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24/5/05 13:36Real quickly, five books that meant a lot to me (I'm not doing the whole meme, no). In rougly chronological order:
A Wrinkle in Time--I'm sure that this is one of the books that made me want to write. It floored me with the breadth of its imagination and sense of possibility.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (entire series)--I cannot state too strongly how much these books threw me out of certain angsty-teenager patterns of thinking and gave me the grim cheerfulness I can manage on the best of days. Truly, I think the only cure for being despondent about the state of the whole universe is to realize just how absurd everything is, at the bottom of it all--but the thing is, tHGttG is not pure cynicism. It detatches only to turn around and say you can't detatch; you have to love life in all its absurdity.
Siddhartha--And if I needed another smack on the head to get out of my teenage angst, this was the book that did it.
Luck in the Shadows--This IS the book that made me start writing again. It's more fun than a barrel of gay monkeys, but is not actually all that well written--it made me feel that fiction good enough to stir one's hard wasn't just something for a few geniuses, but something that might be attempted by everyone.
Ash: A Secret History--I don't even know what to say about this one. It grabbed me and didn't let go; it flattened me. I think it's the unflinching realism of the warfare combined with the sense of the weird, the numinous, the inexplicable.
A Wrinkle in Time--I'm sure that this is one of the books that made me want to write. It floored me with the breadth of its imagination and sense of possibility.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (entire series)--I cannot state too strongly how much these books threw me out of certain angsty-teenager patterns of thinking and gave me the grim cheerfulness I can manage on the best of days. Truly, I think the only cure for being despondent about the state of the whole universe is to realize just how absurd everything is, at the bottom of it all--but the thing is, tHGttG is not pure cynicism. It detatches only to turn around and say you can't detatch; you have to love life in all its absurdity.
Siddhartha--And if I needed another smack on the head to get out of my teenage angst, this was the book that did it.
Luck in the Shadows--This IS the book that made me start writing again. It's more fun than a barrel of gay monkeys, but is not actually all that well written--it made me feel that fiction good enough to stir one's hard wasn't just something for a few geniuses, but something that might be attempted by everyone.
Ash: A Secret History--I don't even know what to say about this one. It grabbed me and didn't let go; it flattened me. I think it's the unflinching realism of the warfare combined with the sense of the weird, the numinous, the inexplicable.