December Posting Meme: Influential Reads
Jan. 20th, 2019 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phoenixfallsamindamazed asked: [Do you have any] particularly memorable or influential reads?I must admit, I laughed. So much of my identity is wrapped up in books -- in reading, and rereading, and analyzing, and daydreaming, and writing about, and writing in conversation with -- that the list of "memorable or influential" could easily be triple digits. Still, I can't resist a book-related prompt, so here are the books that I think helped form core parts of who I am.
Going way back into my childhood, we find Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney. A picture book, about a woman who dreams of and then actually spends her life travelling, then retires to live in a cottage by the sea. And wherever she travels she plants lupines, because what she finds she must do something to make the world a little more beautiful. It's a beautiful book, the illustrations have a spare, washed-out look that add a romantic, dream-like quality, and it's a beautiful message that I internalized very, very young. Of course, as an adult, I am disturbed by the ecological implications -- lupines are an invasive species! Don't just go planting things places because you think they're pretty, dammit, you'll disrupt the native ecosystem! -- but ultimately, yes, I want to spend my life doing things that make the world a little more beautiful.
Moving forward in time a little, there is of course Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery. Of course, as a highly imaginative, slightly solitary young girl, I identified strongly with Anne. But I had also already internalized that "girly" things were "bad," and Anne is very decidedly "girly." I refused to admit, for many years, that I loved Anne of Green Gables (and its sequels); it did its work on me in secret, shaping the traits that I admired in other people before I could admit to admiring them in myself. But over the years, I grew more comfortable claiming Anne -- her whimsy, her over the top loves and hates, the way that she carried her love of all things imaginary and magical into adulthood with grace, never feeling that she had to "grow up" according to some arbitrary societal standards. Every time I hop up to skip along on top of a retaining wall rather than sedately walk beside it, I think of Anne.
Continuing the trend of classic children's literature for girls, there is also the matter of Louisa May Alcott. I love Little Women, Little Men, and Eight Cousins; but their sequels, Good Wives, Jo's Boys, and Rose in Bloom were more influential, I think, for one trait they share in common: in each one, there is a boy, a good boy, one of the heroes, one of our favorites; and he loves a girl, a beautiful girl, who is kind and sweet and loves him back; but she doesn't love him romantically, views him as a friend or brother, and she rejects him. And she is right to do so. These were the stories that taught me that beautiful girls are not prizes the universe hands out to boys who have done something good; that no matter how much a boy may love a girl, she does not owe him her love back.
Switching gears and moving away from gender politics for a bit, it is here that I must admit that Orson Scott Card was a formative author. Speaker for the Dead is the title that stands out the most, for making me question for the first time what I considered a accepted principle of science fictional settings -- non-interference, Star Trek's Prime Directive. In it, humanity has established a scientific colony on a planet with intelligent alien life -- an alien life with a strong oral tradition and semi-permanent structures, but very little in the way of tools or technology. The humans are assiduously practicing non-interference, keeping to their locked and guarded compound, ensuring that none of their technology ever escapes to infect and alter the course of the aliens' natural evolution -- and at a climactic point in the novel, one of the aliens cries desperately to a human character how unfair that is, how selfish, that humanity is denying his race the stars. It's a gorgeous moment, and one that shook my worldview to that point.
(To be fair to Star Trek, though, the Prime Directive works a little differently -- ideally, the non-warp-capable aliens should never have know that humanity/the Federation was there; once they know what exists outside their world, the Prime Directive has already been hopelessly broken.)
Additionally, the titular concept of a Speaker for the Dead was so filled with empathy, so rooted in the idea that it is both worthwhile and necessary to learn to see through other peoples' eyes (even, or perhaps especially, people you have little natural sympathy/affinity with) that I have to think it was formative in that regard as well. Card's books in general, at least at that point, were ones I found incredibly empathetic; as I grew older and his politics swung more extremely to the right, I struggled to reconcile that empathy with his politics. When I first was reading through his work, I had a trio of Mormon friends; they spoke of him in hushed, horrified terms, as a rebel, a renegade, someone constantly risking excommunication from the church. His books were the first SFF books I found that had gay men in them -- and while there were usually Reasons those men could not settle down happily with a male partner, they were nonetheless characters the reader was meant to admire or sympathize with. To this day, OSC makes me sad, because somehow he twisted all that empathy that I found so inspiring into a truly hateful belief system.
And while we're on the subject of authors I have ended up having an extremely conflicted relationship with, lets talk Marion Zimmer Bradley. Several of MZB's Darkover novels were responsible for how I came to terms with my sexuality. In The Forbidden Tower, four telepaths, initially two M/F couples, end up creating a quartet in which each different pairing has a unique dynamic that each partner can find strength in, and the foursome as a whole is strong enough to defeat the representatives of an establishment that has turned abusive in its elevation of virginity as the only "pure" source of power. The two initial couples, while they love each other deeply, have issues that they cannot face in isolation -- only by drawing on the strengths brought by the members of the other couple can they find ways through their various blocks to happiness. If this sounds kind of woo-woo, well, it is, it's an SFF novel from the seventies; also, if incest is a hard squick, stay away, as the two women are twin sisters and one of the M/F couples is first cousins (and their cousinhood impacts their relationship because they are unable to healthily conceive due to too many interrelationships in their family tree). But this book is the reason I identified as polyamorous even before I realized I was bi -- the idea that no one person can fulfill all your needs, that a relationship can be strengthened by bringing in additional partners, was one that felt so completely right to me as soon as I saw this single pattern for it in a fictional world that I knew it was how I wanted to live my life.
But Darkover wasn't done with breaking up my default assumption of straightness! Because not much later I read the Renunciate novels (The Shattered Chain, Thendara House, and City of Sorcery) in the same world, a trilogy focused on a woman-only society within the strictly patriarchal culture who have renounced all relationships with men in pursuit of their own financial and romantic freedom. The main character in these novels is an outsider, a scientist (anthropologist?) from a more "advanced" interstellar civilization that long ago diverged from the people of Darkover, and which views itself as sexually egalitarian (but is about as egalitarian as our current society is). Magda joins the Renunciates by accident but takes her vow to them seriously, and thus immerses herself within that society. Through that action she discovers (1) some of her own internalized misogyny, and (2) her sexual and romantic attraction to two different women, who end up becoming her life partners. (Also telepathic powers, of course!) And that was exactly my experience as well, that first I had to work through my internalized misogyny, and once I had chipped away at that enough I suddenly realized, oh, that's what those feelings about my female friends are, everything makes so much sense now.
And all that would have been great, really, except that as an adult I discovered online SFF book fandom, and several years ago that fandom blew up with truly horrifying details about MZB and her husband and their reprehensible "philosophies" regarding child sexual abuse (namely, that its a-ok, a natural expression of sexual desire), and the fact that they actively put those "philosophies" into practice on their own children and others.
The thing that made that revelation so difficult for me, as for so many MZB fans, is that she was so formative in my exploration of my own sexuality; and that now that I know what she did, it's impossible not to see strains of those beliefs in books that I previously loved. The particular titles that I think of as *mine* are not quite tainted -- but others, that were also favorites, are definitely. . . understanding of, sympathetic to, adults who were sexually drawn to young teenagers. In some cases, adults that actively abuse young teenagers. Those revelations were the reason I stopped writing in my "Just As They Wished It To Be" Tony/Rhodey 'verse; I no longer trusted myself to be handling the power differential between 19-21 y/o Rhodey and 14-16 y/o Tony ethically.
Ugh. Moving on.
There is one nonfiction title that I think was influential enough to deserve a place on this list: A Theory of Shopping, by Daniel Miller. To tell the truth, I don't remember his ultimate point; the internet tells me it was something about shopping as akin to a sacrificial rite, pushback against the idea of shopping as mere function of a society based on consumption. But what stuck with me from the book, which I read as part of one of my core sequences in college, was the first chapter, which was filled with observations from a year long study of shopping habits in a particular London neighborhood. Those observations finally explained one aspect of my parents' relationship to me.
You see, my whole life (and almost the entirety of their marriage), my mom was the primary breadwinner. She was the high-powered executive, travelling frequently on business, with the suits and the laptop. My dad had a job in the arts, and he was the more "nurturing" influence -- he was the one who read my sister and I to sleep at night, who braided our hair, who crafted our Halloween costumes from scratch. He was very loud (half complaining, half bragging) about how whipped he was, how he always deferred to my mom's lightest whims.
And yet. . . I never could quite bring myself to believe in their relationship as an example of female liberation? And I didn't know why. Until Daniel Miller described the patterns he discovered in family shopping habits -- that men primarily shopped for the big ticket items, and for the "treat" items; while women primarily shopped for the family's day to day necessities, the groceries and clothes and household needs. That no matter how egalitarian the couples he interviewed thought themselves, that pattern held -- women did the nitty gritty work of seeing that everyone was clothed and fed, while men did the "fun" shopping. And what's more, men expected praise any time they participated in the shopping women usually handled -- "Honey, I picked up the milk for you," and so on -- whereas women simply absorbed and internalized those duties as their own, not extra work they did for the family as a "favor."
That was exactly the pattern my parents followed in their relationship.
And last but assuredly not least, there is Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series (well, the first six books of it). This series of fantasy doorstoppers is set in an alternate Renaissance Europe, where an offshoot of alt-Christianity took hold in alt-France, involving worship of Elua, a god born of the blood of Christ mixing with Mother Earth, whose sole tenet was "Love as thou wilt." Much of the series focuses on physical and romantic love -- but what I found resonated most with me was how many varieties of love the books explore. The main villain is at one point shielded by a priest of Elua, because while many of the people she manipulated acted out of greed and vanity, she acted out of pure love for Macchiavellian games (and her love for her child); the protagonist of the first trilogy, Phedre, is a divinely ordained prostitute who falls a little bit in love with all of her patrons, including above-mentioned villain; there is love of country and love of family (born and chosen) and love of knowledge and love of truth. There is grand, sweeping, romantic love that breaks through all barriers; and there is love that is based in a specific situation or limited by time, love that is quieter and more steady and that lives comfortably beside all those other loves. And all of those loves are shown to be worthy of respect and protection.
And that. . . that resonates with me in the same way that Miss Rumphius does. I want to leave the world a slightly more beautiful place for having had me in it; and while I'm here I want to pursue that kind of fierce open-heartedness, that looks for things to love in everyone around me and then acts to honor and protect that love. It's a hard goal -- harder some days than others! -- but a worthy one, I think, and it's become a central component of my personal philosophy.
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Date: 2019-01-22 04:22 am (UTC)--echoes all the way through it, as well as being a beautiful and worthy statement by itself.
I'm very struck by that account of gendered shopping habits, because it reminds me of reading once that in many hunter-gatherer societies, women provide most of the nutrition, but the occasional game men bring in carries much more prestige. Which tends to be explained in terms of differences in physical strength or the restrictions of nursing and childcare, but if it carries across such disparate cultures, maybe it's really just a matter of social dominance and who gets the fun jobs?
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Date: 2019-01-22 04:30 am (UTC)Yeah, I've read that too, about hunter-gatherer societies. Although, as with any similar statement, I always wonder. . . do the societies themselves really view the male-procured game as more prestigious? Or did the person who asked the question bring some bias to the table that shaded that answer? ;)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-22 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-22 06:10 am (UTC)