Worked all day yesterday on the speech and then had a meeting that took all morning, so I'm slow with Austen and Conscience. I'm trying to think of a clever way to combine them.
Anyway, Tyler Cowen has challenged bloggers to list the ten books that most influenced them. You can see his list here. Like him, I'm going more on gut feeling rather than over-analyzing the thing.
This sort of writing is always easier than the kind that requires real thinking. My list is below in the order I discovered them. I had to cheat and go to
1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I got very sick at the start of Grade 2 and missed several months of school (had to repeat as a consequence). They thought I might die. I wasn't sure I cared whether I lived or not I was so tired of always being in pain. My father sat beside the bed and read me Huck Finn. This is the paragraph that made me feel like living again:
This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed -- only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all -- that night, nor the next, nor the next.2. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Read this when I was twelve and I still like it now. It has a very unfashionable world view now but an absolutely correct one. I have to be very careful about picking this up because if I read so much as three paragraphs I will have to sit down read the whole thing again. PS: When you buy books like this or Huck Finn, be sure to get a good illustrated edition!
3. The Best Times by John Dos Passos I found this book on a shelf in our house and read it the year I was fifteen. I read it so many times after that that it fell apart. I was so inspired by it that I read every single book Dos Passos mentions in The Best Times.
4. Phaedrus by Plato In Quebec we all go to these colleges called CEGEPs. Mine was a very old-fashioned one where we had to do the old Quebec classical curriculum. That meant studying Philosophy, Classics, Mathematics, French, English and History (tragically no Music otherwise it would have been perfect). I did this book in first year Philosophy. It was like someone handing me an éclair after a lifetime of oatmeal.
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Another book I read at CEGEP. I remember finishing it and understanding why the doctrine original sin was right for the first time in my life. PS: Chinua Achebe needs to get over himself.
6. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. A German girl named Ulrika I met when I was in university was reading this as part of her English as a Second Language course. It was an absolutely insane choice because humour is lost on a second-language reader. She left her copy in my room and I started reading it and loved it. Years later I gave a copy to a woman I was working with and the Serpentine One and I will be celebrating our fifteenth wedding anniversary this year.
7. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The hardest book I ever read. All through university, the Tractatus was my Bible. I completely internalized it.
8. Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I had so completely internalized the Tractatus that I simply projected it onto the Investigations. It took me a long time to see just how different it is. And then one day I saw the light and got the Investigations. Wittgenstein blows apart Enlightenment rationalism and modernism. My writing style owes so much to Wittgenstein that I should be paying royalties.
9. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. I was saying to a friend just the other day that I think this is Chandler's response to Mickey Spillane's vile I, the Jury. For, vile as it may be, Spillane's book accidentally posed a very profound question: How much difference is there really between the character of the romantic hero and a that of cold-blooded vigilante/executioner? In this book, Chandler is reluctantly forced to conclude that the answer is, "Not much". (Hamlet too! List the objectively knowable facts about Hamlet and he is every bit as vile as Iago or Macbeth.)
10. After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. I said quite a bit about my relationship with this book back in an early post. Suffice to say here that this finished off modern ethics and liberalism for me.
11. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. When I was in university I thought people who watched Masterpiece Theater were shallow. So I read this book I had never heard of just so I could feel superior to all the people who were raving to me about the television miniseries based on it. Like a lot of people, this book brought me to Catholicism, in my case back to Catholicism. It was the first novel I'd ever read that seemed to have been written by someone who lived in the same world I did. Everything made sense and I started going back to church again because now I could see the connection between loving people and loving God.
12. Emma by Jane Austen.When I put my first pair of glasses on it was an incredible jolt to suddenly see the world in crisp, clear focus. I'd been going who knows how long without realizing that my vision was poor. The difference was so amazing that I walked all over downtown seeing all sorts of things clearly for the first time in I didn't know how many years. Emma had the same effect on me.
13. The Reef by Edith Wharton. I read this just last year. It has a flaw—that is flaw singular—there is a minor character who gets mentioned at the beginning who reappears in the last chapter, by which time you have forgotten why his name is significant. OTOH, that gives you and excuse to go back and read it again. I reread it three times in a row. Then I put it down for three months scared to read it again just in case I would be disappointed. I wasn't. This is, in my unorthodox view, the very best of a very good writer's work. BTW: As good as Henry James is, Wharton is better.
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