I was tagged on Facebook to list ten books that really made an impact on my life. Not because of grandeur or quality of writing, just books, or literature in general, that has managed to stay with me. In the instructions, you are admonished not to spend a lot of time thinking about it, just put down the ones that immediately come to mind. So I started to make my list, and I found myself thinking really hard about it. Not because I wanted to make it just right, or I wanted people to be impressed by my selections. I was struggling because I’ve never been a big reader, and I was having difficulties coming up with ten titles. In the end I wound up with five plays and five books, and of the ten only three of them were read in my youth, and one of those three was read at the age of 17.
1. The Borning Room by Paul Fleischman
2. Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker
3. The Giver by Lois Lowry
4. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
5. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
6. When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom
7. King Lear by Shakespeare
8. Henry V by Shakespeare
9. Stop Kiss by Diana Son
10. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
You see, my sister and I were born 11 months apart. Crazy, I know. My parents always claimed that it was on purpose. Personally, I think that there isn’t much to do in a small mountain town … At any rate, we are very close in age and living in the aforementioned small mountain town we wound up sharing everything. Everything. We had the same teachers, were in all the same clubs and to a certain extent we even shared the same friends. Since we were so close in age, and the opportunities were few and far between, in many instances we had no choice in the matter. However, when my dad jokes that he raised a right brain and a left brain in two separate children, he’s not far off. My sister and I have little in common, heck we don’t even look alike.
Therefore, whenever it was possible we would do things separately and there became this unwritten code that both of us acknowledged. Some things were hers, some things were mine, and we never strayed into the other person’s “things.” Oddly, we never fought about who got what “thing” either, it just naturally happened. We had plenty of other things to fight about though. There was a time during our early teens that I affectionately refer to as WWIII.
My sister’s biggest “thing” was reading. She was, and still is, a voracious reader. Now that’s not to say that I didn’t read at all, obviously for school and summer book clubs I had to. So I would read the minimum amount required and no more, and I would make damn sure that I never read the books that Jen did. Those were hers and that was sacred territory. Likewise, she stayed away from the books that I read, keeping that world completely separate. My biggest “thing” was theater and performing and she was more than willing to stay far, far away. We had our things and it kept us sane-ish. The funny thing is that by the time we were both in high school, and the treatise had been signed to end WWIII, we realized that maybe this whole sharing thing wasn’t such a bad gig. We embraced our mutual group of friends and stopped trying to avoid each other in clubs and groups.
But the real olive branch came, when one day Jen came into my room and handed me a book. It was one of “hers.” From a series she adored, by an author she had gone to meet to get an autograph. Normally, I would not have touched that book with a ten foot pole. It was off limits, go directly to jail do not collect $200, end of story. And here she was, handing it to me and encouraging me to read it because she thought that I would really like the story. Mind blown. That is how I came to read the Redwall series, and the beginning of my sister’s and my odd reading relationship.
Now we will often read the same books and talk about them. Generally books of her choosing because she finds my taste a little too heavy and I’ll read just about anything. What cracks me up though, is that every now and then she’ll call me to ask if I told her that she wouldn’t like a specific book, or if she’s avoided it her entire life because it was one of “mine.” Funny how something that seemed so important twenty years ago, doesn’t matter at all now. It still feels a little against the grain every time that I pick up a book, but I’m getting over it. Maybe next time it won’t take me so long to come up with ten titles.
