some answer or plan my adult self could apply to my somehow suddenly complicated life? Of course not, but beautiful literature opens those channels of thought and those "dark passages" (re:Keats) we all need to explore sometimes. The pace of language, for me, allows reflection on my life even more so than evocative music. There was definitely some kind of internal process happening through all this re-reading I did last summer, some kind of space created to let me stand still for a minute--or let's be real: many, many hours when I should have been "working"--and look at love's prism, and the beauty of the natural world that persists around all our crises, in Lawrence's beautiful prose.
I definitely agree. I think good literature provides us with a great framework to figure out how to lead our own lives.
I haven't read a lot of Lawrence, except The Rainbow, which I truly enjoyed. As you pointed out, though, good literature in general reveals new ways of thinking and feeling that we may not even realize are there. I think reading the "classics" (however you define them) is also a great way to "construct" one's self through narrative and become better versions of ourselves.
Anyway, thank you again for your insightful comment!
Amazing story, Doga! Thanks for sharing. I remember avidity reading fairytales as a child, from the Grimm Brothers to Romanian folktales, Nasrettin Hoca stories, and A Thousand and One Nights. I still enjoy reading fairytales from all around the world. But my heart will always belong to Latin American writers and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is my favorite. Write more! I love reading you.
Thank you very much Catalina, I appreciate it! I think I must have also read some fairy tales but as I said, my memory of them is very very hazy. I love the fact that you read A Thousand and One Nights as a child! I've read some Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I have a Spanish copy of his "One Hundred Years of Solitude" from way back but until now I have been to scared to take a stab at it.
And thank you for your kind words, I appreciate them!
My parents divorced when I was quite young, and I spent equal time with each of them, so whenever I think about my childhood, it starts out divided into these two halves. My mother's side of my family is very literary - both of her parents were English professors, and my maternal grandfather's younger brother has published a few books of poetry. That side of the family is likely why I learned to read before entering 1st grade. My mother's fiction tastes, though, are not mine, and we don't often connect through books. My love of reading, and my personal taste, I must attribute to my father and the massive, ever-growing pile of science fiction and fantasy that I would browse in his basement throughout much of my childhood.
From a fairly young age, probably beginning around 8 or 9, I would intersperse some of his books into the ones that I was reading, and so I ended up not having a particularly distinct "YA" phase. He would do the same, by the way, though I wasn't always aware of it; we read the second Artemis Fowl book at the same time, and I was extremely confused because I used the wrong bookmark a couple of times. To this day, I can't keep that particular book's story beats in order in my mind. In any case, many of my father's books were wonderful one-offs, by authors I would never again encounter; many more were an introduction to authors I still love to this day. That pile is how I discovered Tad Williams, Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks, Peter Hamilton, Neal Stephenson, and maybe even Neil Gaiman; Larry Niven always fit right in as well. Some day, when I'm filling out a library of my own, I'll go back and pick up copies of the Guy Gavriel Kay and Roger Zelazny novels that stuck with me so strongly from that time.
Drinking from that well and always thirsting for more from it are a part of who I am. The most concrete influence, I think, was the casual and obviously correct acceptance of transhumanism that so many of those authors displayed - that simple demonstration that a person is not their body, and that their body is wholly their own, left me quite immune to the sort of "sex realist" transphobia that you sometimes see spreading through communities like mine. There is more still, though. It was with those books of my father's, picking and choosing the ones that I liked, and examining why I liked them, that I built my sense of wonder and my conviction that we, people who live now, have the capacity to build a world better than the one we find. I've heard a great deal about "classics" of this or that genre, and read some of them, but I don't feel any particular urge to seek them out. What good ideas they have, I'll find somewhere else, in something that carries their influence to me without needing some canonical work far removed from my own context.
This is not the only source of literature in my life, of course. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my friend Henry, who in high school lent me his copy of Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings. I've been a fan ever since. Likewise, I can thank my aunt, my father's sister, who sent me the first two volumes of One Piece when I was about 10 years old, when that grand epic was first coming to America. I still keep up with it today. In middle school I started playing Dungeons and Dragons, which gave me an appreciation of setting and worldbuilding as an art in itself, to be accompanied by microfiction and brought truly to life in games or other stories. Somewhere along the way I ran across 1632 and Eric Flint's experiment in community-based, shared universe alternate history. His recent death and the resulting uncertain future of many of the more minor Ring of Fire works is a worry. As a child of the internet, I got a great deal out of webcomics, and the occasional web serial. The MSPA forums were my first real "home" on the internet, and I'm still a little sad about the way Homestuck and its author ultimately went. I still read Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick, Phil and Kaja Folgio's Girl Genius, and Tom Siddell's Gunnerkrigg Court, all of which I picked up around the same time. And in college, I avidly consumed the works of Canadian web serial writer Wildbow, most famous for Worm, though I haven't read his current project. I keep thinking I should still be following Stand Still, Stay Silent as well, and perhaps someday I'll get back to it. And of course I can't fail to mention Neal Bailey's Cura Te Ipsum, which I read as it was released from around the middle of volume four, and am forever pleased that I managed to get physical copies of. (Hi Neal!)
I love fiction so much. I love reading it, thinking about it, talking about it, analyzing it, and most of all, I love doing these things far away from critics and journals and arbiters of what is or is not "high culture". That is perhaps the one fly in the ointment - I am forever eager to defend the works I love from the perceived gatekeepers of the literary world, though I know that instinct grows less rational by the year. As I write this, I'm having to restrain myself from going back and discussing the amazing narratives I've enjoyed in videogames or on television, and the inevitable one-sided defense of how these are true and critical contributions to the world of narrative art.
May you ever love your favorite stories, and find joy in articulating why and how you do. That, I think, is my message to my fellow readers.
Thank you for taking the time to write this great response. There are some authors here that I haven't heard of and I hope to check them out in the future.
I enjoyed reading this. Everyone should stop to write a piece of their reading history today. I think the world IS so often as it it told in the books! Whether it's the actual facts or the emotional landscape, books, especially good literature, reveal something we need to know about living in the world.
Here's a tiny piece of my own reading life. In college at about age 19 I started tearing through D.H. Lawrence's books--starting with Sons and Lovers--soaking up so many aspects of his writing, but really following the long and sometimes contradictory conversation from novel to novel about LOVE. Love in many forms, often outrageous, often painful, self-absorbed, self-sacrificing, chafing against the "real world," expansive, reductive, all the ways we recognize and negotiate this feeling. Love may only be an emotion, but the world outside is certainly shaped by it again and again.
Last summer, 30 years later, I was in crisis, and the center of it all was love and my own relationship to it. I instinctively returned to Lawrence, re-reading and listening to four favorites--Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover--and picking up a couple of novellas I hadn't read before. Did these books, written about 100 years ago, contain some answer or plan my adult self could apply to my somehow suddenly complicated life? Of course not, but beautiful literature opens those channels of thought and those "dark passages" (re:Keats) we all need to explore sometimes. The pace of language, for me, allows reflection on my life even more so than evocative music. There was definitely some kind of internal process happening through all this re-reading I did last summer, some kind of space created to let me stand still for a minute--or let's be real: many, many hours when I should have been "working"--and look at love's prism, and the beauty of the natural world that persists around all our crises, in Lawrence's beautiful prose.
Thank you very much Laura, I appreciate it!
I definitely agree. I think good literature provides us with a great framework to figure out how to lead our own lives.
I haven't read a lot of Lawrence, except The Rainbow, which I truly enjoyed. As you pointed out, though, good literature in general reveals new ways of thinking and feeling that we may not even realize are there. I think reading the "classics" (however you define them) is also a great way to "construct" one's self through narrative and become better versions of ourselves.
Anyway, thank you again for your insightful comment!
Amazing story, Doga! Thanks for sharing. I remember avidity reading fairytales as a child, from the Grimm Brothers to Romanian folktales, Nasrettin Hoca stories, and A Thousand and One Nights. I still enjoy reading fairytales from all around the world. But my heart will always belong to Latin American writers and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is my favorite. Write more! I love reading you.
Thank you very much Catalina, I appreciate it! I think I must have also read some fairy tales but as I said, my memory of them is very very hazy. I love the fact that you read A Thousand and One Nights as a child! I've read some Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I have a Spanish copy of his "One Hundred Years of Solitude" from way back but until now I have been to scared to take a stab at it.
And thank you for your kind words, I appreciate them!
Ok, I'll join.
My parents divorced when I was quite young, and I spent equal time with each of them, so whenever I think about my childhood, it starts out divided into these two halves. My mother's side of my family is very literary - both of her parents were English professors, and my maternal grandfather's younger brother has published a few books of poetry. That side of the family is likely why I learned to read before entering 1st grade. My mother's fiction tastes, though, are not mine, and we don't often connect through books. My love of reading, and my personal taste, I must attribute to my father and the massive, ever-growing pile of science fiction and fantasy that I would browse in his basement throughout much of my childhood.
From a fairly young age, probably beginning around 8 or 9, I would intersperse some of his books into the ones that I was reading, and so I ended up not having a particularly distinct "YA" phase. He would do the same, by the way, though I wasn't always aware of it; we read the second Artemis Fowl book at the same time, and I was extremely confused because I used the wrong bookmark a couple of times. To this day, I can't keep that particular book's story beats in order in my mind. In any case, many of my father's books were wonderful one-offs, by authors I would never again encounter; many more were an introduction to authors I still love to this day. That pile is how I discovered Tad Williams, Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks, Peter Hamilton, Neal Stephenson, and maybe even Neil Gaiman; Larry Niven always fit right in as well. Some day, when I'm filling out a library of my own, I'll go back and pick up copies of the Guy Gavriel Kay and Roger Zelazny novels that stuck with me so strongly from that time.
Drinking from that well and always thirsting for more from it are a part of who I am. The most concrete influence, I think, was the casual and obviously correct acceptance of transhumanism that so many of those authors displayed - that simple demonstration that a person is not their body, and that their body is wholly their own, left me quite immune to the sort of "sex realist" transphobia that you sometimes see spreading through communities like mine. There is more still, though. It was with those books of my father's, picking and choosing the ones that I liked, and examining why I liked them, that I built my sense of wonder and my conviction that we, people who live now, have the capacity to build a world better than the one we find. I've heard a great deal about "classics" of this or that genre, and read some of them, but I don't feel any particular urge to seek them out. What good ideas they have, I'll find somewhere else, in something that carries their influence to me without needing some canonical work far removed from my own context.
This is not the only source of literature in my life, of course. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my friend Henry, who in high school lent me his copy of Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings. I've been a fan ever since. Likewise, I can thank my aunt, my father's sister, who sent me the first two volumes of One Piece when I was about 10 years old, when that grand epic was first coming to America. I still keep up with it today. In middle school I started playing Dungeons and Dragons, which gave me an appreciation of setting and worldbuilding as an art in itself, to be accompanied by microfiction and brought truly to life in games or other stories. Somewhere along the way I ran across 1632 and Eric Flint's experiment in community-based, shared universe alternate history. His recent death and the resulting uncertain future of many of the more minor Ring of Fire works is a worry. As a child of the internet, I got a great deal out of webcomics, and the occasional web serial. The MSPA forums were my first real "home" on the internet, and I'm still a little sad about the way Homestuck and its author ultimately went. I still read Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick, Phil and Kaja Folgio's Girl Genius, and Tom Siddell's Gunnerkrigg Court, all of which I picked up around the same time. And in college, I avidly consumed the works of Canadian web serial writer Wildbow, most famous for Worm, though I haven't read his current project. I keep thinking I should still be following Stand Still, Stay Silent as well, and perhaps someday I'll get back to it. And of course I can't fail to mention Neal Bailey's Cura Te Ipsum, which I read as it was released from around the middle of volume four, and am forever pleased that I managed to get physical copies of. (Hi Neal!)
I love fiction so much. I love reading it, thinking about it, talking about it, analyzing it, and most of all, I love doing these things far away from critics and journals and arbiters of what is or is not "high culture". That is perhaps the one fly in the ointment - I am forever eager to defend the works I love from the perceived gatekeepers of the literary world, though I know that instinct grows less rational by the year. As I write this, I'm having to restrain myself from going back and discussing the amazing narratives I've enjoyed in videogames or on television, and the inevitable one-sided defense of how these are true and critical contributions to the world of narrative art.
May you ever love your favorite stories, and find joy in articulating why and how you do. That, I think, is my message to my fellow readers.
Thank you for taking the time to write this great response. There are some authors here that I haven't heard of and I hope to check them out in the future.
Thank you again!