15 Books
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tori04 List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it.
Virtually all of these books I read as a teen or young adult. Books I read in the period between about age 13 to 17 or 18 in particular had a huge impact on me, because that’s when I was starting to develop my writing and storytelling style. I knew what type of stories I wanted to write, but lacked the tools or experience to write them. These books influenced either the way I write, the way I approach the material, or they inspired me to write by their subject matter.
I do find it sad that most people don’t read books any more, and most young people that spend all their time tweeting can barely form a coherent sentence.
Animal Farm by George Orwell: I actually read this as a child, long before I was assigned it in Jr. High. Of course the symbolism went right over my head at the time, but I did realize that here was a serious, adult story using talking animals, filled with dark violence, betrayal and a sad ending. Orwell’s spare prose should be a lesson to all those contemporary authors that think a book must be 600+ pages.
The Haven by Graham Diamond. I read this in my early teens. Not a great work of literature by any stretch of the imagination (it was actually pretty badly written.) this influenced me more for the subject matter: intelligent, talking wild dogs and vampire bats fighting a war against the remnants of humanity and their bird and wolf allies. At the time that was one of the coolest premises I’d read. The fact that I hated the ending didn’t diminish the book’s impact on me.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Anyone who’s read this book and any of my comics (particularly Jet, 2350 and City of Ice) will see resemblances right away. I read this in high school, and it was one of the direct influences I used in while writing the original version of Jet. The casual violence, the narcissist anti-hero, the dystopian setting, and most of all the Nasdat language all had a huge impact on my work. I just wish I was half the linguist Burgess was.
Xenogenesis (Dawn, Adulthood Rites & Imago) by Octavia Butler. Another author who knows how to tell a story using the philosophy that less is more, I read these books in my 20’s. This was one of those few series that I thought about it long after finishing it, because the protagonist faces choices with no easy answers. An Impossibly ancient alien race rescues humanity after a nuclear war, but their reason for doing it is to interbreed and absorb humanity until it’s extinct. The survivors have no way to resist, and the theme of the three books is race (the protagonist is black) gender (the aliens have 3 genders) and free will under impossible conditions (do you resist and allow the human race to go extinct quickly, or do you join the aliens and take part in what will be a long, drawn-out extinction by interbreeding?)
Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle. Another for-adults story about talking animals, this is an unapologetic animal rights novel. It’s a bit disjointed, with multiple 1st-person chapters that switch around between various animals. The main character is Doctor Rat, an insane lab rat who heartily approves of humanity and all the experiments done to his fellow captives. All the abused animals around the word eventually rise up in revolt against their oppressors. It was all very inspiring stuff when I read it as a teenager.
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. The same author also wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Color of Money. A good author can take a premise that sounds dull and maudlin and turn it into a masterpiece. A story about an orphan girl in the 1960’s that grows up to become a chess grandmaster, while battling substance abuse problems and her own isolation could have been melodramatic or (worse) ‘inspirational.’ Instead we have a brilliant novel about the nature of talent that tells the story in a concise, matter-of-fact way that makes it difficult to put down, and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions about the lead character and her life choices. The author’s writing style is something I’ve deliberately tried to emulate, which may be why someone once described one of my earlier prose stories as ‘clinical’ rather than emotionally charged.
Watership Down by Richard Adams. I really can’t picture any furry fan not being familiar with this novel and why it would be an influence on me.
Call of the Wild / White Fang by Jack London. Two other books I read as a child. I’m still puzzled these are stuck in with the ‘children’s classics,’ what with all the extreme violence, death, animal abuse and racism, but I guess anything with animals gets automatically labeled a children’s story. While the animal behavior part doesn’t really hold up to modern knowledge, I found the whole savage wild animal aspect enthralling. Too bad no one’s ever done a decent movie of either of these books.
Stephen King (body of work). I can’t really pick just one book of his. I haven’t read all of them, but the ones I have read were a big influence on my writing style. Very to-the-point prose that gives an immediacy to the characters and makes you feel like you’re there, and not just reading a story. While not everything he wrote was a masterpiece, his best works are.
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I loved this book as a kid, about a boy who runs away to live off the land in the northern Appalachian mountains (I think that’s where it was located). It inspired me to read a whole slew of living-off the land books, both fiction and nonfiction, although I eventually decided I liked running water and prepackaged food too much to try doing anything like that myself.
Yellow Eyes by Rutherford Montgomory. The life of a wild cougar in the west, written when hunting was still legal and encouraged. A powerful animal protagonist, who learned to survive the hunters by killing the dogs rather than fleeing up a tree. While this was specifically written for children, it still should be a must-read for cougar fans, and was a big influence on some of my story earliest efforts.
Forever by Judy Blume. It was expected that every teenage girl had to read this (at least when I was a teenage girl) and it was usually the first ‘dirty’ book a teenage girl would read. Besides giggling over the sex scenes, this showed me the expediency of cutting out all the bullshit in a story and going right to the good stuff. The book is about an older teen’s first sexual relationship, and by golly that’s what it’s about, there’s little else in the book that doesn’t directly relate to that subject. A lot of contemporary authors could learn from that example.
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. I really read this book when I was too young to handle it. One of the hazards of growing up in a household filled with literary rather than popular books. This is an absolutely brutal , semi-autobiographical story of a young boy in WWII eastern Europe, who is sent by his intelligencia parents into the countryside when they have to go into hiding from the Nazis. The boy’s caregiver dies early on, and he wanders from village to village, encountering every possible form of brutality and perversion known to mankind. This is not “another “ Nazi or Holocaust story—WWII is simply the time period. You only see Nazi’s once or twice, and most of the violence is done by and to the peasants. This is an incredibly harsh, difficult book to read. The violence you see in my work is just a distant echo of what I read then. What I read in that book is something I could never hope to, or want to, come close to reproducing in my stories. It showed me where to draw the line.
Marathon Man by William Goldman. Goldman also wrote The Princess Bride. Another book that influenced me more because of its writing style than the actual story. Not unlike Stephen King’s prose, there’s interesting inner monologues, concise narration, and the lead character undergoes a believable change at the story’s end. Makes you want to take up running.
World Enough, and Time / Time’s Dark Laughter by James Kahn. Two SF/Fantasy books set in the far future with a mixed furry, mythic and human cast. I didn’t care for the writing style or the actual story one way or another (in fact, I hated the end of the second book.), but the idea of the mixed civilization, which I also saw in the early Spellsinger books, was something I would eventually use in my own work.
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