Landmark Books of my Life

[Latbear4blk]

I love @TotallyOz' thread "Favorite Book as a Child". As a variation, I wanted to suggest a thread about landmarks books in our lives. By landmark books I do not mean books we like a lot, but books that transformed who we were. "Before and After" books.

In my case, there are two major books that come to my mind. The first one is a book from the 60s that I read in the 80s: The Social Construction of Reality", by Beger and Luckmann.

That book gave me the conceptual framework I needed to process my coming out. I actually read a translation in Spanish, an edition with yellow covers I will never forget.

I would carry my book everywhere, reading and re-reading.

The other book that transformed me is a short novel by Miguel de Unamuno, "San Manuel Bueno, Mártir". Reading it made me question my attitude towards religious people and heir need to believe in gods. I read it in my late 40, and recently started to read it once a year as it is in one of muy courses bibliography. Every year, it is the book that I most successfully sell to my students. I love it and they all end loving it. 

[PeterRS]

Most of the books that have affected me and to a certain extent changed my thinking relate to historical events or my views on a certain country. The partition of India had largely escaped me until some decades ago I read Paul Scott's masterful quartet of books which go under the title The Raj Quartet. This epic fictional tale brings to the fore the differing views of long time British residents, colonial masters and the rising tensions with the people of India. The characters are superbly drawn from the sadistic police inspector to the young lady just arrived from Britain to meet up with her Indian boyfriend and Barbie Bachelor, the ageing Brit who intends to stay on after Independence as she has nowhere else to go. The Quartet was made into an excellent tv series in the 1970s featuring the cream of British acting talent. It changed my views on the history of the lead up to that disastrous period in history.

The first two books of the Quartet

Over the last three decades we have learned more about the story of Hong Kong and how it became one of the world's leading economic city states. With China now breaking its agreement with Britain to basically leave it alone for 50 years after the handover, our attention is on the present and future rather than the past. Yet its past is utterly fascinating, from the Qing Dynasty being the world's major economic power in the early 18th century to the internal decay that was evident a century later; from British traders being confined for most of the year to the quaint little Portuguese enclave of Macao, to the need for the British colonists to find an outlet for the opium which they grew in great quantity in India and so to the Opium Wars that heralded what all Chinese even today call the start of the century of shame. None describes this in simpler, easier to comprehend detail then Foreign Mud by Maurice Collis. This was the name given to the drug opium. 

The origins of the Vietnam War also fascinate - and horrify me. From the dreadful effect of French colonialism, from Roosevelt and Truman's rejection of their wartime ally Ho Chi Minh's written requests that the anti-colonial American government not permit the French to return to post-war Indo-China, to the mistaken belief that Vietnam was a communist domino rather than a country seeking to rule its own affairs, Vietnam suffered 3 million deaths over a 30 year period. Again, many books have been written, but none had more effect on many than Robert McNamara's 1996 mea culpa In Retrospect. Vietnam was basically McNamara's War. As he writes, "we were wrong, we were terribly wrong." In Retrospect reveals the fatal flaws and misassumptions behind America's involvement in the war. It is tempting to suggest that it should be a bible for all those countries going to war believing they are in the right. Yet America's leaders paid no attention and continued its overseas misadventures with Iraq.

Recently I came across a short novel which made me think more closely about the priesthood. Stephen Hough is one of the world's finest concert pianists and clearly a fascinating character. The Economist named him in 2009 one of the world's top 20 polymaths. His intention was to become a priest until he won one of the world' top piano competitions at the age of 21. That launched him into a major concert career and he now has more than 60 CDs on the market. The Final Retreat is his first novel. A short book with just 182 pages, it takes as its subject a troubled gay priest, his thoughts and deeds as his world descends into areas he sought to avoid (although i hasten add that pedophilia is not part of the book). Written almost in a clipped style, it is difficult to put down.

[BiBottomBoy]

Here are my two.

[TotallyOz]

Well, first I would have to start with my age. The Hobbit played such an important part of my life. I grew up loving it and reading it under the covers at night. To this day, I have read it over 20 times (most likely 100).

Next, the book that made me think more than any other book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I read this in college and it makes this think more every time I read it. I went to a very liberal college and the professor hooked me onto this.

Perhaps, my favorite book I ever read was Ulysses. Again, I have read it at least 20 times and learn more every time I read it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude. I read this in college and fell in love with the author and read all his books.

Last, Captain Corelli's Mandolin. A good friend gave me this in law school, many moons ago, and inscribed on it a nice note. I read it and it was like reading poetry. To this day, I can look at it on my self, remember the characters and remember my friend.

So, that tells you a lot about my life. I love books. I love reading. As you might be able to tell, I like rereading books just as much.

[BiBottomBoy]

OMG. Had to read Ulysses and that other super long book of his for one class in college. Hated it. Loved the book of short stories Joyce did though.

[Ethanmiami]

Brideshead Revisited

Winesberg, Ohio

Chronicles of Narnia

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

 

[Latbear4blk]

8 hours ago, BiBottomBoy said:

Here are my two.

Would you share how these books were transformative for you?

[Latbear4blk]

5 hours ago, Ethanmiami said:

Brideshead Revisited

Winesberg, Ohio

Chronicles of Narnia

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

 

Would you share how these books were transformative for you?

[demonito25]

14 hours ago, BiBottomBoy said:

OMG. Had to read Ulysses and that other super long book of his for one class in college. Hated it. Loved the book of short stories Joyce did though.

you mean portrait of an artist as a young man? happy to know i wasnt the only one to suffer that novel

[PeterRS]

Like TotallyOz I read a lot. So permit me to add two other books that opened my eyes - literally. After my first visit to Istanbul, I became fascinated by the Byzantine Empire and the whole history surrounding that part of the world. The Crusades played a major part. So I started by reading Steven Runciman's early 1950s three-volume history (surprisingly readable!). At school, I was taught that the Crusades were the virtuous Christians attempting to take back its most holy site from the heathen Muslims. And that was about it. In fact, they were a huge blot on the history of Christianity. Many more recent accounts make this clear, including The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf. This finally helped me put all those centuries into a better perspective.

On a totally different tack, I am a classical music fan and love much of Wagner. Brigitte Hamann's masterly biography of the evil Winifred Wagner, the 17 year old Welsh girl who became the wife of the 45 year old gay son of Richard Wagner, Siegfried, Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth is utterly fascinating especially from an historical view. No one was a more dedicated Nazi than Winifred. That she was in love with Hitler is certain. That he was in love with her is equally certain. Whether they ever consummated that love remains debatable, but it is likely. Even after the end of the war, Winifred never wavered from her adherence to the Nazi cause. Her family kept her out of the public eye, but in a tv documentary made about her life in the 1970s she renewed her dedication to the cause of National Socialism. Even on camera she seems proud to present herself as "the only Nazi in Germany."

 

[CurtisD]

On 3/16/2021 at 12:32 AM, PeterRS said:

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf.

An excellent book!

Working out which books have influenced me, as opposed to informing or amusing me, has been an interesting exercise. There are an almost overwhelming number of books from which to choose - I am writing this in my library surrounded by a lot of books.   However, with one exception, the books which have influenced me, the threads from which are still in my brain unconsciously shaping my views and perceptions, are books I read when I was young. It is not that I have not acquired a lot of knowledge over the intervening years, but this later knowledge is held in the conscious mind and I am aware I use it. 

As a child I had free run of my grandfather's library. I have warm memories of sitting by the window, the sun and air coming in from the garden, my nose buried in one of his books. One of which was inscribed to him at the age of eight and presented such a joyfully insouciant picture of thumbing the nose at authority that it had me riveted. Clearly under the right circumstances nose thumbing was more than ok, it was ones duty! Granddad’s book said so and at the time I knew him Granddad was every inch the respected citizen, so it must be so. I knew better than to ask him for confirmation, he was now Granddad with standards to uphold. But this book ‘The Lost Squire of Inglewood’ was well thumbed. My absolute respect for Authority never recovered.

 

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim’ is another book I read when young that encouraged adventure rather than compliance with any particular set of behavioral expectations. The variety of people and unfamiliar thought patterns fascinated me and left a lasting interest in ‘the other’.

 

‘The World Over’ a two volume collection of short stories by Somerset Maugham embedded an interest in understanding social structures and the suspicion that social structures and attitudes may not be all they were cracked up to be. It helped that several stories had gay themes.    

 

Top of the gay list, apart from a medical text with illustrations of the syphilitic brain which has forever lead me to practice very careful sex, are books of two very different types, romantic versus gritty.  

The romantic are the novels of Mary Renault, particularly ‘The Charioteer’ and ‘The Persian Boy’. Gay was normal! Gay was in fact just as I felt it to be. How happy was that! Now I could stare down the prejudices of the World for what they were – dumb nonsense.

 

The gritty is ‘Ruling Passions’ the autobiography of Tom Driburg, Lord Bradwell, the Labour politician. It lyrically describes a cum stain as resembling a map of Ireland. I read this when it came out in 1977 and it was an eye-opener to how easily and randomly the gay male sex drive could be satisfied. I remained a Renault-romantic, but with eyes more wide open. Also in the gritty camp is a spy novel with an openly gay subtext, given to me that Christmas by an aunt who knew I had read Driburg’s autobiography. The protagonist remains closeted, has increasingly sad lonely hook-up sex and dies a sad fuck. The conclusion embedded in my mind is the one I suspect my aunt was aiming for: Renault is a better model than Driburg (but an occasional Driburg moment is fun). I have searched the shelves and can’t find the book.  

 

A more sophisticated influence is Machiavelli’s ‘Discourses’ into which I feel he put both his intellect and his heart, while ‘The Prince’ received only a narrow sliver of his intellect. It gave me a subconscious warning bell that in human affairs nothing is stable and that democracy is the best system but a very fragile one.  That bell has been ringing off the hook in recent years.

 

The last and most recent influence by many years is ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ by Katherine Boo which I picked up in India thinking it was a novel. I could not believe how deep the characterization’s were. Then I read the dust jacket more carefully and discovered it was in fact non-fiction based on long-term contact with a group of slum dwellers. What struck me was the entirely different logic of survival in the slum to the logic of survival in my world. To survive in the slum I would have to un-learn much of what I have learnt and a successful slum-dweller would have great difficulty transitioning to my world. You really need to make the effort to understand other people’s frame of reference because you can’t assume it is your own.

 

[PeterRS]

48 minutes ago, CurtisD said:

The gritty is ‘Ruling Passions’ the autobiography of Tom Driburg, Lord Bradwell, the Labour politician. It lyrically describes a cum stain as resembling a map of Ireland. I read this when it came out in 1977 and it was an eye-opener to how easily and randomly the gay male sex drive could be satisfied

Tom Driberg was an avowed homosexual known for his notorious gay affairs even when an MP. But then many British parliamentarians had long had homosexual affairs and were not averse to sex with boys. Lord Boothby was not only the lover of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's wife, he attended gay parties from at least the 1950s when such affairs were very much against the law. He also consorted with the notorious gay criminal Ronnie Kray who procured at least one boyfriend for him. In 1964 the Sunday Mirror newspaper had run a story alleging Boothby and Kray were lovers. Boothby threatened a lawsuit. He won a settlement of £40,000 and an unqualified apology. For years the British Intelligence Services were well aware of Boothby's dalliances but chose to ignore them. In 2009 there was a tv special titled "The Gangster and the Pervert Peer."

Then there was the gay affair of the leader of the Liberal Party for 9 years, Jeremy Thorpe. A well known frequenter of public lavatories (cottages in English parlance) he nevertheless married and fathered a child. When his wife was killed in a car crash, he then married up, this time to the divorced wife of Earl of Harewood, a cousin of the Queen. But long before then he had started up a long term affair with a drifter named Norman Scott. After several years, he wanted rid of Scott and arranged for a friend to pay him £5 per week to keep quiet. But Scott would not disappear. So in 1975 Thorpe arranged for a friend of a friend to murder Scott. The deed was bungled. By 1979 the whole affair had become public knowledge and Thorpe and his colleagues were accused of attempt to murder. After a steamy trial, the presiding judge was so biased against the defence and its witnesses that the jury returned verdicts of not guilty. The affair was made into a mini series in 2018 under the title "A Very English Scandal" with Hugh Grant giving a superb portrayal of Thorpe.

[PeterRS]

2 hours ago, CurtisD said:

The romantic are the novels of Mary Renault, particularly ‘The Charioteer’ and ‘The Persian Boy’. Gay was normal! Gay was in fact just as I felt it to be. How happy was that! Now I could stare down the prejudices of the World for what they were – dumb nonsense.

Mention of Mary Renault's The Persian Boy reminded me that I omitted one recent book that all but turns our western view of world history on its head. Peter Frankopan's 2015 book The Silk Roads is a brilliant account of the world told from the viewpoint of the Silk Roads - there were several. It successfully challenges the western view of history that runs - “Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Instead he writes about the great Empires of the past which were all in what we now call Asia in between China and Turkey. Not only is it the bridge between East and West it is where Civilisation was born. Part of his thesis is that the present has washed away the past. One example is we forget that Persia was at one time not just the world's largest Empire through which several of the Silk Roads crossed, it was one of the greatest of all civilisations. Having spent two weeks in Iran a few years ago, I can attest to the wonders of a stunning country. 

Reviews of The Silk Roads are full of words/phrases like brilliant, dizzying breadth and ambition, exceptional, a vast rich historical canvas, a terrific and exhilarating read. The Wall Street Journal Reviewer wrote, "a rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world.”