Ten Books That Made Me

There's been yet another social-media-meme that's been buzzing about my ears for a week or more.  Try to ignore these things as one might.  Me?  I actually enjoy such fluff, some of it.  When asked which actress should star in my life-story, I do not hesitate to suggest (the late) Shirley Booth.  Last meal?  My beloved husband, A.'s chicken-livers and gravy over rice.  Which city should I live in?  Fine where I am, though San Francisco will always be my favorite.  Harmless fun.  Not all of it, of course.  "Which Kardashian Are You?" is not a question I'm either qualified or inclined to answer.

Questions about books I am best prepared to answer, natch.  These tend to be numerical challenges: ten best books of last year, twenty-five favorite novels, five over-rated writers, how many have you read of the "100 Best Books"?  If I've been "tagged" once, I've been tagged every time.  I like the perennials as much as the next fellow, though my answers by now might be a bit stale.  Favorite novel? The Golden Bowl, by Henry James.  Favorite children's book?  The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame.  Favorite "series"? Oz.  Etc.

Sometimes all it takes to make these things new is a change in the phrasing.

"Name The Ten Books That Most Influenced You."

Now, "influence" is an interesting word, isn't it?  I'm no more a writer than to the extent of this, so that's not how I read the question.  (I suspect the influence of great writers on my writing has all been bad, come to that.  Henry James indeed.)  Whatever the question meant when it was posed, I've taken it as a question of character, specifically mine.  I needn't love them.  They need not be ten books I've reread, or plan to reread.  They need not necessarily be ten books I finished.  These things always come with an instruction to "not think too hard about it," to just list "the first ten titles that come to mind." So, I did.  The result was surprising, and more interesting -- at least to me -- than I'd anticipated.

What are the ten books that made me?  Let's see.  In just the order they occurred to me then:

Like pretty much everyone else my age, I watched Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" when it first aired on PBS in 1980.  I was sixteen?  Seventeen?  Thereabouts.  And like a lot of people my age now, I watched the new version with Neil DeGrasse Tyson with real pleasure, but also a certain wistfulness for the innocence -- mine and ours -- of the original broadcast.  I'd never seen anything like it.  Don't know that anyone had.  In that television show, Sagan explained a good part of the world to me for the first time.  It was a revelation, though I don't know how many of the specifics I retained. Still.  So, I should not have been surprised that the first title that came to mind for my list was Sagan's.  The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark was originally published in 1995, though I didn't read it until much later.  I was nearer forty than sixteen when I finally realized not only how little I knew -- perfectly predictable, that -- but also how little I'd read to arrive at the opinions I already held.  I was a grown man.  I'd read serious books.  I didn't believe in gods and monsters anymore, the life eternal, the power of prayer, the origin of the species in a man named Adam and a woman named Eve.  At thirty, and forty, and despite the best efforts of Carl Sagan and the one or two competent science teachers I'd had in school, I knew very little indeed about the universe.  My thinking was still more defined by what I didn't or had ceased to believe, which is fine, even admirable in youth, but plain embarrassing as I drifted toward middle-age.  Science, as such, was all but unknown to me.  I set about correcting that deficit as best I could.  Sagan's book, and all the other books to which it led me, gave me a context, a way of understanding and articulating ideas I'd come, more or less to accept before I knew quite what they were.  More, Sagan showed me there was joy in the discovery of the knowable.  "... nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant that what we are able to imagine."  Just so.

However, it was Oliver Sacks who showed me first that I might read about science without being able to "do" science.  Add to my list, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, an unexpected bestseller, when it was published in 1985.  I read it because everyone seemed to be reading it then.  It was perhaps the first serious book about the workings of the mind that I'd read since being undone in high school by the likes Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner, Carl Jung and R. D. Laing.  "A" for effort, I suppose, but what a muddle!  No wonder I didn't feel the need again for years thereafter.  But where those ol' boys all spoke from absolute, if conflicting and scientifically questionable authority, Dr. Oliver Sacks was curious and invited curiosity, not conversion, not subscription.  Moreover, Sacks wrote bright, clean prose, discussed genuine science, and most importantly, said what he, and we don't know as well as what we do about the mysteries of the brain and the human experience.  Let me emphasize this point: what we don't know -- yet.  That's optimism, and without God.

Back up a bit.  This wouldn't be anything like an accurate list were I to not acknowledge my debt to the dead gentlemen who translated the King James Bible.  I did not grow up in a religious household, but I did grow up surrounded by The Bible.  How, in the United States of America, does one not, even now?  It informs not only our politics but our prose.  I read "The Bible," and then read it again, in everything from the Revised Standard to the little red, Gideon New Testament they gave us in Cub Scouts.  I've read it since, one way and another, and I am, I should think, the better for it.  I've no more faith in it now, as either oracle or history, than I have in the collected works of L. Frank Baum, but that doesn't mean "The Book" isn't in me.  Seems to me, inescapable, if not for want of trying.

If it ever came to such an unhappy choice -- God forbid -- I'll admit I'd rather read The King James Bible straight through, begats and all, before ever again reading Being and Nothingness: An Essay of Phenomenological Ontology.  Jean Paul Sartre's most ponderous, philosophical tome makes my list none the less.  Why?  This was the first work of modern philosophy I made myself read, and read, and read until I finished the damned thing.  Took me months.  (All that, I see now, just to drag us out of Plato's cave!)  I include it here not because I went on to study phenomenology, but simply because reading such a book taught me that I could.

Likewise, in a way, my next.  With considerably more regret, I must admit to never really warming to Charles Darwin and On the Origin of the Species.  More than once I've done my Darwin, or tried. If importance is the measure rather than size, and as the Really Big Books go, Charles Darwin did nothing wrong.  The fault is entirely mine.  I am just not up to ideas, however exciting in themselves, however elegantly reasoned, when expressed with such relentless sobriety.  Alas.  Still, I'm glad I did it, and I am almost ashamed to have to add that I am of course grateful.

(I should note just how ridiculous it is proving to be to discuss such important books in such a narrowly personal sense, but here we are.  It's not as if I have anything more serious to contribute, so on I'll go.)

More directly effective in making me, would be yet another popular science writer who not incidentally was a good if not, as I understand it, a great scientist himself, Stephen Jay Gould, and specifically his book, The Mismeasure of Man.  That book cured me of any lingering misapprehensions regarding biological determinism I might have otherwise retained from having grown up in America when and where I did.  Again, as with Sagan and Sacks, (and James Trefil, and Alan Lightman, and Martin Gardner,) Gould gave me more than facts, more than the best argument.  He gave me hope.

William Manchester (1922 - 2004), is now remembered mostly I should think for his great, unfinished life of Winston Churchill, but first and foremost for me, he was the author of The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972.  Those two, huge volumes, begun in a sophomore "Social Studies" class and then read straight through on my own, taught me how to read history; to read for what changes us, and who, and how such things are possible.  The book would doubtless now be thought old-fashioned in it's use of pocket-biographies of largely forgotten figures like socialist Eugene V. Debs to point the progress of the American mission to make a better world.  (I'm afraid the book has in fact passed out of print.)  Still, for me, before I'd ever heard of Howard Zinn, William Manchester showed me a past I'd never heard of, and yes, gave me heroes when I needed them.

I read Auden because I read Isherwood.  I read both because they were gay.  Only after I no longer needed to find my kind to find my place did I really read Auden, the poet.  I don't know that I understood his importance as a poet, and to me as a reader until I'd read my way through The Collected Poems in my thirties. By then I knew a poet and had read more widely in poetry because of that friendship than I might otherwise ever have done on my own.  My friend made me brave.  The abundance and beauty, the fun in Auden came to me late then, well after I knew his story and "Musee des Beaux Arts," and "Funeral Blues," and "September 1, 1939."  Reading Auden, almost as much as knowing my dear friend, R., opened me to reading Elizabeth Bishop, to reading Shelley, to trying Chaucer, to Eliot at last and all.

Which leads me to my only real cheat on this list.  My next-to-last book is really the five fat little volumes of Auden's anthology, edited with Norman Holmes Pearson, Poets of the English Language.  More even than the various volumes of the Oxford Anthology of English Verse, edited by Q. et al, this book has been my best education, point of departure and the place in poetry to which I find I most return, even now, years after I first read my way through it.  Auden's introductions have been a classroom to me, the selections have lead in more directions in my reading than any other single title I can think of.  I owe it, and Auden, so much.

I recognized no more than half way through the making of this list that fiction seemed not to figure.  Strange indeed as I read more novels than anything else. More of the writers I most love are novelists than are poets, essayists or historians, to say nothing of scientists!  I can't explain it.  It was not a conscious decision to avoid fiction, honestly.  Perhaps the novelists were just too much associated in my mind with all those other lists, of favorite books, and most reread and so on.  Maybe that one word, "influence," bumped me out of my more usual groove.  If so, good.  Made me think.  That's as close as I can come to the point of this exercise and this list; made me think.

I think I can be forgiven one sentimental favorite with which to end, which is not to say I haven't learned a great deal from the book.  The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell is a book I will read all my life.  Because of it, I've read Johnson.  (And Goldsmith, and Fanny Burney.)  I didn't really read the book until a decade ago, when I bought a disreputable looking edition in six grubby volumes from the used bookstore where I first worked when we moved to Seattle.  Whatever I'd read of Boswell before, it was ersatz, abridged or amended in some stupid way.  Only when I finally read the book as it was written did I come to appreciate that it too would be a book that had changed me in some fundamental way I can't explain so easily as most of these others.  Maybe it's just age.  Maybe I had to be in my forties before I could love Dr. Johnson.  Now I've read the essays and the poems, Hell, even the prayers.  Maybe I had to learn how to love people I might not have much liked.  It's certainly possible I had to be old enough to need the company, and the conversation.

The good news is that in making this list, it seems I'm as unfinished at fifty-one as I was at sixteen.  The difference, I imagine, is that now that seems like good news to me.

For the last word, as it were, I turn this over to the late Carl Sagan:

“Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate--with the best teachers--the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”