NAME A BOOK THAT CHANGED THE WAY YOU SEE FICTION.
Give us the author, the title, and how. The “how” can be any significant way you choose. Doubtless there are many books that affect you, but pick the one that comes to mind first or that you’d most like to share. If Finnegan’s Wake challenged the validity of linear narratives, or Among Others validated autobiographical fiction, or The Color Purple made you demand authors write deeper women, or Cat’s Cradle left you with an indelible love of tangents – please, share.
I’m fascinated by the lasting effects of literature. We hear about canons, but reading is often a much more individual thing, and we all have books that cast a shadow over libraries. All I ask is that you keep it honest and brief. You can tweet your answer if you like, though some people may want a few sentences. Here’s an example:
Richard Matheson’s Hell House had the gall to seemingly end
and then drop a complete second twist ending in ten pages.
He executed it so quickly that I expected what was still in my right hand would be the typical blank pages and publication notes -
until I read the pages. It played with expectations of what novelists
do in page-lengths in a way that begged me to experiment.
and then drop a complete second twist ending in ten pages.
He executed it so quickly that I expected what was still in my right hand would be the typical blank pages and publication notes -
until I read the pages. It played with expectations of what novelists
do in page-lengths in a way that begged me to experiment.
See? Not so tough, though now I’ll have to think up another. In a couple
weeks I’ll compile everyone’s answers into a megapost. If you can beat
the above for brevity, you’re winning. If we’re lucky, we’ll all walk
out of this with a revealing reading list.
 |
| Goodreads, circa 1874 |
So: what book changed fiction for you? And how?
"Pride and Prejudice" changed my life. I had never identified with a fictional character before. Most were fighting mythical monsters, wars or governments, or having larger than life adventures that to me, at age 15, were not plausible. Elizabeth Bennet was witty and sassy, and her cat-and-mouse game with Mr. Darcy captivated my teenage heart. This felt real, whether it took place in the eighteenth or twentieth century.
ReplyDeleteLanark by Alasdair Gray..
ReplyDeleteWhat did it do to you, Tom?
Delete"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie. It was the first time I really understood that writers could be magicians and completely misdirect the reader. I will NEVER forget how completely gobsmacked I was by the ending the first time I read it (and Edward Wilson, you can take your snarky little response elsewhere, fold it and -- (ahem, sorry for the digression)). I've read mysteries for years, and was accustomed to the _detective_ keeping things from the reader, but never this. I've never taken anything completely for granted since.
ReplyDelete(Is that what you wanted, John?) :)
It's exactly what I wanted! Thank you, Janet, for a model reply.
DeleteSorry, I can't join you here. I never do 'biggest, brightest, best' when it comes to books. The answer is invariably the one I'm reading. N. xxx
ReplyDeleteI'm not asking for the best book or biggest you've read - only one, out of however many, affected the way you saw other books. If your current read is doing that, feel free to share!
DeleteFor me Terry Pratchett's "Guards! Guards!" changed the way I saw Fantasy genre.
ReplyDeleteI loved Fantasy, but I couldn't figure out why Fantasy genre was getting so stale to me and it was only when after reading Terry Pratchett's work that I realized all those other authors were always telling the same story:
a prophecy, some pointy ears, a wise mentor, maybe a dragon, slap in a generic everyman "chosen one" who tries to fight his destiny, and Bam! Done!
Pratchett's books especially those featuring the crime-drama stylings of Sam Vimes, taught me that fantasy could be so much more. The Elves and Wizards and Dragons are just a backdrop, a medium, for telling real stories about real people that readers care about. You lose sight of your characters and make them shoddy copies of Tolkien characters and it ceases to have a heart.
Atonement, by Ian McEwan.
ReplyDeleteIt may seem a cliche now, but James Joyce's ULYSSES did it for me. In the process of finishing my second degree, I did a course in literary theory. The entire second half of the course was ULYSSES. We were assigned the Bloomsday companion, but I actually was assisted by an unabridged recording of the book by a Joyce scholar. It had the effect on me in the way it did so many others-- I was startled and I knew I'd never read the same again. In the end, I felt like a better human being because Joyce managed to fill the pages with not just the stuff that usually makes up our stories, but the mundane, the boring even. I didn't feel in charge, it wasn't all filtered through me. The book existed without me. Having spent so much time with it, I cried when it was over. I think the last few pages are the most beautiful words put together in text. I felt like the whole thing was a call to every other writer to think in new ways. Sadly, I think the only person to answer the call was Joyce himself, in FINNEGAN'S WAKE.
ReplyDeleteIf it's cliche, it's only because the widespread impact of his work is widely known. To be affected by Joyce is entirely fair.
DeleteI'd have to pick L'Etranger by Albert Camus. The spare storytelling was a revelation -- up until then, I'd always been taught the more educated and intelligent you were, the more complex and verbose your sentences should be. The story itself is more like a thought experiment -- the "what if?" aspect is always very close to the surface, yet it's never cloying or pious.
ReplyDeleteThe subtlety of Meursault's transformation was a revelation too. To this day I soometimes use that book as a kind of litmus test. Whether a person reembers the withdrawn, disaffeted Meursault from the beginning or the passionate Meursault from the end often tells a lot about them, I find.
In the same way, L'Etranger has turned into a yardstick for both prose and character arcs (not so much plot). I've tossed aside a lot of highly-acclaimed books because their pretty, pretty text just reads like self-serving wankery after L'Etranger.
Borges' manipulation of short form.
ReplyDeleteHow did Borges change the rest of literature for you, Ross?
DeleteHe creates, for me, unparalleled depth with a minimum of language. His short stories stand out as some of the absolute best, creating incredible worlds and atmosphere, and yet they're usually only a few pages. I don't know of anyone who does it as well, or really who approaches that skill.
DeleteThe Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. It was my first reveal into multicultural fiction and didn't include fairies or dragons. It was just a simple story whose characters opened my eyes to a whole new literary world.
ReplyDeleteMy teacher in 7th grade (if I remember correctly) loaned it to me out of her in-class library and ended up letting me keep the copy when not only did I take so long returning it, but brought it back obviously well-read.
Wow, you really made me think with this one.
ReplyDeleteI think probably The Tempest by William Shakespeare had one of the most profound effects on me. I studied it while at high school. It made me realise that every character, even those who are considered not important or powerful, must have a voice and a soul. Caliban is a savage and Ariel is a spirit and yet they both long for freedom. It stays with me to this day.
Jai
Stranger in a strange land is the first book that really peeled my mind open and made me rethink how i look at things. Had mostly read fantasy up till then, that got me hooked into sci-fi. You could actually see the shift on my bookshelves, from stuff like Magic Kingdom for Sale to books like Dune :) Now of course it's all a mish-mosh, i read all sorts of things but that was the first big shift in my reading tastes.
ReplyDeleteSo It Goes...An Influential Book and a Few Stories of Import
ReplyDeleteOkay. I'm going to throw out a few things here.
Forever War by Joe Haldeman is some hard, sociological science-fiction that uses war as a backdrop and interplanetary travel to really examine how we humans treat one another. It was my first encounter with some real profanity in a book. I probably shouldn't have been reading this when I was twelve.
Childhood's End: We read this in high school and was truly blown away to discover how Arthur C. Clarke addressed some important topics in ways I'd never encountered before. This work is provocative in the sense it makes us examine some of our base assumptions.
Slaughterhouse-Five: Vonnegut is an amazing write who transcends genre classification and this work both entertains and illuminates. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, feels so real, and has a slippery relationship with time. So it goes.
A Rose for Emily: William Faulkner is better known for his longer work. This piece is Southern Gothic sliced up in non-sequential bits. You could do worse than analyze the technique found within.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Ambrose Bierce turns a phrase like no one. You've likely read this and know what I'm talking about. A snappy piece of work. Check it out if you've not done so.
I'm sure there's more, but I must get back to my own writing.
Best,
Sean
The Fionovar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay - It was the first book that made me cry. I never realized before that point in time, just how much a book could make you feel, or how good writing could make characters feel like real people rather than caricatures. It was also a lesson in writing satisfying endings. I think it changed my world view too, that and his later writing, how I thought about love, relationships, and mortality.
ReplyDeleteBitten by Kelley Armstrong. The depth of her characters (even minor ones) and the backstory she wove into the narrative (without info dumps) made me really stop and think about my writing. But what I struggle with most is narrative voice. I tend to describe things from a distance and I've been working this last year to infuse the natural voice of the character into my writing. The book that made me realize that was A Brush of Darkness by Allison Pang. Her first paragraph hit me in the gut and shouted "That's what you're missing!" That's the book that made me rewrite my entire YA ms from 3rd to 1st person POV.
ReplyDeleteTo study this more, I went back to Kelley Armstrong's books. Because her series is written by several narrators, the series itself has is a lesson in voice. I can recognize the distinct narrative voice of each character and that's impressive (to me at least) since she has stories written by over a dozen different characters.
Black Sun Rising, by C. S. Friedman, and its two sequels which comprise The Coldfire Trilogy. In these books, Friedman's characters play with the foundations of so-called "magic", altering the very physics of their world as they go along, and as a reader I felt like I was playing with the foundations of so-called "fantasy". Friedman's characters inhabit a fantasy world filled with leftovers from a doomed sci-fi world, and in turn, the books are (fairly) characterized as fantasy but bear many trappings of the sci-fi genre, including a fascinating take on magic that deconstructs its inner workings without actually taking away its mystical properties. These three books also feature my favorite villain of all fiction across every type of media; it's rare to see a sympathetic villain at all, much less one who we get to know every bit as well as the protagonists.
ReplyDeleteFriedman's books were my catalyst for realizing that "nothing new under the sun" is bunk. You can trace every single element in The Coldfire Trilogy to something else, just like you can with most fiction, but the juxtaposition is what makes it unique and compelling. They also gave me a healthy appreciation for believable villains, which has sadly done more to detract from my enjoyment of other work than anything else!
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. There aren't many books that so significantly changed the way I looked and thought about the world around me, and the world in general. And as a writer, I don't think you can have anything that sticks with you that much, and shifts your perception of the world around you, without changing the way you look at fiction. Especially for me, where so much about my own writing and what I'm interested in is about folks interacting, and I think Shandy perfectly captures the limitations and hangups we have when dealing with people other than ourselves.
ReplyDeleteClive Barker's The Damnation Game showed me what a true horror story could be. I haven't read it in years, so I have no idea how it holds up today, but to my tween-young teen mind, that made me appreciate horror fiction as well as all the other speculative genres.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure I can pick one. The Giver influenced me, and later on so did the Lover. Then there is the book that made me love reading as a child, Charlotte's Web.
ReplyDeleteI think I could write a whole post on this subject.
Please do!
DeleteSeriously considering it. Sometime this week!
DeleteA fortunate Life by Albert Facey.
ReplyDeleteIt was only originally written as a memoir by a man with little education. I think his daughter found it and had it published after his death.
It's remarkable to me, not only for the fact that a man who suffered incredible hardship still considered his life fortunate, but that his simplistic and even flawed writing style could reach the hearts of nearly every Australian who read it.
I am tempted to call it Australia's Grapes of Wrath, but it is so much more than that.
I posted something! Here: http://storytreasury.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/books-that-changed-how-you-saw-fiction/
ReplyDelete