Five Formative Books

I woke up with a shocking cold and virtually no voice so I'm at home in front of the heater wearing red tartan ear muffs and warm fluffly slippers, thinking about formative fiction.

Inspired by Leslie Cannold's blog post The Books that Changed me, and with time off work due to illness, I've had a go at compiling my own list of the five books that changed me. If you visit Leslie's blog you'll see I have commented and republished my list there. The descriptions under each book title are shorter and limited to the book itself rather than going off on a tangent as I have below. It seemed poor form to fill Leslie's comments section with such drivel, but here on RToCM there's room for drivel a-plenty!

I'd love to read about the five books that changed you. Post away!

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

A ripper yarn, beautifully told. The voices of the Price women/girls are so distinct from each other and the characters are richly drawn. The story structure is superb too. I remember taking comfort in the passage about a mother’s love for her last child, reading the book for the first time when my youngest child was only barely clinging on to infancy, and I knew there would be no more babies after her. “She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she has gone to sleep…She’s the one you can’t put down.” I went on to read most of Barbara’s other novels which were great stories too, but none of them affected me as much as this one did.

To Kill A Mocking Bird - Harper Lee

I read this at school in either year 6 or 7, and I remember being engrossed even though everyone in the class taking had turns reading passages aloud (with varying degrees of literacy) it took ages to get through it. As well as being a great story, reading this book provided our teacher and my classmates and I with the opportunity to talk about racism, justice and inequity in a way we hadn’t done before.

When Marnie Was There - Joan G. Robinson

Our family didn’t have a lot of disposable cash when I was a kid so instead of organising outings on school holidays to keep us occupied, Mum would take my brothers and I to the Opp. Shop at the top of Plenty Road and we’d stock up on books that were 5 or 10 cents each. My youngest brother was almost squashed in his pram by the boxes of books sitting on the awning above his head, and the base of the pram sagged from the weight of books underneath him. As a kid I didn’t have a strong sense of what I liked so Mum chose a lot of books for me, usually stories with great female characters - Cherry Ames, Sue Barton, Trixie Beldon - and this one. I wasn’t keen on it as it looked very dull, so I didn’t pick it up for ages. When I did read it I quickly became entangled in the beautiful, mysterious tale of the friendless foster child Anna who meets Marnie the sand dunes of Norfolk. This was the first book that made me cry, and the first novel-length book I re-read.

The World According to Garp - John Irving

I read this in my late teens, one of my first “grown up” books. I found it shocking, enlightening and funny, and although it was disconcerting to discover that adults perhaps didn’t have all the answers and could be just as confused as we teenagers were, it was also a relief. I looked at the adults in my life with new eyes and different expectations, and the pressure to develop into an “all-knowing” adult myself was relieved a little.

Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin

It seems unfair to single out the first novel in this series of initially 6, and now 8 books, but I do so as it was my introduction to the folk of Barbary Lane, the free-wheeling uncompromising souls who became my fictional friends; I love re-visiting them from time to time and cheer when Armistead releases a new instalment. They are getting quite old now, particularly Mrs Madrigal. How the old girl hangs on is beyond me - I suspect it may be too traumatic for Armistead to consider killing her off. We have lost a few favourites along the way (sweet Dr Jon and corporate giant Edgar Halcyon) and some not-so-favourites (Norman Neal Williams, the creepy P.I. who lived in the roof-top apartment, and charming philanderer Beauchamp Day). All that pot smoking and sherry sipping has to catch up with Anna Madrigal at some point, surely.

I came to the book via the television mini-series that screened on ABC in the mid 1990s, twenty years after instalments were first published in San Francisco newspapers. I remember it was billed as a “controversial” television series, and it was certainly the first time I remember seeing gay and trans-gender characters taking centre stage, and being represented authentically, instead of the vacuous hyper camp all-male clichés of British comedy or the disturbed individuals of American dramas and novels. I don’t know if that makes it “controversial.”

The dialogue driven narrative of Tales of the City is funny and engaging, and for those of us that didn’t live in San Francisco in the 1970s, naïve nice-girl Mary Ann Singleton’s move from Cleveland to ‘cisco is the perfect vehicle for introducing us to that time and place.

In Australia, at the time I read Tales, John Howard was wresting the Prime Ministerial mantle from Paul Keating. From a period of hopeful optimism and burgeoning maturity (as well as a crushing economic recession) our country seemed to change rapidly and dramatically. Small-mindedness, meanness and bigotry dominated public debate, hostile racists were elected to our parliaments, and any attempt to honestly acknowledge our nation’s past and address some of the wrong doing was dismissed as a “black-arm band” view of history that shouldn‘t be entertained. Workers’ rights were under attack, as were the arts, and conservative men and women tried desperately to corral working women back into the home to have the required number of children. And if that wasn’t enough to put women in our place, the federal government deemed sanitary napkins and tampons were “luxuries” and we would therefore pay a goods and services tax on these essential items. (I believe this is still the case in 2011!). What does all this have to do with the book? Nothing really. But is it any wonder I preferred to spend time with fictional characters as big hearted and wise as Anna Madrigal and her Barbary Lane ‘children’ while all that was going on in reality?

My own living arrangements were similar to the Barbary Lane residents. I was in a large share house with a group of open minded big hearted folk, and at times we were like a family too. It's a time I look back on with genuine fondness and perhaps the way I associate those two households, one fictional the other real, has something to do with the fondness I feel for Tales of the City. Or maybe it's just a damn fine book.