I'm posting the portion of this article I've written today, but I plan to add to it later (like I do with my links page). Check back once in a while!This is a list of books that made a big difference to me at the time I first read them, and in some cases forever afterward, by giving me many new things to think about and/or a completely different angle on an old favorite topic. I highly recommend them all. They're in approximately chronological order according to when I first read them, but that doesn't mean anyone else needs to read them in this particular order, and where I mention ages please take into account that I was a very precocious reader—many kids will not be able to read these books to themselves until they are several years older. (Check out these great chapter books for kids!)
I am not linking these book titles to their listings on Amazon, mainly because that's unnecessary annoyance for me but also because I encourage you to resist ordering new books to be shipped to you at your slightest whim! Look for them at your local public library, consider requesting them via interlibrary loan, wait for them to turn up used, buy them from the real-life bookstore closest to your home . . .or if you must, as a last resort, order online, consider Powell's which I've found superior to Amazon in accuracy of order-filling, environmentally friendly packaging, visual clarity of Website, ability to refrain from spamming its customers, and general vibe.A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle was the first book to fill my head with ideas so rapidly and excitingly that I had to set it down between chapters just to catch my breath and give my neurons a chance to settle down. This children's science fiction novel first caught my attention as a radio dramatization when I was in kindergarten, and I read the book soon after that. It's about time travel, weird mathematical concepts, the powers of wacky women and misfit kids, aliens who are fascinatingly different from us spiritually as well as physically, the horrors of conformity, the nature of equality, and the triumph of love. The dialogue and narrative flow are excellent. It's complex and intriguing enough to hook adults, even those who've read it twentysome times like I have!
Worlds to Explore was the handbook for Girl Scout Brownies and Juniors in the 1970s. I happened to find a copy in a used-book store when I was in kindergarten. Reading it overwhelmed me with the desire to become a Girl Scout, to adopt and
live by those principles while doing all that cool stuff! I joined Girl Scouts at my first opportunity, in second grade, and I was a Scout clear through high school, worked as a camp cook and counselor, and later became a troop leader for six years.
Worlds to Explore has been one of my favorite references throughout, despite my ownership of newer handbooks, because of its welcoming, inspiring tone and its perfect balance of well-organized reference materials with fun little tangents. Its Suzy Safety section taught me first-aid skills and a sense of competence in an emergency that have served me well many times.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin is a "puzzle-mystery" with so many twists and turns that I'm still not sure I understand the whole thing. There are many characters, all keeping secrets from each other and from the reader, and they're all potential heirs named in the will of an eccentric mastermind who forces them (and you) to play his crazy game. Let me publicly thank my childhood friend Helen Dover, who was not so much of a reader as I was, for happening to choose this book as my Christmas gift in fourth grade! [Note: I've read other books by Ellen Raskin that pretty much sucked, so don't bother with them.
The Westing Game is the good one!]
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin is science fiction about a man living in a future dystopia who is able to have dreams that come true. He seeks therapy, and his corrupt therapist tries to use his dreams to improve the world, with many unexpected results. I didn't actually read this book until college, but it's early in my list because I saw the made-for-PBS movie when I was six or seven and experienced the mind-blowing of this story then. The book is even better!
The Chosen by Chaim Potok is the story of an ordinary Jewish teenaged boy in 1940s Brooklyn who is the victim of an accidental injury that leads to his friendship with a super-Orthodox Hasidic Jew the same age. Although the two boys have lived within walking distance of each other all their lives, they've lived in separate worlds and have a lot to learn about each other and life in general. That sounds trite, but it isn't, because of the compelling writing. This book conveys such a vivid sense of place and time that it draws you into both boys' worlds and holds a part of you there. It's the book I chose to re-read both on the plane when I left for college the first time and in the hospital when my newborn son was being treated for jaundice, because I knew I could rely on those worlds to provide just the right amount of distraction and (after so many readings) comfortable familiarity.
Houses by Mail by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl is a book about the house-building kits sold through the Sears catalog in the early twentieth century. This is the book my uncle Ken chose when I asked for "floor plan books" for Christmas at age twelve. I'd been interested in architecture for a couple of years and had been looking at magazines and even meeting with a local architect through a mentor program, but my focus had been entirely on
new buildings.
Houses by Mail opened my eyes to the design features of earlier eras and helped me to understand why I found houses built before World War II so much more pleasant to occupy than newer houses. It revolutionized my own amateur designs and informed my critiques of new buildings. And it placed me firmly on the road toward an aesthetic sensibility that would render me
unable to survive in a cutting-edge architecture school of the early 1990s—but that's just fine, as it turns out! I'm not an architect now, but I still spend hours at a time gazing at
Houses by Mail and taking off on related flights of imagination.
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood is a novel that plays with time but isn't science fiction. It's the story of Elaine, a middle-aged painter who has some complicated memories to work through, and it jumps back and forth between the present and the past, moving in sequence along each time-line but hopping between them frequently. The past is every bit as real and vivid as the present. Sensory details, in particular, are so perfectly described that I now feel as if I have
been an eight-year-old girl in 1940s Ontario.
Unfortunately, this book's engrossing narrative and perfectly structured mood ravel apart toward the end, when the central conflict of Elaine's past is told but for some reason the story goes on, as if Atwood had a collection of memories she wanted to work in there. Not
all of these are irrelevant, and they're interesting to read, but Elaine's apparent psychological health in her young adulthood doesn't quite make sense, and many parts of the story are unresolved and left hanging. At first I read this as a comment on what life is really like, but with repeated readings it's come to bother me more.
Still, this is an excellent novel, one that really makes you think about the natures of time and memory. It's ideal for a long trip or illness when you want to really sink into a book.
Experiencing Architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen was required reading in my first year of architecture school, and I agree that it should be required for every architect, maybe even for every person! It explains how constructed spaces "work" aesthetically, in a way that's very clear and easy to understand. It's the sort of book that makes you feel smarter as you realize just how much you know but didn't know you knew!
Snow Crash and
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson are science-fiction novels packed tightly with ideas and interesting characters, set a few decades apart in a rapidly changing not-too-distant future. Both of them are a bit too violent for my tastes, but I forgive them because of all the cool stuff that happens in between the mayhem. Both books include strong female characters, clever use of psychology to change the world, and overwhelming inundations of both future technology and ironically-derived future culture.
Snow Crash is about a drug, or maybe it's a computer virus, or maybe it's a religion, or maybe it's a human virus, or maybe it's all of the above.
The Diamond Age is about the power of a book to change a little girl's life, about a proper gentleman who accidentally joins an undersea nude drumming cult, about the Mouse Army of Chinese orphan girls, and more.
The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris is a book I love despite disagreeing with its fundamental premise! Morris is a zoologist who, in this book, explains humans as animals. He has many fascinating insights into how we work and why we do some of the things we do. He's particularly skilled in breaking down some kinds of behaviors into categories, for example the different kinds of sex—the different reasons people have sex to fulfill different needs. It's another of these books that spells out things you didn't know you knew. The one thing that bugs me is that his central thesis is that human beings are wild animals who ought by nature to be roaming the savannas, so living in cities or even towns is like being incarcerated in a zoo, and this explains all human deviance and misery. I'll probably rant all about this in another article someday, but briefly: It seems to me that humans are not wild but domesticated animals and that we have domesticated
ourselves. While not all of our built environments are ideal and
some do have zoo-like effects, in general urban living is healthy and functional for many humans and does not equate to being imprisoned by a more powerful species. So reading
The Human Zoo causes me to have an ongoing mental argument with the author, but it's still a great book!
A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell (the first name is a pen name used by the prolific mystery author for her more novel-like books) is in my opinion the very best of the many excellent books by this author. It's about a woman who knows that one of her aunts killed the other but doesn't know why and doesn't know which of them was the biological mother of the baby they were fighting over. The story is filled with twists and turns, extremely well-drawn characters, vivid descriptions of time and place and sensory experience, and the kind of Britishly suppressed tension that makes for excellent suspense. My favorite thing about it is that, even after reading it six times, I can't quite remember exactly how it turns out!
How Like a God by Brenda W. Clough is the story of an ordinary suburban daddy who gradually develops the power to read minds and make others do his will. He runs away from home, is kind of crazy for a while, and then makes a new friend who helps him figure out what to do next. This ultimately results in a trip to Kazakhstan, where all kinds of interesting stuff goes down. I love this book but find it very hard to describe! The best things about it are that the main weird thing (the part that makes it science fiction) is different from any other story I know, and that the experience of being Rob Lewis as he goes through this weird thing is so vivid and real.
The next three books came my way when a neighbor moved out and left a bunch of unwanted stuff on her porch. Laura Schatzkamer, wherever you are now, I thank you!
In the Country of the Young by John W. Aldridge was written in 1969, so the Young he's talking about are Baby Boomers. He explains why his own generation had so many children so rapidly, why they raised them the way they did, and why they built the style of suburbs they did. He goes on to analyze the values, behavior, and logic of the Young. What's so striking about this book is that his characterization of the Young is so accurate and chillingly insightful, even to a Generation X person who's always known the Young as "adults not quite as old as my parents" reading this book first 30 and now 40 years later. It explains the Young's formative influences and the exact direction of their diversion from previous generations, in a different way from anything else I've read. The really mindblowing realization for me was that we're now living in the Country of the Young, much more so than in the '60s, because the Young are running the government and the economy and the advertising and the entertainment industry, and their influence pervades our whole society now. And the fact that they're no longer young is everybody's problem.
How Children Learn by John Holt is about a teacher's observations of young children, both in the classroom and in more casual settings. Much of the book is diary entries and other vignettes. It makes very clear that children are their own best teachers and can learn from all kinds of everyday objects and experiences, not just from formal lessons. It's very inspiring and has been fun to reread as I watch my own child learn.
The Family Bed by Tine Thevenin explains why sleeping near the mother is good for babies. I'm so glad I read this book several years before becoming a mother, because it completely changed my mind about
co-sleeping! I haven't read the newer edition of the book (although I have read other
recent reviews of research on co-sleeping) but the 1970s edition has a charming spirit of having been put together by an impassioned mother who really wanted to help people with her experiences, her library research, and the stories she collected from other families, so that we would not suffer even a moment of the self-doubt she felt when her instincts cried out that her baby should not be left alone.
The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz is a history professor's extremely thorough and readable explanation of what is and is not true about "the traditional American family." Unlike some of the other books I've mentioned, this one tells you that a lot of what you thought you knew is wrong! It's full of useful factoids and statistics, but it goes beyond that to explore the trajectories of different trends in society and their effects on one another. Basically, there
never has been a time when most families consisted of father, mother, their children, and nobody else
and most families were completely supported by the father's income with no government assistance and nobody else in the family employed. It's hard to meet that ideal these days not because we've gone off on the wrong track but because it always has been hard.