Hi,
In a previous post I noted that I've come across people compiling
lists of the ten books that have mattered most to them, the assumption being these
books necessarily mattered for the better, because reading is a good thing,
isn't it, especially in this digital age, when text confronts such challenges. Such
lists are intended to be celebratory.
I offered, maybe too facetiously, to come up with a list of books
that might not have improved my life, that may have sent me into odd tailspins lasting
years. But when I think of the books that have had that kind of power I find I
can't recant them or spew them out so easily. I wouldn't be who I am without
them, though I don't discount the possibility that I might be better.
It isn't just the experience of reading, of course, that I'm
referring to; it's what the reading influenced me to think and do — how it
oriented and engineered me. To act as if real reading can lead only to good
results is to laughably trivialize what books can do.
I have to add that aging matters. Books that penetrated so
deeply when I was in my teens or twenties would hardly leave a scratch now. But
that's partly because they have, so to speak, infected me, and I've developed appropriate
immune responses. (I think it was William Burroughs who compared language to
viruses. If so, exposure is the only way to generate resistance.)
I know I'm dodging a bit, as to particular books, so I'll
offer this for now: I can easily imagine my life would have been less fevered had
I not spent so much time looking for Mescalito, as described by Carlos
Castenada in his "Don Juan or a Yaqui Way of Knowledge." Things would
have also been considerably different had I not read that book about the same
time I was breathing in "The Communist Manifesto" and "The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon". The mating of Marx and Mescalito can
drive one down extreme paths, especially while such a thing as the War in
Vietnam is going on.
Absent such readings I might have been a lawyer, a tenured
professor of philosophy, specializing in phenomenology, or maybe even Dr.
Blume, specializing in viruses.
I'll get back to this subject of retroactively banning books.
I'm interested all along the way in books you might put in the same category as
people you wish you'd never met or trusted, drugs you are sorry you've taken,
and Doberman Pinchers you didn't get away from in time.
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