The book continues

The impending completion of my book makes me think about books that changed me.

If you know what this image is a parody of, show off your knowledge in the comments!

I got the schedule from the publisher yesterday. The manuscript is due May 6th. Pre-sale begins in early September. For now we’re calling it Fortune’s Path. I have to finish two chapters a week to make the deadline. No sweat. Probably.

Now seems like a good time to create a list of books that changed me. (Plus lists are super-easy blog posts to write*.) Thinking about what these books did to me may help me think about what I hope my book does to the people who read it.

The list is in rough order of when I read them or when they were read to me.

• A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. The first book that made me happy, though it was probably my mother reading it to me more than the book.

• Richard Adams’s The Tyger Voyage & Watership Down. More about my mother, a lover of beauty and spontaneous editor of scenes. She censored some passages of Watership Down to protect me.

• Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Astroids. It’s OK to love garbage.

• George Orwell’s 1984. Even things you don’t understand can make you cry. I read it in fifth grade because I loved science fiction. Oops.

• Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 8th grade. Recommended by my English teacher. I’m re-reading it now, and it’s like I haven’t forgotten a line. More of “You don’t have to know what something means to be changed by it.”

• Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. You have to pay a lot of dues before you reach enlightenment. Maybe there’s an easier way. Hmmm, what could that be?

• Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Like a new door in my mind opened and showed me something that had always been there that I couldn’t name. Reading the first line, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” is one of my most vivid memories.

• J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Never read it again after you turn seventeen.

• Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Still my working theory of the mind. “Death is perception without the hindrance of a body or an ego.” Amazing.

• Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Not a good book, but fun. It’s better to be Jack than to read Jack.

• Albert Camus’s The Plague. You don’t have to believe in God to be saved by good works. Very much how I feel about life.

• Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. The work of a lifetime to read and understand. My model.

• Donald Justice’s New and Selected Poems. Completely changed how I write for the better. God bless you, Mr. Justice.

• Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. School sucks but education is amazing. His vision of a better way is here with the internet. He’d hate AI, though. Fascist.

• Homer’s The Odyssey. The ultimate super hero, free of psychological baggage, unbruised by suffering. We could use a little more heathen thinking sometimes.

• William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The best book I’ve ever read. It all really happened to real people.

• Zen Master Ry
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ôkan’s Great Fool. “Raindrops on the Banana Leaves” may be the best poem ever written.

• Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame. Vivid cruelty.Suffering does not have to redeem us, but it can be made beautiful.

• Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe. More brave heathenism. What’s not to like about seeing with the eyes of scientist and writing with the courage of a poet?

So what do I want my book to do? I want it so show readers there’s another way, that success does not require power, that riches don’t require a lot of money, and that they can be happy at work and at home by giving in. Surender to win.

*This still took two hours to write. God help me.