While drinking my coffee this morning, I decided to accept the challenge of a Facebook friend who tagged me with a note in which she rapidly listed 15 authors who had influenced her. The resulting list is more of an intellectual history than a statement of current or abiding influence; for instance, I was once wild about Lewis, Hardy, and Buckley, but haven't read anything by any of them in decades. My only criterion was that I have read more than one book by each. Thus one author (Dostoevsky) is omitted who wrote a book very influential for me (The Brothers Karamazov). The absence of academic historians is as obvious to me is at might be to you. Haffner and Tuchman read better, but they weren't always the best informed. Still, being read matters. Maugham is the supreme stylist of the group. Mencken is the funniest, while Twain and Lodge aren't far behind and aren't as emotionally exhausting as dealing with Mencken's rapid-fire satire. Easwaran was my primary spiritual influence for a good decade, recently supplanted by Tolle; Campbell is always a comfort to return to at any moment in this regard. Hardy (and my dictionary) are responsible for the explosion of my vocabulary in my late teens and early 20s. If you wish to play the game, I'd enjoy seeing your list too. Don't spend more than 15 minutes. It's mostly a way of thinking about thinking, and of lightly encouraging others to do the same...
Somerset Maugham
Thomas Hardy
Mark Twain
David Lodge
Sebastian Haffner
Eckhart Tolle
Eknath Easwaran
H.L. Mencken
Nick Hornby
Joseph Campbell
George Orwell
Barbara Tuchman
Bertrand Russell
Ernest Hemingway
William F. Buckley
C.S. Lewis
4 comments:
Here it goes...
1. Daphne du Maurier
2. Madeline L'Engle (a nod to my middle school years)
3. E.B. Sledge (thanks Dr. Rogers)
4. Mark Twain
5. CS Lewis
6. J.R.R Tolkien
7. Dante Alighieri
8. Jane Austen (she rocked my world!)
9. Louisa May Alcott
10. Rae Yang (thanks Dr. Miller)
11. Harper Lee
12. Margaret Mitchell
13. Zora Neale Hurston
14. Geoffrey Chaucer
15. J.K Rowling (sorry not very intellectual but she is genius)
Thanks for playing the game, Melanie. I see we even have a couple in common.
Thomas Pynchon
Friedrich Nietzsche
David Foster Wallace
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Georg Trakl
Dylan Thomas
Franz Kafka
Max Frisch
Gary Snyder
Jack Kerouac
Ernest Hemingway
Yukio Mishima
Don DeLillo
Leslie Marmon Silko
Jack London
I spent my middle school years reading everything Jack London wrote, so it would be disingenuous to not list him. :)
Two authors by whom I've read but one book, but which book transformed my way of looking at things, are Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space) and Hans Henny Jahnn (Perrudja).
Funny, I seem completely uninfluenced by academic writers. (Adorno almost made the list, though...)
OK, now I'm gonna have to finally read The Proud Tower...
--Harry
Thanks, Anonymous Harry. Although with Pynchon, Nietzsche, and Wallace leading the list, I think I know which Harry it might be. The socialist, nihilist, minimalist, moralist Harry is now more explicable. I appreciate your sharing. You'll find The Proud Tower a lot of fun.
Post a Comment