(or- given my viewing stats- "both"),
Two separate interviews, both in the only newspaper bar the Morning Star worth reading (yes, He's Banging On AGAIN about the Bloody Financial Times and how All Anti-capitalists Must Read It) have got me wanting to pose the question: what reading material has "literally" changed your life?
For me, I'd say Chomsky's World Orders, Old and New. I'd been softened up by a whole lot of other, liberal, stuff, but had only read a couple of short Chomsky pieces before.
What say all/both of you?
Those two quotes-
Rosie Blau writing in the Life and Arts supplement (which is a both bloody fantastic and a hot-bed of com-symps) on November 29th/30th last year entitled "Drawn from Memory"
"He was seven when he first encountered Mad, a monthly satirical magazine, and was immediately captivated by the drawings: "It literally changed my life." Unhappy at the thought of wasting money on comics, Vladek Spiegelman took to brinign home second-hand comic anthologies instead, inadvertaently introducing his son to titles banned from newsstands for their violent content."
and Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on Lou Reed "Why do I have to go through this?" June 21 2008
"Reed grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in suburban Long Island and attended Syracuse University. He identifies a short story by one of his tutors, the poet Delmore Schwartz, as a turning-point in his own development as a writeer. "'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'", Reed says, "changed my life entirely and shaped the way I write, and everything along with it." It taught him the virtue of simplicity. "I don't think there's a single polysyllabic word there. The world shook for me when I read it."
1 comment:
not sure if I can definitely pinpoint a book that had this great an effect on me. There are some which I can say have shifted my thinking or understanding slightly. Ahdaf Soueif's 'The Map of Love' changed my ideas about Arab nationalism and the history of the Middle East, and Eduardo Galeano's Venas Abiertas did something similar for my grasp on Latin America and the grand sweep of colonial and anti-colonial history. In terms of really changing me, though, it would probably have to be Joan Smith's Misogynies and Rosalind Miles' A Women's History of the World, introducing me to the reasons why feminism is so vitally important and why the deep-rooted oppression of woman is something that makes us so viscerally angry, and rightly so.
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