In my last post, I wrote about some of the non-fiction handbooks that influenced me, but I left the fiction handbooks for their own post.
Like my character Bud Castillo in my forthcoming novella A Scout is Brave (heard of it?), I took books very seriously (and somewhat uncritically) as a kid. To me, every book was a kind of handbook, containing secrets on how to live competently.
My head back then felt like the opening sequence to The Twilight Zone with weird shit flying all over the place, clocks and doll heads and action figures and electronic components and Legos.
Actually, it still feels like that.
What I assumed books would help me do is fake the level of calm consistency that I assumed everyone around me performed as a matter of course. So I combed through every book for hints on a Grand Unifying Theory of how to be human.
(Which is what Aubrey Marsh is doing in my novella, too.)
Here are some of the books that influenced me greatly as a young person (elementary school through early college). I don’t necessarily recommend them or even still adhere to their points of view; they just each had moments of gravitational pull.
The Mouse and the Motorcycle, by Beverly Cleary
People who know me from work meetings and social situations may be surprised to hear this, but I’m actually oozing with empathy. It’s just sometimes a little…delayed. Or misplaced.
As a kid, I suspected that almost everything (especially if it was shaped like a person or an animal) had feelings. When Skylab fell from orbit, I fashioned helmets for my stuffed animals out of plastic soda bottle bottoms.
So it made complete sense that a sentient mouse could ride a toy motorcycle simply by making the noise of its engine, and every story I’ve written or believed in since about the heroism of seemingly powerless people comes from Ralph’s ride with Keith’s aspirin tablet.
Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls
This was probably the first (relatively) sophisticated work of fiction I encountered as a kid, along with the Ramona Quimby books.
(I didn’t get much advice from her, just validation that sometimes mischief came for you with the inevitability of the tides.)
My fourth grade teacher Mr. Clark read this to us after lunch for a few weeks, which probed to be a bad idea when he had a classroom of weeping nine-year-olds at the end…including me, to my great surprise. It was a revelation to have something untrue make me feel something real.
Catcher in the Rye | The Count of Monte Cristo | The Great Gatsby
When I got to high school, I of course fell into the Emo Boy Sociopath three-pack.
If you had a boardroom full of devious marketers and charged them with inventing stories for angry teenage boys with big feelings who felt forgotten by girls who should like them, they’d come up with this trilogy almost word for word.
Gatsby is basically Edmond Dantes in the American Gilded Age, right? A man with a sudden fortune uses it to impress a girl who spurned him and avenge himself on other men. The message of both books, that revenge isn’t healthy, is whispered at the end so as not to disrupt the fantasy.
Holden Caulfield, of course, is Gatsby as a teenager, surrounded by emotionally-dead phonies and not yet sure what to do about it. (Revenge, Holden! That’s what’s next.)
I loved all three of them.
The Planiverse, by A.K. Dewdney
My friend William Simmons loaned me his copy of this book when I was in high school, and I immediately latched onto its scientific conceit: how biology and chemistry and physics and engineering could function in a two-dimensional world.
But the quest of its central character Yndrd for meaning has stayed longer with me than all of the little science lessons he encounters along the way.
There’s a quote in the book that sooner or later, every intelligent being must explore its options, that almost physically cracked open my skull to the possibilities of my life. I didn’t have to take my purpose for granted, and it was my responsibility to physically find out what it was instead of merely thinking about it.
I gave this book to my friend Chris Swinney, now passed away, because I thought it was the kind of book about being a seeker that a rationalist like him would connect with. I have his copy in my own library and I value it.
Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
I went through a phase of shunning science fiction when I entered college, and I made it through seven of ten courses as an English major perplexed why I didn’t give a shit about what I was reading.
A summer class on science fiction taught by Kent Beyette gave me permission to read the genre again, like Margaret Mead observing the people of the Manu’a Archipelago. We read Dune, The Mote in God’s Eye, A Clockwork Orange, and an anthology of classic short stories…but first there came this book, which made me cry with a sublime certainty that we could be a better species if we tried.
I cried too for the time I’d wasted on the 17th century poetry that no one reads anymore.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
Really, this is a book about an idealistic philosophy professor who is driven mad by the terrible writing of freshman composition students. His rants about Quality, about seeking some form of excellence in even the smallest acts, were a revelation to me as a former gifted kid who just assumed he could half-ass his way through life because it had been working okay so far.
It’s scary to think that we live in a society so inured to whatever’s easy and comfortable that the theme of “give a shit about what you do even if it seems easy and minor” is a revelation.
But it certainly was to me.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
To say that I had a confused sense of God’s role in my life as a young person would be something of an understatement. I wasn’t sure if God was fucking with me because I deserved it or because I needed to be stronger for some noble purpose.
Either way, I assumed God thought about me a lot.
In this book, young oddball Owen Meany struggles with what he believes to be a great destiny, interpreting his entire life as leading to a moment of service and sacrifice for others. He happens to be right (which was a message I grabbed onto the first time I read it), but that doesn’t change the fact that his awareness of that destiny makes his life myopic (which is what I get from it now).
Aubrey Marsh from A Scout is Brave is related to Owen Meany in many ways, though Aubrey believes his destiny is a far darker one.
This book snapped me out of thinking (too much) about my ultimate meaning as a human being while letting all the little moments that make that meaning slip by.
