What Books Influenced You?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

What were the Big Books you read growing up? The books that you still think about to this day? That inform the way you look at the world?

The first chapter books I remember reading were the Magic Treehouse books by Mary Pope Osborne, which put into words the way it felt to be transported to another world with play. Then there was The Girl Who Owned A City by O.T. Nelson, my first dystopian novel, which made me think about how sideways the world could go. The open ending of Stuart Little by E.B. White, where Stuart drives off in search of Margalo, blew my mind. I felt a deep kinship with Stuart for his commitment to find the friend he loved. Then came the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander which, in my opinion, have far more to offer younger readers than Tolkien’s The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is a master, but I found those books to be a bit of a slog as a ten-to-twelve year old. And the Peter Jackson movie adaptations improved on the books by incorporating the Arwen and Aragorn romance. Alexander’s books, on the other hand, had everything I could have wanted in a series of fantasy novels at that age: adventure, romance, zombies, magic pigs, skeleton kings. You name it.

All these books put words and metaphors to feelings I couldn’t quite express on my own at the time. They gave me a sense of perspective I didn’t know I needed.

Then, when I was about thirteen, I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, which opened my mind to the idea that you could see something with your own eyes and not know if it was real, or if things really were as they pretended to be, a powerful realization for anyone questioning the validity of so-called “normal life.”

Art became a necessary escape hatch from reality. That's why I always hated when people called science fiction escapist—as if that's a bad thing. What if we need an escape sometimes to survive? What if it feels like we're in a cell made of one way mirrors, and a book lets us out so that we can see reality from the other side of the glass? PKD did that for me. And continued to do so throughout high school and college. But as I got older, something strange happened.

About six years ago, my wife and I tidied up our house using the Marie Kondo method, in which you essentially keep only the things that “spark joy,” a philosophy that has remained with us in spirit, if not in strict practice (we have two small children, so we collect some stuff that might not spark joy for us, but does for our children). And during the process, when we got to the book tidying section, I had a realization. Since college, I had accumulated a number of books that did not spark joy—the reason being that they were ones I thought I was supposed to read, not necessarily ones that I actually wanted to. So to the donation box they went. What were left were the books that I genuinely loved, that influenced me when I was younger (the Philip K Dicks, the E.B. Whites, the Lloyd Alexanders), as well as a few newer influences discovered in my twenties, like Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Veronica Roth. But what also remained was space—in my life and on the shelves—for more. More genuine connections. With writers like P. Djèlí Clark, Shannon Chakraborty, Andrea L. Rogers, and Amie Kaufman; Sarah J. Maas and Jonathan Stroud; Ned Vizzini and John Green.

The beauty of the books that I was impacted by when I was younger was that my connection to them was often unhampered by societal expectations. But as I got older, this idea of reading what I thought I was supposed to read instead of what genuinely interested me slowly crept into my life. But in my effort to fight this impulse, I was reminded of something Salman Rushdie said:

I sometimes think it was a good fortune for me to have never studied English literature, because I never had a canon imposed on me by professors. I didn’t have to be told about “the great tradition,” and obliged to worship at the shrine of D.H. Lawrence. I read in my own idiosyncratic way. Like, I’d suddenly get interested in Russian literature, and I’d read everything. And then I’d swing over here and start reading Latin Americans. I would just go on these adventures in literature as my way of educating myself about writing.

Nowadays, I try to follow Rushdie’s example by reading more like I did when I was younger: by following my curiosity and seeing where it leads.

Who did you read and love when you were younger vs. when you were older? Tell me in the comments!