nebroadwe: (Books)
[personal profile] nebroadwe
Over in [livejournal.com profile] sounis, they're having a discussion about about "stories that have changed you - how you think, how you feel, how you live your life." I haven't read very many me-changing books -- mostly, the euphoria I get from reading a really good book is the goshWOW! of discovering the story itself or its author's talent (generally leading to an investment in her career that requires me to buy more shelving, too :-). But as I thought it over, I realized that I had read three books that moved me personally:
When I was 12 and had just finished The Lord of the Rings for the first of many times (a life-changing experience of the goshWOW! variety), I picked up a copy of Paul Kocher's Master of Middle-Earth and my world was never the same afterward. That was my first experience of literary criticism and it blew me away to realize that people didn't just write books -- they also wrote books about books, meta-books, books that took stories apart and showed you all the fascinating mechanics of how they worked and what they could mean. Twenty years later I took my doctorate in English literature, and that's why.

In college, I was unexpectedly bowled over by Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night -- I was groping toward an understanding of my own identity as a woman and an intellectual, and reading a well-written story about a sympathetic character doing the same threw a raking light across my own struggles. Unfortunately, I wasn't hanging out with anyone as compelling as Lord Peter Wimsey, so there was a certain amount of vicarious wish-fulfillment involved :-), but I reread that book a lot because it spoke to my fledgling social/intellectual integration in a way that no other feminist text did.

Most recently, I read The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris and developed an interest in Benedictine spirituality. I'd been surrounded by friends who came up in the Ignatian tradition, but it was The Rule of Benedict that really spoke to me once I'd rediscovered it (sorry, Holy Cross people!). Norris's poetic evocation of the seasons of the church year made me want to pay more attention to the spiritual rhythm of my own life. I haven't always been successful, but I return to this book whenever I need to reinvigorate my commitment.
Thus me. Anyone else have a self-changing literary experience?

Date: 2009-07-11 11:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fmanalyst.livejournal.com
Reading As You Like It and Pride and Prejudice when I was 14 showed me the kind of woman I wanted to be. Gaudy Night showed me what it meant to live the life of the mind as a woman.

Date: 2009-07-14 01:52 am (UTC)
ext_110433: The Magdalen Reading (Books)
From: [identity profile] nebroadwe.livejournal.com
Odd (and wonderful) how the great books speak across decades or centuries, spanning chasms of cultural change. Makes me think there must be something to all that reader-response criticism.

Date: 2009-07-14 11:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fmanalyst.livejournal.com
I think there is. My current project is examining the relationship between fandom and the narrative and the writers (so the current Torchwood meltdown is right up my alley), and reader-response criticism is useful for talking about that. I've been fascinated by how betrayed many TW fans have felt by Children of Earth, even though by all accounts, it's superbly done.

Date: 2009-07-14 12:23 pm (UTC)
ext_110433: The Magdalen Reading (Default)
From: [identity profile] nebroadwe.livejournal.com
Did you follow (or are you looking into) the _Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince_ meltdowns as well? I remember being fascinated both by the level of OMGWTFBBQ! involved and by the fact that I had thought Rowling was telegraphing her moves pretty clearly ahead of time and it wasn't just neophyte readers who might not know as much writer's Morse getting blindsided -- there were people like r.a.sf.w.'s Sea Wasp in there, too, though he wasn't running around with his hair on fire, to do him credit. :-) And I'm always fascinated by the way in which the rhetoric of ... I'm not sure what to call it: economics? patronage? stakeholdership? customer service? ... anyway, that whole, "I pay for your story; you wouldn't eat if I didn't; how dare you disappoint my expectations?!?" schtick gets brought out in these discussions. It's pretty prevalent in the culture now -- I'm wondering if it's got a history or is a product of our service-economy cultural moment?

Date: 2009-07-14 12:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fmanalyst.livejournal.com
I'd forgotten about that, mainly because I was never as deeply into HP fandom as I am TW fandom. One of the things that fascinates me is the extent to which fans declare themselves guardians of the text, as in the whole "Han shot first" battle between Lucas and the SW fans. I'll go back and track down the HP reaction.

Date: 2009-07-14 03:35 pm (UTC)
ext_110433: The Magdalen Reading (Default)
From: [identity profile] nebroadwe.livejournal.com
The Fandom Wank Wiki has some useful links, as long as you don't mind filtering for snark. (And Han always shot first. Mr. Lucas doesn't know what he's talking about. Er, I mean, his revision of that scene robbed it of dramatic punch.)

Date: 2009-07-11 06:26 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] malka2009.livejournal.com
Hmm. This is a difficult question to answer, because, well, there are just too many to mention! ;) As far as novels go, I'll have to second The Lord of the Rings; most recently, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. As far as bildungsromans go, I'm hard-pressed to name a better one than Jane Eyre.

As for autobiography, David B.'s Epileptic and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis changed the way I thought about graphic novels, while on a far more personal level, Elie Wiesel's Night helped me come to terms with what was done to my grandparents and their families during the war; knowing that he and my grandmother came from the same town, that any one anonymous person could be her, gave me something to hold onto at a time when I was struggling to find a medium for my pent-up grief and anger. I don't know that I could call it a "favorite", but it's important to me.

Date: 2009-07-14 01:59 am (UTC)
ext_110433: The Magdalen Reading (Books)
From: [identity profile] nebroadwe.livejournal.com
It's the rare book that really moves me deeply -- I do remember having to tell my senior year high-school English teacher that I just couldn't finish The Painted Bird. It was way too disturbing. (Fortunately, he knew I wasn't just trying to wimp out and let me off the hook.) Lois McMaster Bujold's Mirror Dance left me wandering the house with a weird case of vicarious culture shock. And reading the back end of The Riddle-Master of Hed for the second time in grad school made my heart ache in a way that my thirteen-year-old first-time reader self could never have understood. I guess one has to grow up a little to appreciate what it means to be blindsided by love, not hormones. :-)

Date: 2009-07-14 11:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fmanalyst.livejournal.com
The Riddle-master of Hed is such an incredible story. One of the best fantasy trilogies of all time in my opinion, though it doesn't seem to show up in the lists.

Date: 2009-07-14 12:28 pm (UTC)
ext_110433: The Magdalen Reading (Books)
From: [identity profile] nebroadwe.livejournal.com
McKillip seems to be flying under the radar over the past decade or so. Her style isn't really "of the moment," I guess -- we're into realism and self-referential humor now, rather than lyricism, maybe. The current style-first genre writers I can think of don't really go for her sort of prose (McKinley approaches it in things like _Chalice_, but people like Gaiman and Mieville are a different kettle of fish. Hmm. Gender gap?)

Date: 2009-07-22 07:57 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
You wrote: "(sorry, Holy Cross people!)"

Oh, that's OK. I loved The Cloister Walk too. I sometimes have a little Benedictine in me, too (and I should probably see a doctor about that), but the Jesuit/Jedi is louder.

-Krizzzz

Date: 2009-07-23 04:47 pm (UTC)
ext_110433: The Magdalen Reading (Bear)
From: [identity profile] nebroadwe.livejournal.com
Hey, everybody needs a little Benedictine, of one sort or another (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9n%C3%A9dictine) to get them through the day now and then. :-)

Profile

nebroadwe: From "The Magdalen Reading" by Rogier van der Weyden.  (Default)
The Magdalen Reading

August 2014

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Tags

Powered by Dreamwidth Studios

Style Credit