Seven Books That Changed The Way I See The World

Inspired by Bobbi L. Newman's blog post on the topic, I've tried to come up with the seven books that changed the way I see the world. It's not an easy task, and doubtless I've missed some. It is a list I've cobbled together, hastily, in the last three quarters of an hour, and it is a list which is presented in experiential order:

The House at Pooh Corner - A.A.Milne (1928)

In my mind the better of the two Winnie-the-Pooh books, I first experienced it from my mother's knee at a very early age. It doubtless helped foster my personality and shape my sense of humour. It's a brilliantly written and very funny book, and the end makes me cry.

The Thousand Eyes of Night - Robert E. Swindells (1985)

Swindells was my favourite author as a child, and this was the first of his I read. It came from the local public library. It is the story of a few kids who speculate that unusual mice might have been responsible for some local eviscerations. Contrary to the rules applied in most children's stories I'd read by this point, death poses a very real threat to our protagonists. This detail, as much as anything, made Swindells a gripping author. When I took this book back to the library, I immediately got out The Ghost Messengers, after which there were few other authors who could grab my interest. Swindells' works shaped my concept of adult interaction and perhaps helped make me a secretive sort, enthralled more by my fantasies and woodland adventures than by the drudgery of reality. Swindells had me looking for ghosts at school and making maps of non-existent secret tunnels. In my teenage years I took Lucy Topham, protagonist of A Serpent's Tooth, as something of a role model (though chose to ignore her more drippy character traits). 

The Witches - Roald Dahl (1983)

First experienced in the book-corner at school, circa 1987, read to us by my favourite teacher (and Dahl fanatic), Mrs Morris. The same life-changing concepts in Swindells are to be found here, albeit with a cheeky and dark sense of humour running throughout. Like many children of my age, The Witches stands as Dahl's master-work; the way it ends, in particular, is brilliantly perception-tweaking and is for me the best point of the whole book (another book that excited within me an interest in dark themes and surprise endings is Ruth Brown's A Dark Dark Tale). Dahl influenced me in other ways, too: I nearly killed my grandma with a cup of 'tea' painstakingly brewed from various household liquids and powders.

1066 And All That - W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman (1930)

I read this on a caravan holiday. The pages were falling out and covering me in crusty yellow glue, but in spite of the poor binding I could tell that this book was a Good Thing. It demonstrated to my young self that comedy could be applied to scholarly subjects, and that everything in life can be seen in humourous terms (even death by lamprey). More recently my concept of history is shaped by the Oxford History of England (another influential work which I'm squeezing in here). Its volumes remind one (as is often the case with history) that there are few new things under the sun and that societies of the past were not so far removed from societies of the present. 

Animal Farm - George Orwell (1945)

Following on rather neatly, then, is this allegory of crushed political dreams which I read in bed one teenage evening. Orwell is in good part responsible for my cynicism, I suspect. On the subject of fables, I should also make mention of Watership Down: a tale of death, sex, war, and bunnies. If Watership Down were a sci-fi, it would have an oily-legged slave-woman on the front and would tell the tale of greasy refugees from a dead planet who infiltrate another world to steal its women-folk. It isn't that. It's an allegory of that with rabbits. I think this realization got me to think a bit more about subtexts in literature.

The Pub & The People - Mass Observation (1943)

Picked out at random from the J.B.Morrell library in my last year at York, this was my introduction to Mass Observation and social anthropology. I found its anal documenting of the commonplace to be really rather fascinating: a brilliant and valuable piece of history. It taught me the value of simply looking at the world.

The Female Eunuch - Germaine Greer (1970)

Read on holiday in Northumberland this book probably changed the way I see the world more than any other I've read since the most formative years of my childhood. It unpicked my understanding and stitched it back together again, adding a cherry of pipe-dream utopianism on top as something to which I might aspire. Its blend of socialism and feminism bore deep down through the psychological strata laid in my head by the aforementioned books, and stirred from her slumber the Greenham-tinged Lucy Topham template of my teens, recasting her in a more informed and more self-confident image. I felt my view of the world tested and teased, and while some of what Greer writes is questionable, it still got me thinking about gender and society, and my relationship to both, in a way I hadn't before. 

So that's the seven. I bet I've left something really important out, but it's getting late and I've dissertating to do.