Erika M Ellison nominated me to provide a list of the ten most important books I have read. I will limit it to the first 15 years of my life. 0. The Bible. Inescapable for me. The most important books are Ecclesiastes, Job, the Song of Songs, Isaiah, the Gospels, First Corinthians, James. 1. God Loves You, author unknown.-- My Aunt Louise bought this for me when I was a toddler. It gave me a deep feeling of being cared for by my invisible friend. 2. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien. I read this book 100 times in elementary school. It opened my eyes to the world of Middle Earth and the genre of high fantasy. 3. Myths of the World, Padraic Colum. Introduced me to many of the collective dreams of our species. I read some other book that turned me on to Rustm and Sohrab and delighted in the DAulaires. 4. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin. What an amazing world! She taught me the power of words and especially names. 5. Conan of Cimmeria, Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter. The first Conan collection I owned and the initial step toward Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. I found it at the jockey lot when I was nine. 6. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine LEngle. She introduced me to tesseracts and taught me about true evil. 7. The Iliad, Richmond Lattimore translation. I was hungry for Hellenic civilization from age five and finally discovered names that had not been Latinized in this version. The only good thing about my piano lessons at age ten was borrowing this book. 8. Dune, Frank Herbert. I think I actually read Children of Dune first, but I got the movie tie in paperback for Christmas in 1984. It made me wonder about the creation of a Messiah long before people imagined cloning the Shroud of Turin. I got so much out of this dense, powerful work. 9. Walden, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau and Emerson got me to start a journal in eighth grade. I began to question much of what I had been taught. My religious beliefs are still very colored by panentheism. 10. Philosophy: The Art of Wonder, James W. Christian. One of the best textbooks ever written. My pastor, Gene Martin, loaned this to me at age thirteen. My brain has never recovered. I get a new copy every time it is updated. 11. Mathematics and the Imagination, Edward Kasner and James Newman. Introduced me to topology, the googol, and the googolplex. Infected me with enthusiasm for math. Enjoy it for yourselves: https://archive.org/details/MathematicsAndTheImagination 12. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. Louis Towles lent this to me when we were in eighth grade. I read it three times before giving it back to him. The cover changed from pink to purple on account of the sweat and oil in my palms and fingers. Revolutionary, dangerous, and prophetic in my life. 13. Alan Watts. I cant remember which one I read first, but he blew my mind and introduced me to so many other authors, including Chesterton. I read several other books about Eastern religion and mysticism that also had a profound impact.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 03:49:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015