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Jun. 13th, 2009 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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unicorn: List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- Don't take too long to think about it. The first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes.
I AM SORT OF SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT MY LIST. It is not particularly sophisticated or edgy and yet will contain titles that make it seem like I am trying to appear sophisticated and edgy.
❀ Catch-22 This is the most horrifying book on this list. I read it at the same age I read quite a few fucked up, surreal books about war, like Slaughterhouse Five and Starship Troopers, Ender's Game, et cetera. I've read the serious, realistic war stories, too, and they horrify me like you'd expect, but it's the metaphorical bizarre stuff that actually gets to me way more. One of the original reviews for Catch-22 says "[it] doesn't even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper," and while that was supposed to be really negative I remember it because it's really true. But that's what makes it work because it's like you're trapped in a chaotic nightmare of human hypocrisy and pain, and you can't stop reading because then you'll never know if Yossarian lives or not, and you like Yossarian, and the writing is fucking hilarious but nothing's funny. I staggered around for a few days after I read this, and I've never picked up another thing written by Joseph Heller. This is my favorite book and I figure anything else either wouldn't be as good or it'd be just as terrible.
❀ Slaughterhouse-Five I've read a few things by Vonnegut but this is the only one I remember super well. That's probably because I sat down with the book, read it in a few hours, at which point I immediately flipped back to the beginning and read the entire thing again. It's not written at all like Catch-22 but it still has the same ... plan, I guess. It used the fantastic and totally bizarre, and the funny, to drive home completely devastating points about the boring, real world.
❀ The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs in Stalin's Russia The link goes to a digital version of this book, though I dunno if it has as much as the hardback copy I have, or if it has more, and I linked it because actually I doubt if anyone has heard of this. It's nonfiction, obviously, and it's not a story, it's an art collection. But it tells a really compelling story anyway, because it's about how that government disappeared people and altered photographic evidence proving they'd ever existed, and the book is probably the reason I'm now so vehemently against state censorship of any kind.
❀ Address Unknown This is a very short, very small book my parents used to keep on their coffee table. It's a story told in letters, the two characters are close friends, both German, between the years 1932 through 1934. One of them's Jewish. One of them thinks Hilter is the best thing that every happened to Europe. Do I really need to go on? I tried to find it online to read somewhere because it's so short but no dice.
❀ Fahrenheit 451 Another good reason I'm against censorship. I'm pretty sure everyone knows the basics of this story already. You know someone tried to ban this book somewhere? Had they ever read it?
❀ 1984 My dad used to say that you really didn't need to read both this book and Fahrenheit 451, since they both had the same message. He has a point, but I don't think he's right. For one, they're both written dramatically, dramatically differently, even starting from the same vague sort of idea, which I think is interesting. For two, George Orwell put a lot of thought into his Newspeak ideas, and while from what I know about linguistics I don't think the conclusion he drew was entirely accurate, he had a damn good point about people in authority using language to control people. Oh, and Big Brother is bad. Don't go into Room 101. Et cetera.
❀ Animal Farm I'm not even a huge Orwell fan, but goddamn, did he succeed in his mission in life, which was to make me and everyone else who read his books uncomfortable with communism, which was easy for me, what with reading all the stuff about how horrible Stalin was. CENSORSHIP SHOWS UP HERE AGAIN, too. Also, the idea that large groups of people—populations, really, since the story is so symbolic—are sort of dumb and just predictable, which also shows up in the next item on the list.
❀ Foundation This is great science fiction, even if Asimov wrote it so long ago that he didn't even put computers into his far future society. His world building is just fantastic like it always is, and there are some great characters and some fun adventures that I don't really remember all that clearly. Looking back it was really psychohistory that got to me in these stories, and it's basically what I focus on when I explain them to other people. I don't really think that human societies on the large, large scale are so predictable that you can literally predict the future, but I did spend a long time thinking about it. A really long time.
❀ Lord of the Flies I'm going to run out of horrible entries for this list soon, I think. This might be the last one. I really have a soft spot for stories about kids and this book doesn't hit that at all, because, well, they're not totally unrealistic characters but you sort of sense they aren't meant to be literal children. Or maybe they are, because children aren't that different from adults, really. They're still human, and the message of this book is pretty obviously that human nature is fucking terrible.
❀ American Psycho Finally, a lighthearted book! No, really. I mean there's some fucked up stuff about society Ellis is pointing out, and the murders are described in graphic detail and at no point ever does Ellis ever shy away from how brutal and insane Bateman is. But! Mostly I just find the funny parts hilarious and I really admire the way it's written. I just really like reading this book, I might be sick.
❀ Treasure Island I love Treasure Island. It might also be my favorite book, though obviously it didn't sucker punch me like Catch-22 did, I just looooooooove the story. Long John Silver is basically the prototype for every fictional pirate that ever came after him, and he's my favorite villain of all time. I really like a lot of what Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote, actually, but this is his best, I think. Though probably not as insightful as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but not everything has to be! I also love watching adaptations of the book, too, my favorite being Muppet Treasure Island.
❀ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I think I must've been seven or eight when I first read this. It was my favorite book for forever, I used to try and reenact scenes from the novel. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer when I grew up.
❀ Relativity I wondered if this would be too pretentious to put on here, but eh, fuck it. I used to read philosophy but I never got very far, because it never made me think and I didn't really care. Even the radical, fucked up stuff! Nothing. Then as a young teenager I read Einstein's very plainly written book and spend a long time afterwards internally going OH MY GOD NOTHING IS REAL D:
❀ Lord of the Rings Has anyone not read this? Shame on you! I hated it when it became cool to Tolkein-bash, because I read these books when I was eleven and I adored the story and it was beautiful and I'd never wanted to get to the end of a book so badly in my entire life, because I just had to know what happened, and I actually sort of felt bad for the people who were seeing it in theaters first, when they came out a few years after that. Not because I was being snobby, though it probably was a little bit of that, but because the movies were pretty and awesome but the books were gorgeous and brought my young self PURE JOY which the movies just could not live up to. Even though I loved them, too. Edit: I should probably also admit I am a complete goddamn dork, but I have never been able to support capital punishment after I read Gandalf say, "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement." So this had an impact on my life, too.
❀ The Chronicles of Amber It took me ten years to stop writing like a Roger Zelazny knockoff, and I still slip into it occasionally, because of these books. It's a swords and sorcery high fantasy story told in the first person, with a narrator with the voice of an old time hard boiled detective. There are other awesome characteristics, like a huge cast of interesting characters who you never forget or get confused even if there's like fifteen important characters, and a magic system which actually makes sense to me, and awesome humor and a good plot, too. In the unlikely event I have children I'm in real danger of naming them Random, Corwin, and Deirdre, that's how much I adore these books.
Man, that was a mostly depressing list. I had to leave a lot of my favorites off, too, because even if I love them they did not dramatically affect me in that forever and forever kind of way. Which is sad, because I really wanted to go on about how much I love Lamb: The Gospel of Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Maybe it belongs, actually, it was sort of scarring, too. Just not in my formative years, I guess.
unicorn: List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- Don't take too long to think about it. The first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. I AM SORT OF SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT MY LIST. It is not particularly sophisticated or edgy and yet will contain titles that make it seem like I am trying to appear sophisticated and edgy.
❀ Catch-22 This is the most horrifying book on this list. I read it at the same age I read quite a few fucked up, surreal books about war, like Slaughterhouse Five and Starship Troopers, Ender's Game, et cetera. I've read the serious, realistic war stories, too, and they horrify me like you'd expect, but it's the metaphorical bizarre stuff that actually gets to me way more. One of the original reviews for Catch-22 says "[it] doesn't even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper," and while that was supposed to be really negative I remember it because it's really true. But that's what makes it work because it's like you're trapped in a chaotic nightmare of human hypocrisy and pain, and you can't stop reading because then you'll never know if Yossarian lives or not, and you like Yossarian, and the writing is fucking hilarious but nothing's funny. I staggered around for a few days after I read this, and I've never picked up another thing written by Joseph Heller. This is my favorite book and I figure anything else either wouldn't be as good or it'd be just as terrible.
❀ Slaughterhouse-Five I've read a few things by Vonnegut but this is the only one I remember super well. That's probably because I sat down with the book, read it in a few hours, at which point I immediately flipped back to the beginning and read the entire thing again. It's not written at all like Catch-22 but it still has the same ... plan, I guess. It used the fantastic and totally bizarre, and the funny, to drive home completely devastating points about the boring, real world.
❀ The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs in Stalin's Russia The link goes to a digital version of this book, though I dunno if it has as much as the hardback copy I have, or if it has more, and I linked it because actually I doubt if anyone has heard of this. It's nonfiction, obviously, and it's not a story, it's an art collection. But it tells a really compelling story anyway, because it's about how that government disappeared people and altered photographic evidence proving they'd ever existed, and the book is probably the reason I'm now so vehemently against state censorship of any kind.
❀ Address Unknown This is a very short, very small book my parents used to keep on their coffee table. It's a story told in letters, the two characters are close friends, both German, between the years 1932 through 1934. One of them's Jewish. One of them thinks Hilter is the best thing that every happened to Europe. Do I really need to go on? I tried to find it online to read somewhere because it's so short but no dice.
❀ Fahrenheit 451 Another good reason I'm against censorship. I'm pretty sure everyone knows the basics of this story already. You know someone tried to ban this book somewhere? Had they ever read it?
❀ 1984 My dad used to say that you really didn't need to read both this book and Fahrenheit 451, since they both had the same message. He has a point, but I don't think he's right. For one, they're both written dramatically, dramatically differently, even starting from the same vague sort of idea, which I think is interesting. For two, George Orwell put a lot of thought into his Newspeak ideas, and while from what I know about linguistics I don't think the conclusion he drew was entirely accurate, he had a damn good point about people in authority using language to control people. Oh, and Big Brother is bad. Don't go into Room 101. Et cetera.
❀ Animal Farm I'm not even a huge Orwell fan, but goddamn, did he succeed in his mission in life, which was to make me and everyone else who read his books uncomfortable with communism, which was easy for me, what with reading all the stuff about how horrible Stalin was. CENSORSHIP SHOWS UP HERE AGAIN, too. Also, the idea that large groups of people—populations, really, since the story is so symbolic—are sort of dumb and just predictable, which also shows up in the next item on the list.
❀ Foundation This is great science fiction, even if Asimov wrote it so long ago that he didn't even put computers into his far future society. His world building is just fantastic like it always is, and there are some great characters and some fun adventures that I don't really remember all that clearly. Looking back it was really psychohistory that got to me in these stories, and it's basically what I focus on when I explain them to other people. I don't really think that human societies on the large, large scale are so predictable that you can literally predict the future, but I did spend a long time thinking about it. A really long time.
❀ Lord of the Flies I'm going to run out of horrible entries for this list soon, I think. This might be the last one. I really have a soft spot for stories about kids and this book doesn't hit that at all, because, well, they're not totally unrealistic characters but you sort of sense they aren't meant to be literal children. Or maybe they are, because children aren't that different from adults, really. They're still human, and the message of this book is pretty obviously that human nature is fucking terrible.
❀ American Psycho Finally, a lighthearted book! No, really. I mean there's some fucked up stuff about society Ellis is pointing out, and the murders are described in graphic detail and at no point ever does Ellis ever shy away from how brutal and insane Bateman is. But! Mostly I just find the funny parts hilarious and I really admire the way it's written. I just really like reading this book, I might be sick.
❀ Treasure Island I love Treasure Island. It might also be my favorite book, though obviously it didn't sucker punch me like Catch-22 did, I just looooooooove the story. Long John Silver is basically the prototype for every fictional pirate that ever came after him, and he's my favorite villain of all time. I really like a lot of what Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote, actually, but this is his best, I think. Though probably not as insightful as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but not everything has to be! I also love watching adaptations of the book, too, my favorite being Muppet Treasure Island.
❀ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I think I must've been seven or eight when I first read this. It was my favorite book for forever, I used to try and reenact scenes from the novel. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer when I grew up.
❀ Relativity I wondered if this would be too pretentious to put on here, but eh, fuck it. I used to read philosophy but I never got very far, because it never made me think and I didn't really care. Even the radical, fucked up stuff! Nothing. Then as a young teenager I read Einstein's very plainly written book and spend a long time afterwards internally going OH MY GOD NOTHING IS REAL D:
❀ Lord of the Rings Has anyone not read this? Shame on you! I hated it when it became cool to Tolkein-bash, because I read these books when I was eleven and I adored the story and it was beautiful and I'd never wanted to get to the end of a book so badly in my entire life, because I just had to know what happened, and I actually sort of felt bad for the people who were seeing it in theaters first, when they came out a few years after that. Not because I was being snobby, though it probably was a little bit of that, but because the movies were pretty and awesome but the books were gorgeous and brought my young self PURE JOY which the movies just could not live up to. Even though I loved them, too. Edit: I should probably also admit I am a complete goddamn dork, but I have never been able to support capital punishment after I read Gandalf say, "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement." So this had an impact on my life, too.
❀ The Chronicles of Amber It took me ten years to stop writing like a Roger Zelazny knockoff, and I still slip into it occasionally, because of these books. It's a swords and sorcery high fantasy story told in the first person, with a narrator with the voice of an old time hard boiled detective. There are other awesome characteristics, like a huge cast of interesting characters who you never forget or get confused even if there's like fifteen important characters, and a magic system which actually makes sense to me, and awesome humor and a good plot, too. In the unlikely event I have children I'm in real danger of naming them Random, Corwin, and Deirdre, that's how much I adore these books.
Man, that was a mostly depressing list. I had to leave a lot of my favorites off, too, because even if I love them they did not dramatically affect me in that forever and forever kind of way. Which is sad, because I really wanted to go on about how much I love Lamb: The Gospel of Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Maybe it belongs, actually, it was sort of scarring, too. Just not in my formative years, I guess.
