There are books you love, and then there are books that change who you are. Sometimes, one book can fulfil both roles.
This blog post came about after fellow author, H. C. Brown, tagged me in a Facebook post that invited me to list ten books that had an impact on me – without thinking too hard about it. I jotted them down and then began to analyse the list. That was when the thoughts in the paragraph above occurred to me.
A list of my favourite books to read would probably look about fifty per cent different. The ten novels that swim on the surface of my mind, however, offered more than just entertainment. They shaped me in some way – they altered my character or my outlook on life. Here’s how.
10. They’re a Weird Mob by John O’Grady
When I was 17, my mother bought me a hardback compendium of John O’Grady classics: They’re a Weird Mob, Gone Fishin’, Aussie English and Aussie Etiket. I read They’re a Weird Mob under the perfect circumstances – I didn’t know it was fiction – and was a little disappointed when I later found it was not biography. But I’ve since learned it was not really fiction, either: O’Grady used actual events from his own experiences, along with huge slabs of real-life dialogue, to paint a detailed picture of working-class Australia in the 1950s. Nor was the Italian protagonist, Nino Culotta, created in ignorance – O’Grady’s barber was an Italian, so the author had access to first-hand knowledge of Italy and the immigrant experience.
While it is approaching its 60th anniversary, They’re a Weird Mob is still a pretty good guide to the attitudes and mores of Australians, especially the white, working-class kind. And as one of my university lecturers once said, “Never underestimate the power of a writer like O’Grady.” They’re a Weird Mob might be comedic and basic in its construction, but it has thematic depth that belies these qualities. Just how much depth becomes clear upon viewing the film adaptation, which changes or removes elements that to the unstudied eye appear incidental, but are in fact vital to the novel’s social commentary.
This was the first book I read that made me question what it means to be Australian – and to want to write in an Australian voice. 9. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens What left a lasting impression on me, aside from the almost inconceivable scope of David Copperfield, was the minor character of Steerforth. In the narrator’s charismatic but shallow-hearted companion, Dickens had imagined an ex-friend of mine… 120 years before he was born.
8. All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot This collection of short stories by the famed Yorkshire vet was one of the first adult books I read. While I don’t think anyone would hold up Herriot as a paragon of literature, his accessible prose disguised a mastery of dialogue, characterisation and structure. All his stories have a start, middle and end, often with a twist or moral arising from earlier events. He also had a knack for benign humour: he could make the reader laugh without being cruel to his characters, which is much harder than it sounds. No one, aside from Stephen King (see below), had a bigger influence on me as a young writer.
7. Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King Other Stephen King books have had a greater impact on me as a reader – Cujo, The Shining, Skeleton Crew, Different Seasons, to name a few – but Nightmares & Dreamscapes affected me in a number of unusual ways, all of them crucial to my development as a reader and a writer.
King’s long foreword about the purpose of fantastical fiction shaped my own view of fiction as a whole and instilled in me a real distaste for pretentious literature. Two stories, ‘Rainy Season’ and ‘You Know They Got a Hell of a Band’, sparked an interest in the ‘peculiar little town story’ (you can read more about that here). I fell in love with King’s non-fiction piece about Little League baseball, ‘Head Down’, and it impelled me to seek out more of his non-fiction work, such as Danse Macabre, perhaps the best book ever written about the clockwork of horror. Lastly, Nightmares & Dreamscapes was the first King book I read where I was old enough to be interested in the author’s notes about how each story was conceived. That interest has never left me.
6. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
When I think about stories that left me reeling on the final page, it is Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’ and this vampire novella that come to mind. But it was not just the perspective-skewing twist of I Am Legend that left a mark on my psyche, it was the astonishing reality with which Matheson built his post-apocalyptic world.
Hollywood has had a few swipes at adapting I Am Legend for the big screen and has failed to varying degrees. That’s because it is the antithesis of Hollywood: grim, pragmatic, lonesome, introspective. I would like to see someone such as Darren Aronofsky take a stab at it – he could shoot it in black and white and call it Neville (the protagonist’s surname) so no one knew what it was. That might capture something of what Matheson put on the page.
Long before I read my first Hemingway novel, I Am Legend showed me that simplicity and profundity need not be mutually exclusive.
5. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham In Year 9, I misread a question worth one third of the marks in my final English exam and proceeded to completely fuck up the answer. In those days, results from your yearlies pretty much determined what level of English you would be placed in for the following year, so in 1992 I found myself banished from advanced English for the first time in my life. To make matters worse, the remainder of the English classes that year were ‘mixed’, meaning those such as I who had just missed the cut wound up sharing a classroom with the indigent and illiterate.
The one good thing to emerge from those 12 months of humiliation was my introduction to The Midwich Cuckoos. It was my first taste of Wyndham’s soft science fiction, which he called ‘science fantasy’, and I think if my writing resembles that of any other author, it is his. High concept, character driven, often with a horrific element – that aptly describes Wyndham’s books and 90 per cent of the fiction I’ve written.
4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
If the foreword to Nightmares & Dreamscapes taught me to be leery of pretentious literature, The Grapes of Wrath was the book that assured me such an attitude was justified. It proves that great literature can offer a memorable and accessible story along with broad social criticism and masterful language. It also serves to show the self-absorption of novels like Catch-22 and The Road, where authorial posturing takes precedence over reader enjoyment.
3. Emma by Jane Austen
I had to read this book in Year 12 English and I loathed it. Not only was it tedious, it was verbose and bombastic – I remember starting a new chapter and becoming discouraged just three words into it (“What the hell does ‘ostensible’ mean?”). Never had I been so glad to see the back of an author. As a 17-year-old, I shared Mark Twain’s sentiment: “Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.”
Then, when I was a couple of years out of university, I took my copy of Emma off the bookshelf and started to skim through it out of curiosity. I wound up reading the whole thing, and loving it. Not only had my own vocabulary improved, which helped, I no longer had to read it, and I think that helped even more.
Emma is like one of those 3D pictures – on the surface it is a bland image of strait-laced society, but closer examination rewards the reader with irony, biting wit and social satire. It also showed me that sometimes you need to be ‘ready’ as a person to fully appreciate a book. In Twain’s case, I think his dislike was a form of literary rebellion against the prevailing orthodoxy of the period rather than a fair critique of her work. This excerpt from one of his letters certainly suggests so: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
There are books I read over and over, and then there are books that I love so much on a first read that I never to return to them again for fear they won’t be as enchanting the second time around. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the latter. Everything about it just worked for me – beautiful language, well-drawn characters, good story, clear (but not overdone) themes. Like The Grapes of Wrath, this novel hails from a time when literature was written to be read by everyone, not just academics and intellectual poseurs.
1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
In On Writing, Stephen King recommends budding authors should, as part of their development, read books containing prose so superior it is almost intimidating. In Cold Blood was such a book for me. Reading it was like popping open the case on a Swiss watch, seeing the tiny cogs and wheels moving in perfect synchronicity, and then looking glumly at a sundial I had cobbled together from pine off-cuts. That’s not to say Capote’s writing is hard to comprehend. It is accessible as well as beautiful – and impossible to put down, too.
