Wednesday, November 16, 2005
The Books Not-So-Famous People Loved in College
Slate has a cool piece on the books that asked a whole slew of famous-ish thinkers about the most influential books they read in college. My pick: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (or as it's more accurately translated now, In Search of Lost Time). Sigh. There is nothing that makes a girl swoon more than a writer who takes pages upon pages to talk about falling asleep as a child. The snarky social commentary, the involuntary memories that whisk us away from a drab present to a glorious past moment with the taste of a cookie, the sprawling sentences and paragraphs - Proust had it all. Which books from your college days were most influential?
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I didn't have influential books in college so much as I had influential professors and courses and texts. For example, my Women in Politics course really kick-started my feminism as it exists today, and got my brain thinking in directions it had never been before. It was the first time I'd read Susan B Anthony, or Sojourner Truth, or Abigail Adams, or Margaret Sanger, or dozens of other influential women in America's past. My course on the history of Russian women prompted me to think about feminism on a global level. One book from this course (A Revolution of Their Own) told the stories of several women who were born in Tsarist Russia and lived through the Revolution and the fall of Communism, which helped shaped my views of feminist politics.
Oh, yes. And hearing a poetry professor read Yeats' The Second Coming totally blew me away and opened up my mind to looking at poetry in an entirely different way.
Is it awful that I don't know? I remember books I hated - Death In Venice in particular - and a few Comparative Lit. courses that had good readings in general, but I really spent most of college reading the Bible - which, honestly, has been one of the most influential books I've ever read.
(that was your other sister above, forgetting to sign her note)
I'll go with Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which taught me that histories can be as entertaining and opionated as any other kind of book. Before Gibbon, it simply would never have occurred to me to read histories for pleasure. After Gibbon, I wanted to go to grad school and write that kind of history -- not the ivory towers, million-citations-per-page sort of treatment, but a kind of history that can be picked up and enjoyed by anyone.
It didn't quite work out that way, of course, but it was a nice dream for a while.
... poison wood bible. The way the author creates characters that felt honest and real and yet representitive of concerns in life. Still is one of my favorite books of all time I think. Additionally, I think it was this book as much as anything else that started my feminist concerns, (as much as one dares to say that as a man) specifically looking at the way she depicted the father/daughter relationship... don't know why, but things looked different after that book.
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