Really major life-changing events (marriage, an influential chance meeting) aren’t common but we all have them and usually several in a lifetime.
What I suspect is more common, at least of those of us who read, is to realise that one has a series of books which have been sufficiently influential that they’ve significantly changed the tone or direction of one’s life.
And reading Mrs Worthington’s entry “Books that shaped my life” in Tara’s Gallery this week I realised that I too had such a list. So I thought I’d document it. Here are some of them in roughly chronological order; I’m sure there are others.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass. I remember these from an early age. They started me thinking about language. Later re-reading it as a student I saw and became fascinated by the unexpected logic, something which has stayed with me. This was later enhanced by Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice.
TS Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This is something my father used to read to me at bedtime when I was probably about 7 or 8. I especially remember, and still love, Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. I knew it off by heart and I still remember chunks of it. This was in the late 1950s, long before Cats, the musical. To this day I love cats and I love railways.
WE Johns, Biggles books. I read as many of these as I could get my hands on, probably from the time I was about 9 or so right into my teens. Yes, they were fantasy adventure, but they were also a world into which a repressed (even depressed) child could retreat from the world.
Boy Scout Association, The Chief Scouts’ Advance Party Report. This was the 1966 set of proposals for modernising the scouting movement at the time I was transitioning from Scouts to Senior Scouts. I realised it was important and read it. I didn’t agree with it. I saw it for what it turned out to be: the beginning of the emasculation of the Scout Movement as I knew it and as I believed then, and still believe, it should be. It was thus one of the 3 or 4 straws which directly led to me leaving Scouting; somewhere I would have liked to remain.
John Betjeman, High and Low. I don’t recall what impelled me to buy Betjeman’s latest slim volume of verse in 1966, but it soon became a firm favourite. As a late teenager it lived by my bed and if I awoke, sleepless, I would dip into it until sliding into slumber again. Why would a teenage boy in the late ’60s find a volume of poetry comforting? Isn’t that rather worrying? It didn’t so much kindle in me a love of poetry but an awareness of the changing world of architecture and railways.
Havelock Ellis, The Psychology of Sex. My parents had a copy of this and it was openly available to me on the shelves from a very early age. I read it, and learnt a lot from it, as a teenager. It kept me one step ahead of my girlfriend in our joint exploration and development of our sexuality.
Florence Greenberg, Jewish Cookery. No I’m not Jewish. I picked this up as a student because it is such a great cookery book. It covers all the basics and provides a wealth of interesting recipes. It wasn’t the only cookery book I had as a student, but probably the one I used most often. And I still have it and use it!
David Hockney, Photography. I’m unable to remember now which of Hockney’s books on photography it was that I recall seeing, but it was one of the early ones where he was experimenting with “joiners”. The book was probably his Photographs (1982) or just possibly Cameraworks (1984) although I had thought it was a late-70s book. But whichever it was I found the “joiner” technique fascinating and it is still something I experiment with from time to time. It has definitely been a factor in the development of my photography.
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time. If there’s one work (it’s actually a series of 12 novels) that changed my life this is it. There are comments elsewhere herein (for instance here) about how I was recommended to read Dance by our friend Jilly, and how that simple recommendation led to what is now the Anthony Powell Society and such a large part of my life.