I spent part of Thursday and Friday at the Great Lakes Metro Conference at Buffalo State College. It was a great time, and I took away a lot from the presenters and participants.
During his presentation at a panel on Regional Governance, George Grasser from Partners for a Livable Western New York flashed a quote from James Howard Kuntsler, a visionary cultural critic and author of The Geography of Nowhere (if you click his website you’ll see he has a regular feature called “Clusterfuck Nation,” which made me LOL it up).
I first read Kuntsler during my junior year of high school when a brave English teacher decided to make the suburban kids in her Honors class read a chapter from The Geography of Nowhere, a book how bad the suburbs and cars are, essentially. If you haven’t read this book, you now have an addition to your summer reading list.
Anyway, when I saw the quote it made me think about that English teacher and then a list I made a few years back for my zine, oh, what? I had just finished up undergrad and decided to compile a list of the ten most influential non-fiction books I read during college. The Geography of Nowhere, which I picked up and read in full my freshman year, made the cut. Here’s the whole thing, in no particular order:
- Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
- The Making of Black Revolutionaries by James Forman
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
- The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kuntsler
- No More Prisons by William Upski Wimsatt
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks
- Schoolgirls by Peggy Orenstein
- Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman by Candace Falk
- Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe by Lester K. Little
As I noted then, important does not always equal best. These are the books that, when I was reading them, carved out little pieces of my brain and slipped inside. Their messages, lessons, and theses helped shape who I am and how I both interpret and react to the world. After I compiled the list and put it in the zine, I regretted that I didn’t include Cunt: a declaration of independence by Inga Muscio.
In the “Acknowledgments” section of one of his novels, American Gods, Neil Gaiman thanked the author of a book whose title I can’t remember at all. It’s really not important because what I took away from that was what Gaiman said about the book’s impact on him: it changed his life when he was “still of an age where a book could change me forever.”
At the time when I read Gaiman’s acknowledgments, I couldn’t imagine being “old enough” to not let a book change me forever. I think I get what he was saying now though. The above books were all read during a time where I was deeply and unabashedly open to learning and changing (for me, that time was more or less college in its entirety). And so they altered me.
But it’s not like now, at 26, I’m closed off to change or growth. I have grown and am growing. It’s just different, harder.
Slower.
College was a time during which I prepared to make big, life decisions but did not make them. Being changed by a book or a late night conversation or a Herstory dinner was easier because the lessons I took away from them didn’t necessarily slam into the reality of having to be up and presentable by 9:00 a.m. And, as I’ve discussed before, I had time.
My list since graduating college is much smaller but here’s what would be on it: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, and one I finished yesterday, Baby Catcher by Peggy Vincent.
What does your list look like?
