![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Books who changed one's point of view
Jul. 14th, 2003 05:31 pmOr at least coloured one's attitude. Because books really can. Especially when one is an impressionable teenager. They need not be necessarily the Great Literary Classics. Of those which spring to mind when I wonder which books managed to do this to me, only one belongs to any kind of canon. Lord of the Flies, which I read when being 12, shook me and fascinated me and chilled me and destroyed the idea of childhood innocence or children being disposed towards being good.
(Given I was a teenager at the time who was anything but popular in school, you'd think Real Life had managed to do that, but no.)
The Mists of Avalon (age 14, I believe) for the first time showed me, myth and legends addict that I was, that myths are extremely open to interpretation, that there was such a thing as a female point of view versus a male one, or a pagan versus a Christian one. It's been nearly two decades, and I can see the flaws of this book clearly now, but I still credit it for opening my mind to certain concepts.
Since I liked The Mists of Avalon so much, I went on devouring other books which Marion Zimmer Bradley had written, which meant, at the time, mostly the Darkover novels. And I credit Heritage of Hastur and Sharra's Exile with yet another attitude-changing effect. Up to this point, the only homosexuals I had seen in fiction, either in novels or in the movies and TV shows, had been either funny or villainous characters. I didn't know any in real life. (Actually, it turned out I did - two friends of my parents, one male and one female, but I didn't know that at age 14.) And then came MZB with her sympathetic homosexual and bisexual characters, which certainly was an eye-opener. It also made me realise how one-sided the previous representations had been.
Lastly, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, her novel about her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, being hospital bound and hence investigating, out of sheer boredom at first, Richard III. and the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, left me with an enduring scepticism about history and historians as unquestionable reliable sources. And it left me as a Ricardian, which, many biographies and pro- and con-arguments later, I still am.
(Given I was a teenager at the time who was anything but popular in school, you'd think Real Life had managed to do that, but no.)
The Mists of Avalon (age 14, I believe) for the first time showed me, myth and legends addict that I was, that myths are extremely open to interpretation, that there was such a thing as a female point of view versus a male one, or a pagan versus a Christian one. It's been nearly two decades, and I can see the flaws of this book clearly now, but I still credit it for opening my mind to certain concepts.
Since I liked The Mists of Avalon so much, I went on devouring other books which Marion Zimmer Bradley had written, which meant, at the time, mostly the Darkover novels. And I credit Heritage of Hastur and Sharra's Exile with yet another attitude-changing effect. Up to this point, the only homosexuals I had seen in fiction, either in novels or in the movies and TV shows, had been either funny or villainous characters. I didn't know any in real life. (Actually, it turned out I did - two friends of my parents, one male and one female, but I didn't know that at age 14.) And then came MZB with her sympathetic homosexual and bisexual characters, which certainly was an eye-opener. It also made me realise how one-sided the previous representations had been.
Lastly, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, her novel about her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, being hospital bound and hence investigating, out of sheer boredom at first, Richard III. and the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, left me with an enduring scepticism about history and historians as unquestionable reliable sources. And it left me as a Ricardian, which, many biographies and pro- and con-arguments later, I still am.
