Again with questions about your past!
I’ve recently started re-reading one of the very first books that started me on the path to where I am today, politically. I’m not sure how common of a title it is for folks of our political persuasion, but I remember that as soon as I saw it on the shelves at the book warehouse I labored in for a few years, I knew I had to read it cover to cover.
I’m not going to tell you what it is though. At least not until you tell me the books you all read in your formative years. Fiction or non-fiction; popular or obscure. Tell me about them. The who and the when, as well as what you got out if them.
I ask this for a reason important to RNS itself, so don’t be shy.
My formative years (1950’s-1970) were filled with reading. For pleasure, I read mostly science fiction, starting with the entire works of Verne, then progressing to A.E. Van Vogt and Heinlein.
I continued reading SF well into my 30’s, reading mostly serialized works in Analog. I did read a particularily good work called “The Weapons Makers” by A.E. Van Vogt, which had, as it’s theme, a society characterized by either heavily-armed space-based pirates or equally-armed citizens, as a citizen could own a “defensive” arm of any type (weapons techs had figured out how to make a weapon that would only fire when it read your mind and detected a defense situation). The hero was a detective working for the society that was chartered to police this defensive weapons setup, preventing conversion of weapons, etc. Very curious book, and it may have been the basis for the whacky trigger-tech ideas we see being legislated today in GFW blue states. More recent SF has included “Footfall” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and “The Russian Spring” by Norman Spinrad.
I read little of a political nature, that is, unless it was assigned as course material. I DID read Ayn Rand, enjoying “Atlas Shrugged” the best, “The Fountainhead” next best. Reading these novels and discussing them in a (rare) right-wing student group at Portland State University attracted my first wife to me (not a plus, as it turned out). I WAS motivated to form one of the first student PACs in OR, a YAF (Young Americans for Freedom affilliate. We stumped for Goldwater in the ’64 election, occasionally carrying signs reading, “Drop the Bomb” (one of our opposing PACs was an anti-nuke group). When not boosting the Right, the group mostly played Pinochle and Hearts in the Student Union.
Ah, the dissolute days of my youth!
I’m actually re-reading atlas shrugged right now. It was the victim of a less than diligent effort before. That’s a good start. Ditto for the fountainhead.
Being a 1976’er, I started reading in the 80’s and as a young lad found that Tom Clancy (Starting with hunt for red october, red storm rising, all the way through with special significance on Without Remorse) was to my liking at an early age (maybe 11 or 12?). These had a big impact, believe it or not. I enjoyed them all, but the three I mentioned were my favorite clancy books.
Umm, Tolkien was a sine qua non for my friends and I growing up. I’ve read the Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy at least three times.
There were a handful of authors that fall under “had to read for school but liked their books” (Faulkner, Hemingway, etc) but I don’t think they were terribly influential.
I read three or four books a week from the time I was eight until I was about 22, when I was burned out due to college (English with Writing Emphasis– so much bad fiction that I only read non-fiction for the next few years).
The most formative books, as a very young kid, would be the Time-Life book sets my parents had– natural history, geology, biology, astronomy– as they got me reading and studying. The idea here being, consult all available information and form your opinions based on the widest variety of input. Independent reading often leads to independent thought. In fiction, the Choose Your Own Adventure books got me interested in writing and storytelling, as well as “pretend stories.”
That’s way, way back, I know, but it’s da troof.
By the way, I’m a ’76er, too.
I read a lot of sci-fi as a kid when we returned from overseas as Missionaries, in fact the entire stack at the library over a five-year period. I just did a post on it (reading). I didn’t read Ayan Rand who I thought was tedious and lecturing, her characters social and mannered. I preferred P.G.Woodhouse and the British for that social stuff. I read fantasy and adventure to take me elsewhere, not social-criticism. Heinlein was always good and when “Stranger in a Strange Land” got me close to some sympathetic high-school girls – I realized that “book learning” could serve another purpose. His archives are at my alma-mater UC Santa Cruz where I was a hippie – or so I thought – but for some reason I didn’t actually fit in there either. A feeling I had most of my life which I had always attributed to the overseas experience and missing some common ground, a piece of the socio-cultural puzzle. I never got very political, probably because my parents had already staked-out that “moral high-ground” and I avoided it as much as possible.
As a grown-up liberal in a blue-blue sea of liberals it was all as one thing, like water to a fish. But there were times I couldn’t breathe either. I got political when I started riding motorcycles off-road and realized how great and well-funded the Ecoweenie anti-access groups were, and how rigid, doctrinaire, and intolerant. Then when I became a gun-owner all the parallel tracks were there. Working in the publishing industry among Blue-Blue-Blue Liberals (my boss’s wife is/was a leading lawyer/counsel in the state Democrat Party) on 9/11, among the first things I heard from them was self-blame. I downloaded Ann Coulter’s “Slander” to my eBook and read it on the flight to Hawaii.
I realize now that I never fit-in because I wasn’t like them from the beginning. I wasn’t like the college friend who made a career for himself climbing up the Sierra Club corporate ladder, or the one who happily works with the Center for Biological Diversity – various institutions that threw open the doors to success and and wealth to naive college eco-recruits willing to climb a corporate ladder of a faintly different stripe. Eco-Tools on a Government grant. I have to go load some more ’06 rounds for a match, I spend too much time blog-commenting.
In junior high I couldn’t get enough of three (sometimes intertwining) series: Mack Bolan, Able Team, and Phoenix Force. They were serial novels of the combat variety. Back then I would read them as fast as I could get my hands on them. I would be interested to know if the stories could keep me engrossed now.
Tom Robbins “Skinny Legs & All” and “Another Roadside Attraction” helped me out with my problems with organized religion.
J.R. “Bob” Dobbs “The Book of the SubGenius” helped me out with my disillusionment of the hippies and Pagans and liberals. And if someone tells you there is no J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and it’s really some guy named Ivan Stang (who really should be called Douglas St. Claire Smith) that wrote the Book of the SubGenius, don’t believe it; that person is naught but a tool in it for the money. 🙂
I discovered science fiction through Analog and read everything in the genre that I could get my hands on. Heinlein is still my favorite author. Before that, it was mostly non-fiction and sciency stuff about archeology, astronomy, dinosaurs, codes and cyphers, etc. I still love anything historical.
My dad read the Mack Bolan series, so I probably read the first thirty or more. Louis L’Amour too.
Magazine-wise, I don’t think I missed an issue of MAD for more than a decade, and later got into the original incarnation of National Lampoon.
Oh yeh, as a kid overseas and unable to speak much of the local language I sought refuge in reading old Reader’s Digest condensed books that were on the old bookshelves, including Michener’s “West Wind to Hawaii” (ther was some pretty racy stuff!), and I also read swaths of The Encyclopedia Britannica that was in the house.
I’d pull out a volume and flip through it reading whatever in it that struck my 9- and 10-year old fancy. I read about Wagner because of the fascinating ghost-ship illustration for “The Flying Dutchman.”
Through the detailed but tiny diagrams in the Encyclopedia I learned how a gas-operated machine gun worked, the means for submarine buoyancy, and how an aircraft flew. I was totally enamored with WWI aircraft and the exploits of the pilots, from Frank Luke to Eddie Rickenbacker to the French Aces and the German ones. My brother and I built tissue-paper covered models and flew (crashed) them off the roof of our house. Maybe that’s why I needed glasses by 5th grade – tiny diagrams.
Milton Friedmans Free to Choose” was one of the books that most shaped my thinking but was introduced to me as a part of a television series by the same name on PBS, back when PBS wasn’t just another liberal mouth piece. Other works by Milton followed: An Economist’s Protest and Capitalism and Freedom. I managed to get through Democracy in America but remember that it wasn’t an easy read. This is a great topic, Phil! It has me thinking.
Heinlein’s Friday. Still rewarding on so many levels every time I read it.
I grew up with a set of encyclopedias from the 1930s, read Fahrenheit 451 as a kid, my brother sent me his Marine Corps Guide Book when I was in 7th grade. I read almost anything including t shirts, ball caps, even cereal boxes if nothing else is available. Graduated High School in 1976, never felt like I fit in there and have never attended a class reunion. I didn’t fit due to being from a military tradition family during the Vietnam war and its immediate aftermath.
Science fiction, especially Heinlein. “Glory Road” was a big one. It crystallized my determination to follow my own path in life. In my second year of college I was introduced to Ayn Rand. She had captured my political outlook and ideals exactly, despite her weaknesses as a novelist (pat characters and situations).
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What is it with ’76 graduates reading encyclopedias? 🙂
I think ours must have been early post-wa.
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