books

[sophinisba]

veleda_k asked me to talk about a book that influence me. I'm finding this hard! I can think of a lot of books that made a big impression on me at the time that I read them but seeing the influence later is harder.

Here are some books that my parents read to me:

Dr. Seuss books, especially The Cat in the Hat and Hop on Pop. Sure, I cared about other books of his later on, but I think these were especially helpful when I was learning to read because they had such good short words. I also used to have this great wooden toy with three parts on a bar that you could turn around so that they'd made different three-letter combinations, including probably cat and hat. It was great! And I have always loved the bit in Hop on Pop:

SONG LONG A long, long song.
Good-by, Thing. You sing too long.

I still think of that, when I lose patience with a performer or a speaker, which I do kind of easily.

My dad read me Alice in Wonderland and a few years later my mom read me Jane Eyre. I loved them but I don't know what to do with that.

My brother gave me The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and that was one of the first chapter books I read by myself. All the Chronicles of Narnia were my seven favorite books for years but then I left and I haven't really gone back. I didn't get into them again when they started making the movies a few years ago.

When I was in junior high and high school I read a lot of books by Virginia Woolf. My favorite one was Mrs. Dalloway. As many wonderful things as there are about this book, I think it had a somewhat unfortunate consequence in that, for a long time, like, if I thought about lesbian love stories I would mostly think of them as stories of missed opportunities, longing and regret. Some of the 10,000 Maniacs songs I was listening to around the same time probably added to that. Many years later, after I started writing femslash stories, I realized that my femslash stories were more likely to be about love lost than my boyslash stories, and I started going out of my way to write more femslash with happy endings and/or porn.

But Mrs Dallaway is still a great book!

Some other books that influenced me around that same age are 1984 by George Orwell, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Makes sense, we're very impressionable as pre-teens.

Boo Sunday afternoon! As I explained the other day, Sunday afternoons and evenings are when I stress and get sad about not being ready for Monday. Something I forgot to say in that post is that B watches football on Sunday afternoons and evenings and yells at the TV, and it makes Sundays worse for me.

Oh well, feels good to get caught up on a meme at least!

Happy birthday, baranduin! I miss you and hope you are having a good day. Thank you for making this icon and for being so smart and honest and kind.

Comments

[veleda_k]

Thanks for answering! It's funny you should mention Hop on Pop. My family still quotes that one all these years later. Even into my teens, my mom used to wake me up by saying, "Up pup! Pup is up!"