I saw this topic on another message board, but thought it’d be fun to throw out here. What are the 5 books or poems that influenced you the most. These are not necessarily your FAVORITE books/poems of all time, but rather the ones that had the biggest impact on your literary tastes, and maybe even that helped define your work...
For me (in no particular order)...
Ginsberg, Howl & Other Poems
O’Hara, Collected Poems
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist…
Rimbaud, Illuminations
Blake, Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience
But like I said, with the exception of O’Hara, I don't think any of these are among my “favorite” books/poems.
If we really want to get into it we can say how & why & what & etc. etc., but I'll save that for the thread.
12 comments:
In terms of deeply sunk, never-get-it-out influence, I know my top ten, in chronological order (and therefore deepest first):
1. Lord of the Rings
2. The Chronicles of Narnia
3. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever
4. The Great Gatsby
5. Of Mice and Men
6. Breakfast of Champions
7. A Prayer For Owen Meany
8. Lolita
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude
10. Lonesome Dove
Now that I look at that list, there's no question in my mind that my novel is an attempted synthesis of these! I'm stunned, really.
Airships (You can do that?)
Jesus' Son (How'd he do that?)
Ham on Rye (If he can do that...)
Till We have Faces (I want to do that.)
5?
Hard to narrow it down, but, in no particular order...
1. The Great Gatsby (Perfection in economy of language)
2. Anna Karenina (Perfection in total lack of economy of language)
3. The Hours (read during the awakening of my fiction writing self)
4. The Age of Innocence (Passion and emotion bleeding through utter restraint)
5. Gone With the Wind (A little embarrassing to admit, but at a young age, it taught me the power of fiction to recreate a whole living, breathing world -- the people, setting, culture, history, etc. A time machine between two covers.)
In no order. I realize now that I taught the first two this year. The first three made me really love language and the second two opened my mind to what people after 1960 were actually doing with it.
The Great Gatsby
Huck Finn
Hamlet
The Ginger Man
Cosmicomics
I figured out the fifth one, but it's a story, not a book: Ralph Lombreglia's "Men Under Water." I read it in college, right when I started writing stories. It's a solid story, but the ending was what got me.
Hmmm, I am not 100% sure, as perhaps I am, in the manner of a cult member, under the sway of something that haven't been able to detect yet, but here's a shot:
1. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
2. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
3. Various Edgar Allan Poe stories (yep)
4. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace (both for what to do and what not to do)
5. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
6. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
7. The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse
8. Decline & Fall - Evelyn Waugh
9. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
And I am currently v. much under the sway of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, from which I believe I can learn a great deal.
From looking at my list, it is clear that I think British people are superior to American people. That accent - so charming and smart!
What a great thread...
The Collected Stories of:
Saul Bellow
John Cheever
Mavis Gallant
Bernard Malamud
Flannery O'Connor
Also - The Information, Underworld, V.
Chronological Order (though I'll kick myself for forgetting something):
As I Lay Dying (the book that turned me from a promising career in aeronautical engineering into a career of little hope as a fiction writer)
Ginsburg's Howl
Some Collection of Garcia-Lorca I Had
The Brother's Karamazov
Jesus Son
bonus: Moby Dick
I only still love a few of these, but they all marked turning points.
1. The Chalet School books of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
2. Katherine Mansfield's stories, especially the New Zealand ones
3. Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
4. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
5. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Hmm...is it coincidence that Grendel and I have such similiar taste?
1. Little House on the Prairie books (NOT the craptacular Michael Landon TV series)
2. The Outsiders
3. Lord of the Rings
4. Cat's Cradle
5. Housekeeping
6. Sometimes a Great Notion
7. Lolita
8. A Prayer for Owen Meany
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude
10. Time Will Darken It
I LOVE Delta Wedding, PJKM...too bad there wasn't more room on the list, because she would definitely be on it.
chris's post reminded me i should have added dean's strike anywhere. and for all the same reasons.
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