A few posts ago, I wrote about the subversive nature of Dr. Seuss.  I mentioned that I felt it had shaped my children's view of the world for the better.  But what of me? What books did I read?

In my earlier reading days, there were the Little House books.  Like the Harry Potter series, these books start out simple with Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie and get more complicated and dark: The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years.  The Long Winter presents a stark picture of just how dangerous life on the edge of civilization can be, and even in These Happy Golden Years the heroine boards in a household where the adults are clearly dysfunctional.  The messages all these books carry is that life is hard, often unfair (how fair was it that Mary became blind?), but in the end rewarding. and that the most important thing is taking care of each other.

There was From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the best book I know of about adventure and caring deeply about something.  And art.  I would not go as far as to say that my love of art was created by this book, but a desire to run away and live in a museum was.  I have yet to fulfill that ambition.

I read every book about horses I could read.  I adored the Walter Farley Black Stallion books. I still love horses.  (You guys need to watch the Breeder's Cup this year; it will probably be the fabulous Zenyatta's last race.)

There was every book written by Louisa May Alcott.  There is a tendency I think to sometimes view these as reinforcing gender stereotypes, which to some extent they do, but they also create interesting, fully-dimensional, strong female characters who are not victims of their circumstances (Beth in Little Women notwithstanding).

There were the fantasies: Tolkien, with his messages about how the most insignificant seeming can be the most important; Lewis's Narnia, with its Christian allegories about the nobility of sacrifice and responsibility (it is from Narnia that I developed the notion of only telling one's own story); Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, which was  my favorite, with its stories of how the search for meaning takes you far and wide until, inevitably, you end up finding meaning in yourself and your actions.

I read mysteries -- Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen -- which, besides the wonderful exercise of a good puzzle, also gave the misleading impression that all problems can be solved if you think hard enough.  The resolution might be painful, even tragic, but there is always a resolution. 

When I got to high school, I read  a lot of classic and modern literature. I went on a bender where I read every single Eugene O'Neill play.  I read Catcher in the Rye.  (Holden Caulfield is the single most annoying character in all literature, followed closely by Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.)   Shakespeare, Bronte (both Emily and Charlotte), Kozinski, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Huxley.  An amazing amount of poetry: Frost, Dickinson (whom I did not care for), Browning (both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett), Eliot, to name just a very few.

Somehow, through all of that, I developed a political and aesthetic personality: progressive, poetic (even if my own actual attempts at poetry are pretty pathetic) and deeply committed to the idea of justice and care for human beings and suspicious of society's attempts to control them (thank you, Aldous Huxley!).  (I was never exposed to Ayn Rand, or I might have turned out very differently.)

All of these were important to me, but the most important, I think, deserves its own post.