To All The Books I've Loved Before (Blog Roll post)

The latest prompt was deceptively simple: name the book that changed your life.

My first response was an outraged mental squeal: "ONE? Just ONE? Are you kidding?" :O)

As you might be able to tell, I'm a follower of Erasmus, who said something to the effect that when he had a little money, he bought books, then food. So in consequence, we have a LOT of books (and that's not counting the ones for my husband's business...)

In the interests of keeping the list (sort of) short, here are my three choices:

1) The Wounded Sky, by Diane Duane. This is a Classic Star Trek novel, but aside from a fantastic plot and writing that makes science understandable to the novice, it has a special place in my heart for one other reason. In the library in the small town where I lived years ago, there was the Adult Section and there was the Kids Section. To my eyes at seven or nine or twelve, the adult section had all the cool books, the thick books with hard covers and lots of pages. The librarians were careful to keep the kids out of the adult section---and that included the ones who should have been reading more advanced books (like me.) (Looking back, I understand why---there were a lot of, ahem, more romantic titles in the adult section and I'm sure they didn't want to hear from Jane's daddy where his daughter had learned those terms. ;-))

Anyway, I snuck in there one day and found The Wounded Sky. And I fell head over heels in love with it---not because I understood all of the astronomy that makes up most of the science in the plot (in fact, I still don't, though years later, I was amused to find out that the author had wanted to be an astrophysicist, but discovered she didn't have a grasp on the math either) but because it didn't talk down to me.

And in the days before kiddie lit made money (thank you, JK Rowling :)) a lot of children's books assumed that kids were, well, stupid. This book didn't and I loved it. And it opened doors for me---I started reading other Star Trek books, then other sci-fi novels and then other works of fiction. And I'm still doing it. So, thanks, Diane Duane.

2) Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. This book sticks out in my memory because it's the one book I've ever read in which there is intentionally not a single likable character...which, if you think about it, is a pretty ballsy thing for a writer to do. I won't say I enjoyed reading it, but it definitely made me think about how hard it must have been to write book like that.

And finally...(so many books, so little time...)

3) Cry, the Beloved Country (sorry, I can't remember right now who wrote this.) I loved it because it was poem masquerading as a story about guilt and honor and redemption and the terrible choices people make in harsh times, even when that means facing dishonor inside one's own family. Long after I finished reading it for my high school AP class, this single line stuck with me: "Cry, the beloved country, for the beloved child who is the inheritor of our fears."

And that about says it all; we pass both good and bad down to our children, our fears and our hopes. The line made me cry a little at 18 for the sheer hopelessness of the line and the situation in which the characters lived, but it rings true even now at 34.

So that's my list. Check the books out if you like; all of them are still in print (except, possibly, for The Wounded Sky, but I'm sure you can find it on Amazon if that's to your liking.) Enjoy. :)