The Sybian wrote:Finally got around to listening to Swamp Favorite Omnivore's Dilemma. Fucking cheap corn bringing down the Empire. Mother fucker.
howard wrote:I am not sure a single book has had greater impact on my life than this one. Maybe Ball Four as a kid. Yeah, baseball and food; I'm a pretty simple man.
Scottie wrote:There's a thread just waiting to happen.
So, this thread just happened.
I don't know if I can pick a single book. In my case, two books I read around the same time really rekindled my interest in the outdoors, and that's been a positive development in my live. I've always liked going outdoors, but only within the last 10 years have I really acted on it. And that interest has increased quite a bit in my recent years.
Anyway, the two books are Coming Into the Country by John McPhee and Alone in the Wilderness by Richard Proenneke. Coming Into the Country is a collection of three stories by John McPhee, and all three are about Alaska. The first was about a canoe trip in the Alaskan wilderness that he took with a group that included biologists and state and federal wildlife officials. The second was about the state's efforts to find a new site to build a city that would becoming the state capital. But the best story is the last, which is a look at the small town and nearby residents of Eagle, Alaska. There are so many unique characters in that city that it makes for fascinating reading.
Alone in the Wilderness is an edited collection of journal entries by Proenneke during his first year at Twin Lakes. He built his cabin by hand during the spring and summer, and went on to live at the site for about 30 years. The property is now part of the Lake Clark National Park and you can tour it. Going there is definitely on my bucket list.
Single book? Wow, that's tough. I'll have to say One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, even though I don't remember much of it and I'm sure if I went back and read it a second time, with an older person's eyes, it probably wouldn't resonate as much. But as a fairly naive 16/17-year old from the White Picket Fence Midwest? Eye-opening and mind-blowing. I was never able to look at authority the same way afterwards and, even though I had dabbled with the Beats and other more free-thinking writers, this was the first time I felt like the suspicious I had that there was usually more to the world than what one saw on the surface were completely normal. I'll have to go back and read it.
Others on the list of nominees: Lou Gehrig: Boy of the Sandlots by Guernsey Van Riper, Jr - must have checked this out from my school library and read this about 15 times as 8-12 year old; the answer to why a baseball fanatic from Ohio wound up as a Yankee fan Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer - see above, as complete a confirmation of why I cannot buy in to any faith-based system as exists Down & Out in Paris and London by George Orwell - if only because it was my introduction to Orwell
"The View From the Center of the Universe" by Joel R. Primack, Ph.D. and Nancy Ellen Abrams
It got new-agey and nut & berryish at the end, but it really struck a chord with me. It was definitely more affirmation of already held beliefs than anything new, but still, it resonated with me like crazy.
The Stand - Stephen King
Maybe it was timing, but this was the first real long novel I read, and the first time I ever got involved with characters. It also was when I finally got what King was saying when he'd talk about real horrors (unassuming neighbor being a serial killer) vs. fantasy horrors (evil clowns)
I wasn't so naive that I didn't realize humanity had a dark side, I just never realized the depths.
Omnivores Dilemma - Michael Pollen
It hasn't caused a complete upheaval of my eating habits, but it was the first book ever to make me consider them at all.
Bensell wrote:My two favorites are The Secret History by Donna Tartt and Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.
It's been years since I read "The Secret History", and while I remember enjoying it, I also remember largely not getting it.
Kind of like a "10 Favorite Album List" which in my case is about 56 albums long...
Some good books mentioned already, the Krakauer one is incredible.
I'll put 1984 on the list because it still chills to this day.
What Is The What despite its terrible title is perhaps the most memorable book that I have read in the last 10 years. The story of one of Sudan's "lost boys" who went through unimaginable hell in order to get to the west - and found that his struggles did not end there. But (spoiler alert!) it is ultimately a book that proves (in an unsentimental and unsensationalized way) that sometimes, the human spirit can triumph.
"beautiful, with an exotic-yet-familiar facial structure and an arresting gaze."
Since I love to repeat myself, The Omnivore's Dilemma first changed my thinking about food; then eventually completely changed what I eat. Within three months of reading it, I had drastically changed my diet; as of today, three and a half years later, a completely new set of dietary habits has deeply taken hold. I used to laugh at the people who eat the way I eat today.
Ball Four immediately made me see ballplayers as mere human beans, not as idealized heroes. And made me want to be a ballplayer all the more (helped that in fall 1970, at age 13, I was starting to like girls the way I previously liked only baseball).
Two others that don't qualify, only because the book needed something else to impact my life:
The Science of Hitting by Ted Fucking Williams, that same year, 1970. This completely changed my approach to hitting a baseball, and took me a long ways toward realizing my potential. Too bad that I had nearly zero talent, hence my potential was quite low. If I had any talent, this book would've had a greater impact. (If by that age I had discovered Bill Russell and John Wooden and developed an affinity for basketball one tenth of what I eventually felt for the sport, college would've been free and involved a lot more sex with cheerleaders.)
(The Big Book of) Alcoholics Anonymous, including the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I read this a few years before I sobered up. Then I read it with a very different perspective, sitting in rehab in 1995. Completely different context, and different results. Just reading the book had little impact on my life. What impacted my life was the people in AA, and my interaction with these people. Of course the book outlines the principles carried out by these people and hopefully by me, to the limits of my ability and willingness. But the book alone, not so much. Hence, it does not get the nod; perhaps this is a technicality, but that is how I see it.
One more. The Civil War, three volumes by Shelby Foote. I liked reading history books; this one made me love reading history books. Honorable mention to Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson's one volume history, which was so good, about 200 pages in I went out and bought the first volume of Foote's tome, and read the remainder simultaneous with McPherson. I can't name one without naming these four volumes, and they completely changed my reading habits (I was in med school; I read medical books, then on vacation and in the summers Elmore Leonard/Robert Parker and other pulp fiction, that was it. Spenser. With an S. Like the poet.) and i shifted to heavy dense non-fiction history and biography.
But eating and baseball trump reading habits. And everything else in life, for me at least.
Orwell is moving up in my world; I read about 70% of the stuff on his website, and Animal Farm hit me hard in high school. I favored Huxley's Brave New World to Orwell's 1984, but that is just taste. My favorite authors would be Hunter S. Thompson/Orwell/Chris Hedges, in that order I suppose.
Who knows? Maybe, you were kidnapped, tied up, taken away and held for ransom.
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago
Oh yeah…
Pruitt wrote:Kind of like a "10 Favorite Album List" which in my case is about 56 albums long...
Some good books mentioned already, the Krakauer one is incredible.
I'll put 1984 on the list because it still chills to this day.
What Is The What despite its terrible title is perhaps the most memorable book that I have read in the last 10 years. The story of one of Sudan's "lost boys" who went through unimaginable hell in order to get to the west - and found that his struggles did not end there. But (spoiler alert!) it is ultimately a book that proves (in an unsentimental and unsensationalized way) that sometimes, the human spirit can triumph.
What is the What was a fantastic book that I was enticed to read by the Swamp Reading threads.
An honest to God cult of personality - formed around a failed steak salesman.
-Pruitt
James Joyce’s Ulysses. Wholeheartedly I believe this is the single greatest work of art ever created by a lone man; statues, frescoes, pyramids, splatter on canvas and sold for fortunes, lines drawn undrawn altered then overwritten, sunken cities of civilizations doomed to their own senseless legacy of underwater untranslatable periodically fashionable curious tourist attracting falselore, compositions of all sorts worshipped on or off key, G-d’s ceiling, opera’s underscored wailing to disguise orchestral innovation, neon electric buzz, photography in all its staggering methods from once irrefutable to now implausible, no, nothing compares. Self-imposed exile. To truly understand what Joyce is delivering, one does not simply read the novel (nobody has ever “simply” read Ulysses) rather with true divination one is inexorably altered by it; one’s entire electroencephalography swerves from compact to explosive, from finite beginning to eternal absence of infinity; one couldn't compile the thought of an assaulting everway mind. Joyce was perfectly aware that immortality is a fool’s notion; though staggeringly steeped in the history of man’s written word as he was, from dawn of time to epics that structured dynasties both millennial and temporary, to Giambattista Vico’s definition of neverending fourths, upon which Finnegans Wake is structured, and terribly overlooked, to all philopeotic greekromanenglishitalianchinese, Joyce recounted and straightened out their bents in flawless fashion as yet and evertobenever endlessly out-Joyced.
Fools play at immortality; alchemists and would be mystics and all salesmen inbetween. Only Joyce knew what silken thread could multiplysingularly weave a forever in our partial foreverness of distracting worthy; teach a mind to be in concert with his very mind, analytics wonts eccentricities flair polyglottinous poignant philosophy’s playground swing-set daring. A can you while you have you. To be or to be that and then the then after? This thus brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation to the next guy, the previous guy; whoever wills to be the willing. Will willed his will wilfully on wilful willing willards.
Language is a set of sounds agreed upon and each word a mere mouthful of air, yet when communicated, each to each, transcendence born we know exchanges that push the limits of ever to never; the he and the she of it, the eternal and the senseless, mingling in a mill of racket; brilliance and banal each emerge; the latter to expire as a firework, the former to temporarily more everlast.
If I had one wish it would be to know the meaning of every word ever spoken in every language that ever formed ashore upon the banks of this our everus stream.
Second? Art is the whatness of all art; Shakespeare the shaking of all spear. Hamlet. Shakespeare spake all, afterall, only opposed by confines of his needy benefactors’ vague bounds stated as unknowing the very far reaching beyond possible refashion left as testament, knowing that to offend was uncivilized yet needed to describe being offended while glorifying that which he despised. With their stakes, he gambolled and brought down the game itself in such manner than one man could but dare to embark. I have played Hamlet. Although in all waking moments, I do mean the role upon a stage; where one treads in period costume to speak that which reaches beyond the grasp of any history’s insular identifiable moments. The here, the now, the you as you are, and all future you that come what may will be subject to parameters no less tangled in the mind; the very wonder of being, all laid bare. A two-week run in my final year of high-school education; two performances a day, for which as reward I received a free pass through Grade Twelve and reluctant valedictorian. Yet unknowing how it would affect me, I considered it fair trade, distance being then unpredictable. Uncut, four-hour performances, not a word omitted, my very dreams throughout this period were cauldron conjured battles of blank verse versus iambic pentameter on a ghostly plain, bereft of all but my lonesomeness, badgered and attended by some more well-meaning than others, delivered to deliver, wrought upon to wring upon, I hammered it out; in each iteration harder meaning emerged, very wondering what I even was. Oh, how it affected me in later life as, yet knowing to this day, each word lain down, engraved, reconsideration as endless echoes persist flummoxd ceaseless and profound, dear my friends, we speak of these things once dearly and, should the stars above grant as pulse of mind and matter, may live to speak of them refashioned some day yet again, others will have this journey in kind, yet know the same atoms of man.
Hamlet, you should know, contains beyond 4000 lines; that lone character, not the entire play. Attempt performing that twice daily for a fortnight; afternoons for bored school children, evenings for the critically scrutinous. Merry, it is a four-hour performance to be violently surmised, uncontainable, and, in each retelling upon one’s limit by exhaustion peaked, one then must summon the otherworldly fuel to speak a monumental speak and yet sell a choreographed athletic sword fight leading to one’s hopefully eloquent summation in harrowing sacrificial literary death. Eight months memorizing Hamlet’s lines. No, that’s not quite the gist of it, good fellows; mates, I implore you, bend an ear, with me travel, for my muscles stretch as sinews raw and eager to be heard, and I know you are my most welcome accompanied conveying voyagers. Oh! Rather eight solid months learning what Shakespeare was riveting through Hamlet so I would not, nay no nay never, trod upon the boards speaking words lost on me; for nothing is so poor as an actor that knows not the meaning and flexible echo of his lines nor the human compulsion of each syllable and gesture meant as deliverance. Drilled it into myself, (threads ago I mentioned my Junior hockey nickname was “Shaker”; that’s why) until I became it and it became me, and not a sun rises nor sets upon this that which is me, this poor fragmented rogue dogsbody, upon which the scales of time have been o’er practised, the fret-board worn of repetition, the keys and strings so hammered and stretched, tones known so as now and then to become thought, sounds and words veiled as each to each, this is that which I am become.
1984. Endgame. In my few free silent minutes, we still have minutes, I like to imagine a world where people were not born into failure’s dust, as I perhaps was, now mixing longing and dreams and perhaps memory, on a small island, remote and disconnected from the various goings on of whatever we dared imagined happened beyond what we now consider always. Those eyes see my eyes. In small corporate houses, owned by the federal mining company, the steel rail manufacturer, invisible giants that employed our fathers. Once we’d other industry, not unworth the study so long gone rewritable as to render their memory vague. My mother spoke of them? Was she perhaps senile? What was it called? Lost in a haze of the final stages? What were those places where we labored to sustain ourselves? I won’t dare go looking now. No gain in knowing anything for sure if you could ever know anything for sure since sure keeps changing. Yet there had to be a once-upon-a-time in order for this time to have ever happened? Well, maybe not. There’s no consulting it. How could anyone know if normal was anything but a statistic? Can’t. We make the statistics. Thus everything’s normal. Coal? Oil? Fish? I saw little of my father. He would disappear from our lives and return only momentarily, ephemeral as a physical postcard, hugs us and give us tiny presents and then vanish again. Our little town was dominated by smokestacks that belched ceaseless exhalations of orange fumes into blue sky but none of us did the math at the time, that we were breathing it and the only escape was impossible because where would you go if you could ever go anywhere right? The structure itself was as cloudy as its poisons; who made this factory and why and what were they making and what were they making all of this for and what happened to it and where did it go and did it just disappear? No, surely not. There had to be a reason for it. But what was the reason? Who knew? None of us knew. Our fathers made these things. We would someday make these things. That’s all we knew. Except, and this began to happen more frequently, there were incidents. Incidents, where the routine was disrupted and that which we once took for granted was suddenly, well, not there anymore. Given that it was impermissible to speak of these odd occurrences, we muted ourselves in the dull routine of survival. One dusk, as nightly power provision was offing into dark, I hid between housing buildings to avoid the tower eyes. My foot fell, rolling oddly, and I reached down to assume it was some stick or other I might take home to dry for the hearth one day. Yet, as it turned out, it was a fountain pen.
