books that changed your life
Today on the way to work, I listened to this past week's podcast of This American Life, which was actually an old episode called 'Books that changed my life.' I really liked the episode and you should all go download it for free (yay free shit!), but it got me thinking about which books have changed my life. So obviously, I made a list.
5 Books That Changed My Life
(in no particular order)
1) Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
This was the first book I read that I really truly studied and teased out as many meanings as I could from it. It's also the book that introduced me to psychoanalytic readings and to my mentor in college, Lisa Ruddick, who I was half in love with, but mostly her brain and her talent and her hilarious lack of desire to read Durkheim. I've read Mrs D so many times, there are entire sections I could quote. It's not a long book, but it's so beautifully written, both entrenched in the late Victorian era and all the historical and cultural mores of that time and place, but also transcendent of all of that, because at its heart it's about people's desire to cling to their illusions even as the world/society/culture itself forcibly strips them away. It's also about the ways in which people, particularly women, but others as well, participate in their own oppression in a last-ditch effort to maintain a crumbling world view that, while regressive and oppressive and oftentimes horrible, also somehow brings comfort and guidance in a fast-changing world. I think this is something I really connect to, because I like to know my place in the world and how I relate to others; I like to be in control of that, even if being in control actually means giving up autonomy for the benefit of understanding my place. Here's my favorite part:
It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it--of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs Walker was Irish and whistled all day long--one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood beside her, trying to explain how.
How beautiful is that? Moments like this are buds on the tree of life... secret deposit of exquisite moments... and she's talking about this every day thing of reading a phone message and how that simple thing basically encapsulates her entire life, and how she both revels in it (exquisite moments) and is oppressed by it (bows beneath the influence) and how it makes her feel thankful for her own oppression (one must repay in daily life) because after her act of rebellion (Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself) it gives her a sense of her place in the order of the world, which she needs because she has to believe in something, if not God, and she's chosen to replace God with this cultural paradigm of Victorian British culture and history. I guess I just really relate to that.
...anyway. Moving on.
2) Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
So in college I had to read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was okay, but didn't really inspire me to read more of Winterson's work or to think she was anything special. And then I read Written on the Body, and The Passion, and they were so incredible and beautifully written and emotional and heartbreakingly real while being also part of this sort of fantasy land that they completely changed my mind about Winterson, but also, I think, my entire writing style. I realized, reading her books, that you could write a novel about relationships that weren't just about relationships, but about the psychosis of relationships, about obsessive love, about imperfect people who make inexplicably awful decisions and yet retain their humanity and my empathy. If I could write like anyone, it would be Winterson. She's incredible.
Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb, singing on the body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message onto my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its place with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.
3) Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews
Because it taught me how to own my shame until I lost it completely, being the trashiest book for teenage girls pretty much ever written.
4) Harry Potter by JK Rowling
This wasn't the first series of books I became obsessed with (Alanna, HI!!) but it definitely left the longest impression because it's what got me into fandom, and fandom made me a happier person and opened up a whole new world to me. I started writing again, and I think I'm even pretty good at it now, even if it's "just" fanfic. And I've met so many awesome people through fandom and through Harry Potter specifically; it's almost a catch-all of fandom, because nearly everyone I know in fandom was in Harry Potter at least peripherally at some point. I met my best friend through Harry Potter, and losing him last year was so incredibly painful, but at the same time, I had a huge support network of fandom friends who were really the only people who could possibly understand what I was going through, but at the same time, knew exactly what I was going through because many of them have been through it before.
Harry Potter gave me a community of like-minded people during a time in my life when I really really needed it, needed to have a place and a purpose in the world, no matter how inconsequential. It let me get to know people in this incredibly intimate way that opened myself up to knowing myself as well. When all you consist of is thoughts on a screen, you get to know yourself really well, and in my case, accept and like the person you are becoming.
5) The Bonds of Love by Jessica Benjamin
I don't even know how to explain this book, so here, read the synopsis: In The Bonds of Love, noted feminist theorist and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin explains why we accept and perpetuate relationships of domination and submission. She reveals that domination is a complex psychological process which ensnares both parties in bonds of complicity, and shows how it underlies our family life, our social institutions, and especially our sexual relations, in spite of our conscious commitment to equality and freedom.
Basically, I read this book for a class (I think it was actually a Virginia Woolf class, but it could've been any number of gender studies classes I took) and it was like a light suddenly went on in my head. Like one of those cartoons where the shining lightbulb appears over someone's head when they get an idea or understand something? Exactly like that.
I'm not ashamed to say that my feelings about sex and sexuality are complicated and conflicted and what most people would probably deem at best fetishizing, at worst problematic. Reading The Bonds of Love helped me reconcile my personality and my moral beliefs about equality and directness and being straight-forward and only doing things I want to do and being so outspoken, with my sexual needs, which are almost the opposite--needing to be dominated and controlled and forced to submit to someone else's desire. For a long time I was really conflicted about my sexual personality because it seemed to be the antithesis of the things I believe in and the way I am in my every day life. But this book helped me reconcile that conflict because it made me realize that giving up control is actually a way of giving up responsibility, of putting the responsibility of pleasure on someone else which, actually, is a way of controlling that other person.
I'm not explaining this right, but it makes sense when you read the book (and in my head.) There's a power in submission that people don't really understand until they've experienced it. A lot of people assume that it's about some weird need you have to feel like a whore or whatever, but that's the opposite of what I get from it and what I need. Giving up control means giving up responsibility means giving up pressure to perform and please means giving up self-consciousness and doubt. And the only reason I understand any of that about myself is The Bonds of Love. And it changed my life and the entire way I understand sex and myself.
...omg that was so much writing. And way too much information. How uncomfortable have I made all of you, now?? HA. Well. Tell me the 5 books (or just 1, whatever) that changed your life. (I'm telling you stories. Trust me.)
PS - Just got my netbook OMGOMGOMG.
5 Books That Changed My Life
(in no particular order)
1) Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
This was the first book I read that I really truly studied and teased out as many meanings as I could from it. It's also the book that introduced me to psychoanalytic readings and to my mentor in college, Lisa Ruddick, who I was half in love with, but mostly her brain and her talent and her hilarious lack of desire to read Durkheim. I've read Mrs D so many times, there are entire sections I could quote. It's not a long book, but it's so beautifully written, both entrenched in the late Victorian era and all the historical and cultural mores of that time and place, but also transcendent of all of that, because at its heart it's about people's desire to cling to their illusions even as the world/society/culture itself forcibly strips them away. It's also about the ways in which people, particularly women, but others as well, participate in their own oppression in a last-ditch effort to maintain a crumbling world view that, while regressive and oppressive and oftentimes horrible, also somehow brings comfort and guidance in a fast-changing world. I think this is something I really connect to, because I like to know my place in the world and how I relate to others; I like to be in control of that, even if being in control actually means giving up autonomy for the benefit of understanding my place. Here's my favorite part:
It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it--of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs Walker was Irish and whistled all day long--one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood beside her, trying to explain how.
How beautiful is that? Moments like this are buds on the tree of life... secret deposit of exquisite moments... and she's talking about this every day thing of reading a phone message and how that simple thing basically encapsulates her entire life, and how she both revels in it (exquisite moments) and is oppressed by it (bows beneath the influence) and how it makes her feel thankful for her own oppression (one must repay in daily life) because after her act of rebellion (Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself) it gives her a sense of her place in the order of the world, which she needs because she has to believe in something, if not God, and she's chosen to replace God with this cultural paradigm of Victorian British culture and history. I guess I just really relate to that.
...anyway. Moving on.
2) Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
So in college I had to read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was okay, but didn't really inspire me to read more of Winterson's work or to think she was anything special. And then I read Written on the Body, and The Passion, and they were so incredible and beautifully written and emotional and heartbreakingly real while being also part of this sort of fantasy land that they completely changed my mind about Winterson, but also, I think, my entire writing style. I realized, reading her books, that you could write a novel about relationships that weren't just about relationships, but about the psychosis of relationships, about obsessive love, about imperfect people who make inexplicably awful decisions and yet retain their humanity and my empathy. If I could write like anyone, it would be Winterson. She's incredible.
Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb, singing on the body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message onto my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its place with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.
3) Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews
Because it taught me how to own my shame until I lost it completely, being the trashiest book for teenage girls pretty much ever written.
4) Harry Potter by JK Rowling
This wasn't the first series of books I became obsessed with (Alanna, HI!!) but it definitely left the longest impression because it's what got me into fandom, and fandom made me a happier person and opened up a whole new world to me. I started writing again, and I think I'm even pretty good at it now, even if it's "just" fanfic. And I've met so many awesome people through fandom and through Harry Potter specifically; it's almost a catch-all of fandom, because nearly everyone I know in fandom was in Harry Potter at least peripherally at some point. I met my best friend through Harry Potter, and losing him last year was so incredibly painful, but at the same time, I had a huge support network of fandom friends who were really the only people who could possibly understand what I was going through, but at the same time, knew exactly what I was going through because many of them have been through it before.
Harry Potter gave me a community of like-minded people during a time in my life when I really really needed it, needed to have a place and a purpose in the world, no matter how inconsequential. It let me get to know people in this incredibly intimate way that opened myself up to knowing myself as well. When all you consist of is thoughts on a screen, you get to know yourself really well, and in my case, accept and like the person you are becoming.
5) The Bonds of Love by Jessica Benjamin
I don't even know how to explain this book, so here, read the synopsis: In The Bonds of Love, noted feminist theorist and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin explains why we accept and perpetuate relationships of domination and submission. She reveals that domination is a complex psychological process which ensnares both parties in bonds of complicity, and shows how it underlies our family life, our social institutions, and especially our sexual relations, in spite of our conscious commitment to equality and freedom.
Basically, I read this book for a class (I think it was actually a Virginia Woolf class, but it could've been any number of gender studies classes I took) and it was like a light suddenly went on in my head. Like one of those cartoons where the shining lightbulb appears over someone's head when they get an idea or understand something? Exactly like that.
I'm not ashamed to say that my feelings about sex and sexuality are complicated and conflicted and what most people would probably deem at best fetishizing, at worst problematic. Reading The Bonds of Love helped me reconcile my personality and my moral beliefs about equality and directness and being straight-forward and only doing things I want to do and being so outspoken, with my sexual needs, which are almost the opposite--needing to be dominated and controlled and forced to submit to someone else's desire. For a long time I was really conflicted about my sexual personality because it seemed to be the antithesis of the things I believe in and the way I am in my every day life. But this book helped me reconcile that conflict because it made me realize that giving up control is actually a way of giving up responsibility, of putting the responsibility of pleasure on someone else which, actually, is a way of controlling that other person.
I'm not explaining this right, but it makes sense when you read the book (and in my head.) There's a power in submission that people don't really understand until they've experienced it. A lot of people assume that it's about some weird need you have to feel like a whore or whatever, but that's the opposite of what I get from it and what I need. Giving up control means giving up responsibility means giving up pressure to perform and please means giving up self-consciousness and doubt. And the only reason I understand any of that about myself is The Bonds of Love. And it changed my life and the entire way I understand sex and myself.
...omg that was so much writing. And way too much information. How uncomfortable have I made all of you, now?? HA. Well. Tell me the 5 books (or just 1, whatever) that changed your life. (I'm telling you stories. Trust me.)
PS - Just got my netbook OMGOMGOMG.