The Books That Made Me

What I discovered as soon as I thought about this subject was that these are not the best books I've ever read. They are also not the most enjoyable books. They are simply the books that changed the way I look at myself and the way I look at books. They changed me in ways that last to this day. So let us begin.

The Juvenile Years

The first important book that I read, like many on this list, was something I didn't want to read at all but ended up very glad that I did. And I specifically remember that to be true of Tom Sawyer because, not only had I not heard of it before, I read the first page several times and was bored by it. As a youngster, I was very wary of books that involved outcasts, the impoverished, or broken people. I had no room in my head for tales of woe and I refused to listen to them or read about them. That Tom Sawyer didn't live with his parents was my first clue that I wouldn't like it. I pressed on beside myself and came to very much enjoy the first book I realized could not be judged by its first pages. As I recall the book, images of Injun Joe and Becky Thatcher are fresh, though I get mixup all of my graveyard memories with those of Frankenstein. What was and what wasn't in Huckleberry Finn also is dim in my memory, but I certainly felt more ambivalence over reading White Fang than I did about Nigger Jim. Though it did come back as I learned to speak Progressive. I made something of a squawk about it in the abstract during my 1990s Boohabian Period. As a kid, I loved the book because it was such a big surprise.

I cannot remember which was the first book of Mssrs Williams and Abrashkin I read, but my favorites were Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor and Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine. Into this series of books I have to throw in a couple more. That would be The Secret Language by Usrsula Nordstrom and Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry. The last in that category of kids books before middle school would be The Lemonade Trick by Scott Corbett. These rounded out my juvenile period.

 

First Sci-Fi
After those, and especially after reading practically all of the Danny Dunn, I read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke and The Martian Chronicles. And while my brother and I digested every one of the Hardy Boys mysteries, I went on to read as much science-fiction as I could get my grubbies on, specifically that of Heinlein. Of all of his, the one that convinced me that I was destined for space was Starman Jones. Although I and other people made a bigger deal out of the fact that I read Clarke when I was 10 years old, it was Heinlein that got to me. The Martian Chronicles were depressing and if I had known that it was permissible not to finish a book, I would have left it alone. But it was a big book, and I was proving that I was a big boy. Before I was a teen, there was nothing that got so deeply under my skin as the pathos and drive of Max Jones. He was me. My imagination was captured the moment I began reading and I saw the crashing train missing the loop in the early part of the book. The wistfulness of wanting to be elsewhere is what I recalled. It defined my youth. I understood the inevitable fact that my mind and my courage would take me far from home and the homeboys of my pre-teen neighborhood. I strove to understand nuclear energy. And suddenly, I did.

Growing Up Fast
In middle school, there were eight or so books that stuck fast in my head. Four because I read them and four because I refused to. The first I refused but read anyway was The Contender by Robert Lipsyte. Anybody who wants to know my biography and state of mind as an adolescent living in Crenshaw ought to read Stop Time by Frank Conroy. As I think about it and my desire to grow up and out, it probably ought to be paired with the song Zoom by The Commodores. So there was never any part of me that felt trapped by circumstances and place, and any suggestion that I had to adjust my way out of that with the kind of YA fiction that existed then, notably The Cross and the Switchblade was simply anathema to me. So while the Contender was good enough on its own, the other titles by Lipsyte left me cold. So too were fantastic and escapist stories, which I took to be the likes of A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, and Two Years Before the Mast. Finally they pointed me to Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. I was sick of all that depressing shit. I must have been something of a piece of work to deal with. Fortunately for all concerned, I read Jaws by Peter Benchley. Suddenly all was right with the world. Here was an excellent, real life portrayal of life in America. Ahh but that was just the beginning. For there was Fail Safe, the book that made me. As I ponder this moment, science and courage were the two signal themes in my life at this point. I might have read Silent Spring, but I was set. I read Red Alert instead. Nuclear was everything. The Cold War was everything. I was in it. And so I read the classic Hiroshima by John Hersey.

 

High School
My English classes put me in touch with some rather standard fare. Billy Budd. Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Red Badge of Courage. The Man Who Lived Underground. Taming of the Shrew. But the entire period seemed devoid with the exception of one monumental book, again something bigger than I was expected to read: Roots by Alex Haley. And while I found that I favored the work of Flannery O'Conner (not Harper Lee) and was stunned by Kate Chopin's The Storm, Ellison's Battle Royale and Yukio Mishima's Patriotism, in the end it was Roots that absorbed me completely. I must have also gone through my father's substantial library but found nothing more interesting than M and J's Sensuous Man and Sensuous Woman, both quite practical in theory if not practice. In the end, there was no place in books worthy of disappearing into as with my prior younger life. Filling this period during my lonely moments were music, pinball, Star Wars and chess openings.

A Marginal Need
I had worked and earned money, got girlfriends and vehicles. It wasn't until my new job at a bank and the attempted assassination of President Reagan that I thought that perhaps I wasn't as intelligent as I should be. So with only that slim motivation I started reading. I picked three authors who seemed appropriate to the time. When I think about it, I reflected then as I often have since about the lesson I was taught in my private prep school that literature was spoken in the important world. This was the answer to the inevitable question, why Shakespeare? The answer was that someday in a job interview the boss might begin "There is a tide in the affairs of men.." to which we are obliged to reply "Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." and thereby demonstrate our worthiness. Now 40 years later I have yet to hear it, but the bell hath tolled for me. But at the beginning of the 80s it had to be about Woody Allen, Stephen King and Robert Ludlum. I also read the plays of Neil Simon and began some fantastic daydreams about New York City. But Los Angeles nourished no greater literary desires beyond the banter of Regis Philbin and Kathy Lee Gifford. So I figured I was up to speed, so long as I watched art films.

Science!
After 4 gap years, I returned to collegiate life. As an old frosh I jumped in with both feet. Metamagical Themas, Goedel Escher Bach, and The Soul of a New Machine were stuffed into my brain like buns in a hotdog eating contest. They were poorly digested, especially the second one, of which I only recall the Incompleteness Theorem. Maybe I should read it again one day. But the most significant books I read and appreciated were The Mind's I and Turing's Man. These were my blueprint. I also later read the biography of Mishima and long considered his phrase 'the unity of pen and sword'. By my fourth year, I was disenchanted with the dearth of higher though in my environment. So I struggled for a clue among my contemporaries and professors I didn't respect, especially my drama teacher who idolized Terri Garr. I found a toehold of solace in music, and the bold strokes of Ayn Rand, Henry Miller and Malcolm X. That was pretty much it. On the whole it left me nothing but the desire to remake the world digitally. Of course I still have some of my textbooks, still remember the boredom of Abcarian & Klotz. still repsect Springer-Verlag and still look wistfully at the old volume of Salas & Hille on my shelf. But outside of academics I learned a great deal by reading Thomas Sowell. While his bigger books were very informative, it was Ethnic America that I took as my personal blueprint.

Shock and Awe
So there is no black unity, the world needs to be taken over digitally and The Rise of Managerial Computing is inevitable. Shoshanna Zuboff kicked off my career with here informative book which reminded me of the terrors of Taylorism. My bets were that machines like the Xerox Workstation, distributed, graphic, object-oriented would change the world and I could ride that wave. By the time I got my American Express card and people from Dean Witter and Amnesty International were calling me at work asking for money, I guessed that I had the whole thing figured out. But something in me was disturbed. So I felt that I could take a ride on the wild side. So I started listening to Pacifica Radio and reading Ishmael Reed. As I got deeper into jazz and reggae and soca and finally dub, I recognized that I was not as cookie cutter buppie as I might have been. There was yet that conversation I could never find. But I tried seriously to see what the deal was in black literature. I kept swinging and missing. Gloria Naylor didn't nail it for me. I was highly disappointed. Terry McMillan was operatic, but soap operatic. I was highly insulted. Ah but then I found Jean Toomer's Cane and Kabnis became my alter ego. But it wasn't until I read Toni Morrison's Beloved was I swept away. During the time that I entered my professional career and began reading not to learn so much as to not insult my intelligence with the blather of conventional wisdom, I discovered many interesting books to read. Along with Beloved were the roots of the Afrocentric and multicultural era. You see, given my education, I was prone to believing that there weren't so many civilized Americans as I once believed. So my shock and discovery of a certain amount of critical work was in order. One of the first was Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life by Cornel West and bell hooks. West's The American Evasion of Philosophy was a great milestone. For while I took a shine to H.L. Menken in his Fifty Years of the New Republic, and was somewhat radicalized by Theodore Cross' Black Power Immerative, it was West's description of Ralph Waldo Emerson, C. Wright Mills and Reinhold Neibhur, that convinced me once and for all that everything I ever wanted in life was philosophically consistent with American thought. No need to go to Europe or Asia or Africa or South America for that.

The Mythopoetic.
But I did go. First stop Jose Luis Borges. I can't remember how it was that I got caught up in Borges, but I'd have to guess that it came from the direction of reading Ishmael Reed. There has been a streak of attraction in me for the cryptic and complex meaning that I believe cannot be expressed through pedestrian language, at least not efficiently. The first time I saw rambling classified ads in the back pages of the LA Reader. There was a bizarre set of conversations going on that were deliciously weird, rambling and sometimes poetic. It was like nothing I'd seen before. So I might have been thinking about that when somebody suggested Mumbo Jumbo.  I blazed through a half dozen of Reed's books, but all of that changed when I finally read Japanese By Spring, as far as I'm concerned, his best work. Yet of course I'm hanging out with nobody particularly interested in such literature. It's a wonder I found Borges at all. I did. And so Dreamtigers. Somewhere deep in my psyche are the echoes and implications of the Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

During this time I was floating and flying through different worlds of mind. The sense of play was elaborate. I read Moliere, and especially loved Tartuffe. I listened to Thelonius Monk. I finally read Candide by Voltaire. This thread of reading foreign authors took me to Carlos Fuentes, to Paolo Friere's seminal work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then around to Sun Tzu. But also I found myself deeply attracted to the work of  T. Coraghessan Boyle. Little did I know that I was heading towards an interesting sort of intellectual dead-end. But in the moment, I declared myself a champion of reason and of logic, abandoning faith and filling myself with the kind of eclecticism that is at once edifying, exotic and self-congratulatory. Like everyone my age, I knew exactly what was wrong with America, and I was finding all of the proper expressions of my own humanity in the retinue of art films and the like. So I found my way to Tarkovsky's austere visions. I dug the quirky sensibilities of Eating Raoul and Repo Man. I was drawn to the films of Henry Jaglom (and Woody Allen) and the wordy narratives of Joe Frank and especially Spaulding Gray's' Swimming to Cambodia. I was digging the discovery of Kurasawa in his latest works. 

At some point I've got to stop this post. I suppose this point is just about right. I'm almost up to my late twenties when I started really taking my journaling seriously, and evolving myself to stand up and speak in public from my own poetry and thoughts. Here I was in the depths of trying to get international in my head. Sun Tsu's Art of War and the Otomo's Akira were two of the gateways.