This
week's question: What one book would you most like to make the rest of the
world read?
Tasha
Robinson
I
suspect this list is going to generate a lot of intellectual, literary wonders
("Why don't more people read and love Ulysses the way I do?") and
political / social / philosophical world-understanding books that shaped
people's lives, so I'm going to counter with a quick, lively read that shaped
how I read fiction: Diana Wynne Jones' Dogsbody, a strange little fantasy
I first encountered when I was 9, and have been in love with ever since. To
this day, I don't quite understand why J.K. Rowling is such a history-making
success, while Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote very similar books but started
decades earlier, is so overlooked. Even so, amid all her twisty, funny novels about
troubled kid wizards and complicated curses and such, Dogsbody stands out as one of the
most different
books I've ever read. It's a thoroughly accessible YA novel in which the dog
star, Sirius, is forced into the body of an actual dog and sent to Earth as
punishment for a crime he doesn't remember committing. Maybe nostalgia and
affection for one of the first really creative speculative novels I ever read
have colored my tastes, but this remains one of my all-time favorite books, and
proof positive for me why Jones belongs on the shelf next to Rowling (or above
her), and for that matter, C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and other classic purveyors
of enduring fantasy.
Jason
Heller
Sometimes
I wonder how the world really sees J.G. Ballard. As a Burroughs-ish, postmodern
provocateur? A clinical social satirist? That sick dude with a hard-on for car
wrecks? He's sort of all those things, but to me, he'll always be the
science-fiction master who ushered my love of the genre—and maybe the
genre itself—into adulthood. When I was 17 and in the midst of falling in
love with Joy Division, I read that the band's song "The Atrocity
Exhibition" was based on a book by some guy named J.G. Ballard. I tried to
track down some of his stuff and eventually found a collection of his mind-warping
short stories from the '60s, Chronopolis—but it didn't prepare me for the
next Ballard book I discovered, The Crystal World. The 1966 novel is a
sluggishly paced, oneirically plotted metaphysical mind-fuck that seemed to
break most of the rules of literature I'd learned up to that point. I'd later
figure out that it shared much with Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness—anyone who's read
or watched Empire Of The Sun knows Ballard's view of colonial decay—but
with The Crystal World, Ballard encased his demons in a vision of the world that was
slowly turning, as if by some quantum leprosy, into crystal. And his prose?
Like a hypodermic needle hovering over my eyeball. The book marks Ballard's
turning point from the catastrophe-of-the-month formula of his early work to
the richer, ingrown dystopia of his '70s masterpieces like Crash and Concrete Island. It's also the novel that
changed my idea of what science fiction could be—and rewired my teenage
brain along with it. If, God forbid, you only get to read one Ballard book in
your life, The Crystal World should be it.
Noel
Murray
Every
summer, my wife and I meet with the teachers that our son—a
high-functioning autist—will have in the fall, and recommend they read
two books. The first is Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The
Night-Time,
which offers an entertaining, moving, and reasonably accurate introduction to
the particular behavioral quirks of the autistic. The second book—the one
I'd push on the rest of the world if I could—is Paul Collins' Not Even Wrong:
Adventures In Autism, which combines a kind of shadow-history of the disorder with
Collins' memories of how he reacted to his own son's diagnosis. By bringing the
stories of "Peter The Wild Boy" and modern computer programmers into
his own personal narrative, Collins looks to expand our understanding of the
autistic spectrum and see that some people we encounter every day may be
undiagnosed autists. The point isn't to make otherwise normal-seeming folk
start thinking of themselves as disordered, but to keep parents of autistic
children (and all the friends and acquaintances of those parents) from thinking
of autism as binary. Dealing with the autistic can be difficult, even
life-consuming, but just as there are autistic traits in a great number of
people who seem neurotypical, so there is a degree of normalcy to the autistic.
We're all on a series of scales, from smart-to-dumb or weak-to-strong or
easygoing-to-irritable, and we'll do better with the autistic in our midst if
we think of them as having specific gifts and challenges, just like anyone
else.