Ulysses, as I've always said, everything I read afterwards was different. Words were just never the same to me.
Ulysses, as I've always said, everything I read afterwards was different. Words were just never the same to me.
The Moments of Dominion
That happen on the Soul
And leave it with a Discontent
Too exquisite — to tell —
-Emily Dickinson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVW8GCnr9-I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckGIvr6WVw4
I don't really know. I think all books change my life in some way or another.
Slaughter-House 5 just reinforced my belief that life is filled with insequential events, yet has enough sequential events to deceive most people.
Dante's Inferno is making me think though, whether or not it's too late for mankind to redeem themselves now.
Hey,
well I would go for Paulo Coelho... I know, I know... how people say that you get tired of Coelho and maybe it's true, maybe not {won't discuss it here}... but his book Veronika decides to die changed my life....made me a much happier person...
Stop asking where is God and keep asking where the hell is human!
About eight years ago I bought the original 1979 edition of The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction edited by Peter Nicholls (Granada) from a local library. They were having a sale of old books. This was a 'reference book only' originally & probably because of that it was in excellent condition. When I first saw it I thought it would just be a load of old Klingons & Daleks or something equally bad. In fact it is an incredibly academic work & apart from the fact that it is thirty years out of date is still a valuable reference book. It introduced me to many authors & critics so I nominate it as a book that changed the way I look at a lot of things.
docendo discimus
certainly the works of Joyce have completely altered me. My first European novel I had ever read was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I soon after moved into Ulysses and Finngeans Wake. the latter two have now influenced me more so than Portrait, but I feel indebted to Portrait. As of right now, I've read Ulysses twice, and Finnegans Wake once and a half times, I'm so close to that second! I have not limited myself to James Joyce's works, here's a couple that have had a considerable amount of impact on my life:
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Sterne
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Ficciones by Borges
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
of course the collected works of such poets and philosophers as Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Nietzsche, Donne, Kant & Hegel (I'm certain I'm close to comprehending these colossus giants),
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
-W.Blake
Wow, we have a lot of the same tastes. And we are obviously both dedicated Joyce fansOriginally Posted by Barbarous
The Moments of Dominion
That happen on the Soul
And leave it with a Discontent
Too exquisite — to tell —
-Emily Dickinson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVW8GCnr9-I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckGIvr6WVw4
Mhmm, I dig that. It's like a build up. Not stationary, then one big change, then stationary again... more a bunch of constant little changes. The Grapes of Wrath hit me pretty hard though, and I wouldn't be who I am today if my fifth grade teacher hadn't read us The Secret Garden.
Oh, and then there's The Swamp Thing saga, the ones written by Allan Moore. I was really affected.
Oh yeah, and the second time that I read Heart of Darkness was pretty revolutionary (I didn't think much of it the first time I read it).
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 11-27-2009 at 12:58 AM.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
Books that changed my life...? I see I haven't posted a real answer to this as of yet. I think that there must be a number of such books:
Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du Mal- As I high-school student I dutifully read all the poetry assigned... and continued to do the same in college... but this book is really the one that turned me seriously on to poetry. Baudelaire was someone I discovered on my own (not required reading) and I found him immediately seductive... laden with dark imagery, eroticism, dangerous seductresses, a blurring of the senses, a mastery of form and a daring use of the same.
Dante- The Comedia- This work left be simply stunned. It was... and continues to be... the greatest single piece of literature I have ever read. I was simply overwhelmed by the mastery of form, the wealth of characters, narratives, history, philosophy, and theology that were explored. I was enthralled by the variety of language and style as the author moved from the sulfurous pit of hell to the wonder of heaven that virtually surpasses the ability of human language and results in the most eloquent and visionary poetry.
Kafka- The Short Stories and J.L. Borges- Labyrinths (and absolutely everything else)- I came to both of these writers with a certain expectations... and in both instances these were not met. I expected something more blatantly surrealist... rooted in the senses... establishing a clear sense of atmosphere. In other words... with a certain concept of Surrealism I expected an dark, sensual, "gothic" atmosphere ala Poe or Baudelaire with the dream-like unreality of Dali. I got none of this... but for some reason... in both instances... the writing slowly worked its way under my skin until it completely seduced me. Both writers opened me up to an endless array of other works of literature: Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Tomasso Landolfi, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, John Barth, Donald Barthleme, Lawrence Sterne, DeQuincy, The Arabian Nights, etc... They also led to a dramatic re-thinking of many other writers and works of literature: Robert Burton, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, the Book of Job, etc... Both authors opened me up to the appreciation of a sort of dark, dead-pan humor, a playfulness with ideas taken to their logical... albeit absurd... extremes, an ability to laugh at the absurdities of modern life, an appreciation of a sort of clean, simply prose, a fascination with the blurring of genres and forms (prose and fiction, history and science fiction, criticism and short stories, etc...), and an appreciation for the truncated and fragmentary.
William Blake- Collected Poetry and Prose- Blake is another who stunned me. As with Borges and Kafka I found myself discovering something far different in Blake than what I had expected considering his reputation as a "lunatic" and what I had already come to know of the other Romantic poets. As a visual artist I was (and continue to be) absolutely enthralled with his efforts to combine the notions of the book as a work of visual art (ala the medieval illuminated manuscripts) with the book as the means of the transmission of text. Blake insisted... 100s of years after Gutenberg had effectively killed the hand-made book in which everything from the binding, the scale, the imagery, the writing/calligraphy down to the choice of paper were carefully considered... that all of these elements... were essential to the readers experience. This alone would have made him an essential figure in my own personal pantheon... but to this we must add the brilliance and originality of his imagery and paintings (made for books), and his visionary poetry in which he nearly achieved his oft stated goal of inventing his own system rather than living under that of another man's.
Considering Blake... I must say that the illuminated manuscripts... especially The Book of Kells, The Lindesfarne Gospels, The Tres Riches Heurs of the Limbourg Brothers, and the Shanameh of Tabriz changes my life as a visual artist through the masterful merger of my two great loves: art and books. These works have inspired my continued fascination with the book as a physical and visual object. The Celtic books especially challenged my expectations with regard to art and opened me up to an appreciation of abstraction. All of these books continue to impact my own artistic efforts to a greater or lesser degree.
Lawrence Sterne- The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman- This book was another mind-blowing experience. James Joyce was nothing after Sterne... an also-ran coming 100s of years later. Sterne was virtually there at the very birth of the novel as an art form and (much like Cervantes) he has the audacity to literally deconstruct the very mechanics of this new art form from the very beginning. Long, rambling, digressions; setting himself up as an omniscient narrator of his own life and then describing events he could not possibly have known about in such detail (such as his own comic conception), blank pages, end-sheets and dedications placed half-way through the novel, variety of letter forms, pages left blank in which the reader is expected to fill in the missing "delicate" bits from his own imagination... all of this could have resulted in a mere exotic novelty... but it is all held together through the strength of the narration and the creation of the brilliant characters... especially the author's father and Uncle Toby who stand (again, alongside Cervante's Don Quixote) as one of the finest examples of friendship ever rendered in literature.
Last edited by stlukesguild; 11-27-2009 at 01:48 AM.
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Did I forget to mention the Beano annual?
docendo discimus
Not that I want to diminish Sterne's achievements or works (I absolutely love his Tristram Shandy) but Sterne did not come out of the blue, but in fact is probably the pinnacle of decades of experimentation with the novel form. And before that, Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, etc. were already "ahead of our times". It seems like the "canonical" rigidity of the novel form really came with the 19th century and that the 20th century merely rediscovered or reinvented the wheel.
Et l'unique cordeau des trompettes marines
Apollinaire, Le chantre
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
I have a much less impressive list, but the criteria was "life-changing."
In 2nd grade, I checked out a Sherlock Holmes anthology. The school librarian tried to convince me to leave it for an older child who could understand it. I dug my heels in (life lesson number 1) and read it while my mother was cooking. I would ask her every 10th word, and she would patiently explain each to me. I distinctly remember "prophylactic" making her blush a bit, so I knew there was deeper nuance to this word. So today, I can trace my love of vocabulary to Sir Arthur.
In Junior High I read Shogun. That led me to study Japanese in college. That in an involved but direct way led to me meeting my wife (of 28 years now). So Shogun certainly changed my life.
I work in a library and am working right now,( don't tell anyone I'm on Litnet) and a book just came across my desk. It's called The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen. Copyright 2006
This book lists 71 writers that celebrate the books that matter most to them.
Just thought I'd share this title.
"What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare." W.H. Davies
I might pile a block of serious literature here and say, raising my brow really high, "well, yes, this book gave me a deeper insight to the human soul" etc, but in all honesty, the book that changed my life by giving me a taste of the high art that I am now a humble student of would be:
"The Number Devil"
I remember quite well the moment when I was sick while eleven years old and my father bringing my some books from the library. And it got me hooked. It felt like hearing real music for the first time in your life when all musical you have heard previously are just scales and, what's worse, they claim that scales are real music.
I do think that this book was really influential in my life.
If you believe even a half of this post, you are severely mistaken.
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