I’ve been spending more time on bluesky (follow me there!) There’s a meme/game going around asking people to list 20 books that influenced them. In theory you’re just supposed to show book covers…but of course I am a writer/babbler, and can’t help but talk a bit about each.
I figured I’d reproduce/expand on the thread here, because it seemed like a fun thing to share, and because honestly I’m trying to avoid focusing on…everything, at least for another day or so. (Though if you want my thoughts on the inauguration, I wrote a piece at Public Notice here.)
So! Without further shilly-shallying, here are 20 books that I love/that influenced me/that I thought it would be entertaining to talk about briefly.
1.
James Baldwin
The Price of the Ticket (1985)
James Baldwin is probably my favorite nonfiction writer; I read this over and over and over when I first got it (in the mid-90s I think?)
I’ve gotten to write about Baldwin a few times; here’s a piece on his long, amazing piece of film criticism The Devil Finds Work (included in this book). And here’s one on his famous discussion of antisemitism in Black communities.
2.
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Smith, eds.
Against Expression (2011)
This is a wonderful anthology of “uncreative writing”—poetry composed of lists or quotations and appropriated text. I bought it just a couple years ago; it was hugely inspiring to me to find there was this whole tradition of poets doing the kind of poetry I was working on and that’s meaningful to me.
Here’s a piece I wrote about Against Expression and how it speaks to current (kind of confused) discussions about AI.
And here’s a pamphlet of uncreative writing I wrote manipulating Mary Oliver text.
3.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
I read this when I was in like 3rd grade or something and it absolutely terrorized me. The shadow thing speaking out of someone else's face; total nightmare fuel. (It was this edition; I adore this cover.)
I haven’t written about The Wizard of Earthsea series, but I’ve published a couple of things about Le Guin’s work; the two big ones are this on Always Coming Home, and this on The Lathe of Heaven.
4.
Carol Clover
Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992)
Clover’s brilliantly argues that slashers and related horror films are built on cross-gender identification (of viewers) and gender switching (for characters.) I still think about this book all the time—for example, it’s the basis of this discussion of the film Men.
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