It’s Literally Wednesday: Life Changing Writers
Dave | August 15, 2012Decatur Book Festival Newsbrief – DBF’s online auction site is now up and running. You can bid on Book the Brick where the winner spends an hour with an author at a coveted outdoor table at Brick Store Pub. DBF includes a signed copy of the author’s book and buys the first round! Also being auctioned are Little Free Libraries, hand painted by local artists (including James Dean). Bid early, bid often. This is not only a great fundraiser, but guaranteed to make you the cool person on your street.
Life Changing Writers
Presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan once claimed: “the reason I got involved in public service, 
by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” And on another occasion: “I give out [Rand’s] Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.”
While Ryan does not wholly subscribe to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism (which embraces atheism — Ryan is a practicing Catholic), Rand’s work rather clearly has had an impact on his political development. Others who have cited the importance of Ayn Rand’s writings include Senator Rand Paul — Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan; is Ryan Seacrest next in this sequence? — and Ronald Reagan. (For a criticism of Objectivism, see the Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlewaite’s Washington Post columns here and here.)
While in college I read The Fountainhead, Rand’s novel whose main character is the uncompromising architect Howard Roark. Back in the 1970s this was read by just about everyone in my architecture program. It was inspirational, but not terribly good writing. As far as being a philosophical manifesto of any sort, it struck me as incredibly simplistic. (The film adaptation, with Gary Cooper and the great Patricia Neal, was even worse. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who never asked my opinion nor that of the New York Times, screens this annually for his new law clerks.)
Six and seven decades later, both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead evoke strong feelings, pro and con, from readers.
Around the same time I read The Fountainhead I also discovered Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), became thoroughly enamored, and reread it at least twice.
People also have intense reactions when it comes to ZAMM, and even those who love it seem to for very different reasons. On an intellectual level I was drawn to Pirsig’s discussion on the nature of quality. Inspired, I went on to read Bertrand Russell, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Baruch Spinoza. Life eventually got in the way, and I doubt I’ve read any deep philosophy in twenty years. (Seriously, does anyone with kids read philosophy, except maybe this?)
Have you read any life changers? What was it, and how old were you?
Note: Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Julia Child, co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (a life changer for at least one person) and many other works.
This Week
Carmen Deedy and Michael White, author and illustrator of The Return of the Library Dragon, Saturday, August 18th, 2pm, Decatur Library, sponsored by Georgia Center for the Book, free.
Joseph Scott Morgan, author of Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator, Saturday, August 18th, 1pm, Eagle Eye Book Shop, free.
Debbie Macomber, author of The Inn at Rose Harbor, Monday, August 20th, 7pm, Margaret Mitchell House, sponsored by the Atlanta History Center, $10, $5 for members, reservations required (404-814-4150).
Latest from Decaturish
Emerson.
Though I’ve yet to move a couple miles into the woods and opine on the friendly birds and distant train whistles yet.
+1
Who is John Galt?
I’d recommend changing “uncompromising architect Howard Roark” to “uncompromising megalomaniac architect Howard Roark.”
I tried “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” I think that was the book where I finally realized life is too short, and there are too many great books out there, to waste my time on long, tedious tomes that go nowhere. Yeah, I hated it that much. Sorry, Dave.
As for books that changed my life, I have to go with Stephen King’s “The Stand.” Yes, I realize King is no Hemingway or Conrad (both of which I have read), but I read it in my impressionable teens, and it was so completely different from anything I had experienced before. And the Lincoln Tunnel scene scared the daylights out of me.
Loved The Stand, and remember being totally engrossed in a marathon reading of it over 3-4 days in high school. Felt like the first modern allegory I’d read.
It’s quite possible that if I first started reading Zen today that I would find it tedious as well.
I believe, for better or worse, there is a window in our lives that we are particularly susceptible to being overly influenced by novel ideas. (Hey, I made a pun.) Perhaps between the ages of 15 and 25 we’ve achieved a certain level of intellectual development but have yet to become jaded. This was true for me in terms of music (http://www.decaturmetro.com/2012/05/16/its-literally-wednesday-9/) and literature.
Token, how old were you when you read “The Strand?”
Agree 100%. Age and maturity have a huge impact on receptiveness to both literature and music. And I was, I believe, 15 when I read “The Stand” (a couple of years after its original publication), which is right in line with your age window.
I read The Killer Angels when I was 15-16 and was totally blown away by it. It didn’t change my life, but it sent me down a long Civil War fascination path, which lasted many years.
Oh God, me too. The Holland Tunnel part is still the creepiest thing ever. And, agree on Motorcycle Maintenance. Never has a book been so frequently and highly recommended to me that did nothing for me. But hey, we all like different things.
For what it’s worth, Ayn Rand despised Reagan.
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett when I was 19…affirmed that I was on the right career path and started my interest in historical fiction.
If you liked Pillars of the Earth, I’d recommend you dive in even deeper and read “Sarum” by Edward Rutherford. It is the ultimate in historic fiction as it follows the ENTIRE history of England by following several families through the generations. He has repeated this model several times with Russka, London, New York, etc. But I found Sarum so interesting, I used it as the basis for a college entrance exam back in the late ’80’s.
“(For a criticism of Objectivism, see the Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlewaite’s Washington Post columns here and here.)”
From the article:
Ever since Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) put out his draconian budget proposal that slashes essential programs for the poor and gives big tax breaks to the rich, Ryan’s attachment to the works of Ayn Rand has been in the spotlight.
_________________________
If your intention was not to be political, you probably could have found an actual “criticism of Objectivism” that didn’t include such incendiary comments.
How about William F. Buckley, then?
I quoted Paul Ryan so, yes, I was unavoidably raising a political aspect. I linked the Rev. Thistlewaite’s articles in an effort to balance the link to the Atlas Society which also contains political viewpoints.
“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
–Victor Frankl
Having grown up in the Bible Belt, reading Frankl’s “Man Search For Meaning” at 16 was a seminal moment in the development of my consciousness, and emboldened me to pursue my own path.
I had a high school teacher who assigned “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He supplemented the reading with a visit from an Auschwitz survivor, who was the mother of a classmate. On one hand I was amazed that we were discussing a book on such a truly deep level. On the other, I didn’t get it; I lacked the maturity to fully grasp and appreciate it all.
If I could transport my adult self back in time to talk with my teenage self, this is one of the many instances where I would be kicking myself in the ass from here to Sunday.
What a thoughtful teacher.
On the other hand, when I wanted to discuss Frankl’s concepts in my school, people looked
at me like I had two heads and were genuinely concerned about the road to perdition I was walking.
I think one of the reasons Frankl so clicked with me at that age was I felt oppressed by my environment–by the provincial small-mindedness around me. His writing liberated me with the understanding that even though I couldn’t control my environment I could control how I responded to it.
My 8-year old and I were discussing this concept yesterday.
Another interesting item from yesterday’s New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/opinion/ayn-rand-wouldnt-approve-of-paul-ryan.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
On a related note, does anyone have a book written in the last 10-15 years that changed someone’s life? I don’t mean to go off on a Daren-style rant here, but I’m finding it tough to come up with something that was written in my formative years.
Was everything that needed to be said, written in the 60s-70s?
Despite its total disregard for the truth, “A Million Little Pieces” was very important to my brother and probably kept him alive at a particularly low point in his life.
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” has helped me think differently about wealth, geography and culture.
I know a teenager that was deeply effected by “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”
+1
Diamond brings up some interesting points in GGS, but I feel like he also swings way too far over to the geographical determinism side. He doesn’t seem to want to deal with the deep cultural aspects of “how we got here”. The greatest example is the lack of Chinese colonization in the period leading up to the European conquests. The Chinese had the technology first but for cultural/political reasons did not use it as the European explorers did. In Diamond’s world this shouldn’t happen. The simple reason is that we are not all the same and that our cultural bearing has a lot of impact on history regardless of what geographies may be involved. My view is that history plays out in a symbiosis or feedback loop similar to the nature/nurture argument in biology. I get suspicious of anyone arguing too strongly for geography or culture.
“Younger Next Year” especially if you’re over 50.
http://www.youngernextyear.com/books/
Between age 15 and 21 I read nearly every writer classified as part of the “Beat Generation”. Most influential to me was “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry.
I read “On The Road” when I was 19, during my freshman year of college. It was the first book I had truly read for myself, and it completely blew me away. Of course, everyone else found it incredibly annoying as I narrated my life as though it was full of the most intense moments that had ever occurred.
Gary Snyder’s poetry inspired me to travel to Washington and Oregon as a lad in an attempt to experience nature as he described it.
Do my rants have a signature style? How cool! I’m not sure which one you were referencing, though. 50 shades on Facebook?
A Good Man is Hard to Find hit me like a ton of feathers, and within it “The Displaced Person” left a permanent mark.
Something in more recent years would be Cold Mountain for the poetry of the language, or anything by Larry Brown. Brown became a great writer by sheer force of will, and I think of him burning seven failed novels in his back yard often.
Good question. I think it’s hard to judge whether something will be considered a “life-changer” or a “classic” within the short time span of 10-20 years. However, with that in mind, I can tell you what novels have had an impact on me in that time. I read Gregory McGuire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West about 10 years ago, and it opened my eyes to a previously unknown world of magic-realism. Although it took some time, it eventually led me to authors like Salman Rushdie, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami, whose work captures universal themes like no other authors I’ve come across.
And while Wicked was certainly not the first adult/urban fantasy novel to gain a wide audience, I don’t think we would have had some incredible novels released had it not been such a success. Some of the fantasty/magic-realism novels that have come out since the success of Wicked: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Jonathan Safron Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy, most of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and the list goes on and on. For re-awakening a love of fantasy, I think Gregory McGuire deserves some credit on the “life-changing” list.
Also, the Watchmen flipped my world upside down when I was in college.
Have you read The Night Circus by Erin Morgernstern yet? That fits nicely into your list. The writer will be at the DBF next month.
Definitely, great book. Sadly, I’m going to miss the event this year. Enjoy her talk.
John Irving’s A Widow for One Year changed my life a little. It certainly changed my driving habits.
Mark Forstater’s “The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius” published in 2000. I especially enjoyed Part One, which the author’s journey & musings on stoic philosophy and Part Two is a modern translation/interpretation of the original meditations. I found it very readable and thought provoking.
I last read Ayn Rand as a teenager and thought her novels were incredibly boring. Whatever chance she had to persuade me was lost when the length hit 400 pages and the paragraphs went longer than 3 pages at a time.
I read “Gone with the Wind” as a 4th grader when ill and out of school for a month. It convinced me that women need to earn their own income so they don’t have to keep marrying for a living. I also learned that walking pigeon-toed causes hoop skirts to sway alluringly.
After that, I was influenced by Catcher in the Rye, All the King’s Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, much of Steinbeck, all of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (but the rest of Willa Cather was too heavy-handed).
More recently, Ann Tyler and Sue Miller have relevance for me.
Oh I forgot that Diary of Anne Frank and Exodus came somewhere between GWTW and high school reading. That was my first inkling of things like genocide and non-fictional evil. I was very angry at my parents that they had never told me that the Holocaust happened. It was the beginning of a long period of distrust of them and their friends and colleagues. This is making me sad realizing that my children are probably going through or going to go through the same thing. What haven’t I told them about so I don’t look like I’m unaware or unconcerned or uncaring?
The bad news is that no matter how well you raise your kids, they will blame you for doing something wrong. The good news is that eventually they will feel very guilty for blaming you. The bad news is that you’ll probably be dead when that finally happens. The good news is that THEIR kids will blame them for doing something wrong, etc. It’s the circle of life.
Mad at your parents? Geez, Holocaust information is/was everywhere when I grew up (not so long ago). What were you doing that you did not notice it?
I don’t think anyone can blame their parents for that one….
That’s was my point at the time. How could as big a deal as the Holocaust, with information about it everywhere, never have come up as a topic at home? My parents had plenty to say about World War II, just nothing about the Holocaust. It was as though it had never happened. I read the book sometime between 5th and 7th grade. I don’t know why it wasn’t taught at school; it should have been. Maybe because U.S. History was repeated year after year after year in elementary school and it never seemed to make it much past the Civil War.
You may want to read “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf.
A Confederacy of Dunces continues to be one of my very favorite books. Not earthshaking, not political, but hilarious but oh so insightful to the foibles and follies of human beings. Also read Ayn Rand as a teen, and for the life of me, can’t remember a thing she said. Guess I have to reread ….
Re: Confederacy of Dunces. A workplace conversation about that book (with the cute new guy) led eventually to my marriage. So I guess it was a life changer. Thirty years later, the book and the guy still make me laugh.
Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the 70’s helped me outgrow the prejudice I picked up growing up in an Irish Catholic family in the Northeast. Kerouac was a huge influence as well.
My uncle gave me To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hobbit and Of Mice and Men for my twelfth birthday. All of them affected me deeply in different ways. Our school abandoned the classics in favor of postapocalyptic fiction for some reason, and Alas Babylon and Z for Zachariah completely freaked me out.
More recent books that made me think hard: Nickel and Dimed: on (Not) Getting By in America, and Collapse by Jared Diamond. For beautiful fiction, Ann Patchett’s book Bel Canto stuck with me for a long time.
I tried to check out The Hobbit in fourth grade. I loved to read, and I could read at that level. The public librarian told me I was too young to read the book, and wouldn’t let me check it out! I remember that to this day. Of course I read the book. Especially since it was forbidden. I still love Tolkien.
It took my something like 11 months to get through Atlas Shrugged. After finally finishing, this has become my favorite quote on the novel:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
– John Rogers
+1
(the secret to humor is surprise)
Great quote. I am going to save that.
+1
Anything, EVERYTHING, by Kurt Vonnegut and Doug Adams. I miss them both more than some family members. They helped me understand and appreciate my (in)significance, and always made me laugh.
I still read everything with the expectation that it might change my life, and I frequently feel changed. I’m going on 50. A recent book that left me changed was “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whale Ship Essex” by Nathaniel Philbrick, 2001.
Man that was a great book. I read that in the last year as well. I went looking for others like it to extend the journey, but came up short.
I thought “In the Heart of the Sea” was a great book, too. I felt immersed in the whaling culture of 200 years past and empathy for people long gone. Great story (just ask Melville) and great writing. Philbrick’s “Mayflower” was good, but not at the same level. It surprisingly doesn’t take place at sea, but was a true eye opener on early European involvement in America.
A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick) at 16, Great Expectations at 32, Old School (Tobias Woolf) at 40. Waiting to read the next one that makes me reexamine my life.
I resented having to read Dickens in high school. Doh! Not that I’m particularly smart now, but I was truly insipid back then. There should be a night course offered at Decatur High open only to people over 40: Things I Should Have Learned in High School But Was Too Stupid at the Time to Appreciate. I couldn’t teach it, but I could write the syllabus.
I would SO sign up for that. The course name should be lengthened to “….or understood back then before work bureaucracy and household details wiped out intelligent thought.”
Nah, we weren’t stupid, we were just teenagers. I’d call it “Books That Are Wasted on Adolescents.” Sign me up, too. (But let’s don’t read “Moby Dick” — I’ve tried it twice in the past five years and just couldn’t get engaged. In spite of thoroughly enjoying “In the Heart of the Sea” as well as “Twenty Years Before the Mast” and also “Ahab’s Wife.”)
Just finished a book called Fire Season by Phillip Connors. He chronicles his experience as a lookout in the Gila Wilderness. While not earth shattering, he has all kinds of interesting observations about wilderness, fire management, relationships, booze, authors, etc…
If you long to head out (or back out) West to camp and just hang out in the mountains, I strongly suggest reading it — fair warning, it will give you the itch to get in the car and head out. The other great thing about it is that it reminded me to go re-read some old Norman Maclean stories that I love. Maclean inspires me to remember to appreciate your surroundings, the vagaries of human nature and that it is never too late to do something you want to do — he didnt publish his first book until he was 70!
Wow, how could I forget Norman Maclean. “A River Runs Through It” totally knocked me out.
A great southern, quiet treat in a similar vein, but hard to find, is “Only the Little Bone” by David Huddle. Wonderful stories about growing up in rural Virginia.
“The Invisible Man”, by Ralph Ellison, when I was 13. It struck me in such a profound way, I still can’t explain it.
I also read that in my early teen years. It gave me a great sensitivity to the African American issues, which has become a live long thing. Also Michael Harrington’s book The Other America inspired my career choice.
For me, it was Native Son by Richard Wright, Raisin in the Sun, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Forgot about the first two.
Chris Hedges – “Empire of Illusion” and “Death of the Liberal Class” are two recent books that have had an effect.
I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in high school and was strongly impacted by it. Brothers K had a similar effect when I eventually got to it.
I also had to read The Fountainhead in high school. Entertaining, especially for a kid who wanted to be an architect, but I found Rand’s message alarming. (As summarized in that masterpiece of film Dirty Dancing: there are some people that matter, and others that don’t.)