The “Why” Behind Sista’s List

My dear friend and spiritual advisor Cousin Pastor Julie (an ELCA pastor in the PAC-NW), issued me the challenge to “share a list of ten books that have stayed with me in some way. Rules: Don’t take more than a few minutes and do not think too hard. They don’t have to be the “right” books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. Then tag 10 friends including me so I can see your lists.”

I know that Facebook is not the place to write a blog post, although my friends may believe I don’t follow that rule. 😀  But along with creating a list, I also wanted to write a bit about why these books were important to me.  So here we go.

• Traveling Mercies – Anne Lamott. Before joining the Episcopal Church, I was “unchurched” for over 20 years.  I knew that I was Christian by heritage and upbringing, but my personal belief set was inconsistent with what I saw as mainstream American Christian dogma.  I felt disconnected from God.  But I sure didn’t like the direction religion was headed – spurning evolution as invalid, denouncing global warming, demonizing the LGBT community, barely tolerant of women in the clergy, intolerant of anything that makes you different from me.  I could not be part of a church that, at best, preached love while ignoring human rights violations in our own country and abroad, and stood aside while people starved for lack of food, adequate health care, and jobs.

Enter my son’s enrollment in an Episcopal Day School.  We live in the near downtown of a large metropolitan city.  While I support public schools in theory, if in practice I could afford private education for my son, I wasn’t going to punish him for being born into a liberal family that sacrifices their children on the altar of public policy. (Boy, am I going to catch hell for that comment…) So when we needed to move him to full time preschool, the closest private school happened to be an Episcopal Day school.  We toured when he was 3; he started at age 4.  Once he began grade school, I began to fret about what sort of indoctrination he was receiving at this “Christian” school.  So we started attending the church affiliated with the school – an Episcopal church.  At first it felt alien and at times even bizarre. We kept at it, and I fell in love.  First with the music, then the liturgy, then the social policy.  Over time I learned about the beliefs of the Episcopal Church, and I was totally hooked.

How is this relevant to Anne Lamott’s writing?  I knew I was having a crisis of faith.  After over 20 years of distance, I didn’t feel “worthy” to do much more than observe from the sidelines.  I sure didn’t feel ready to receive communion.  After much discussion with both my local priest, and Cousin Pastor Julie, I moved forward.  Julie recommended that I read some of Anne Lamott’s essays to inspire more thought about redemption and forgiveness.  Anne was a seriously troubled soul, who found a new physical and spiritual life through her faith.  I took the plunge and committed myself to opening my heart again to God.  I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church this year in my home parish, by our female Bishop.

•  Interview With a Vampire – Ann Rice. I picked up a copy of Interview with a Vampire at an airport shop somewhere, and loved the characters.  This started my binge reading of all of Ann Rice’s works.  I’ve been a fan of vampire related fiction, clear back to the original broadcasts of Dark Shadows.  I’ve also read quite a bit of other, vampire related fiction, and became a fan of “Forever Knight” in the 1980s.  But Ann Rice’s writing really grabs me.  Her mix of spirituality and the supernatural captures my imagination.

• My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees – Jane Goodall. This was a book in my parents’ library when I was a kid.  We were living in Mississippi, which means I was probably in 4^th grade – about 10 years old.  It was published by the National Geographic Society in 1969, and encompassed Jane Goodall’s first decade surveying chimpanzees in the Tanzania’s Gombe Reserve. The story was largely told through photos.  My father and I had private jokes about “David Greybeard” (the male who was first observed using tools to fish termites out of a mound to eat).  I was enthralled with the animals, and her personal relationship with the individuals in the troop she lived with and studied all those years. My fascination with the book and her research began my life long love of animal field research and zoos.  I ran into Jane Goodall in the Memphis airport several years ago.  She was sitting alone at an empty gate, writing in a notebook. Next to her in the adjacent seat was a beat up chimpanzee stuffed animal.  I’m sure she was en route to a speaking gig for her foundation.  I was struck dumb.  I wanted to tell her how her work had influenced this 50+ year old business woman, and thank her for the joy and knowledge she brought to the world, but I figured this woman deserved privacy.  I walked on to my own gate and wept.

David Greybeard and a youngster in the troop.

• 1984 – George Orwell. I was living in Alabama when I read this book.  Alabama the second time, which meant I was in sixth grade.  That would have been when I was 12, in 1970.   I don’t remember what made me read this – it is possible I picked it up at the library just because it was a futuristic novel, written a long time ago and set in the not too distant future.  It scared me spitless, and impressed on me the importance of individual freedoms, guaranteed to us by the Constitution.  Big Brother – we have to be on guard.  That’s why I support the ACLU.

 

• Codependent No More – Melodie Beattie. You may or may not know this, but my first husband was an actively drinking alcoholic.  We separated in 1985; divorced in 1986.  I read everything I could get my hands on about addiction theory and the dynamics in a family of an addict or user.  I know that now the concept of codependency is old hat.  At the time I read this book, however it was all new to me.  My alcoholic husband tried to tell me that I was responsible for his drinking and thus his behavior.  Codependency theory helped me understand why I believed him for so long when intellectually I knew otherwise.

 

• Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan. My first read about the American Industrial Food Complex.  I was not unaware of some of the horrors of the meat packing business (see The Jungle below), but I didn’t understand that the way we grow food in the West violates inter-dependencies in Nature, as well as ethical treatment of animals.  I still am a carnivore, but we buy more and more meat and eggs when we can from markets that can certify the humane treatment of the beast during the farming and slaughtering process.  Now my concern has extended to ethical farming of fish.  I’m a vegan in the making.

 

• The Making of Star Trek – Stephen Whitfield.  If you know me at all, you know that I’m a Star Trek fan.  I’m old enough that I watched Star Trek, Original Series (STOS) when it was first run, but not so old that I could watch the first season in 1966.  That year it was broadcast after my bedtime.  I was allowed to stay up a little later for the second season, once I started fourth grade.  Star Trek represented the optimism and perhaps naiveté of my generation and that post Camelot time.  The future was bright, because we would make it so, abolishing racial prejudice and sexism in the process.  Star Trek even helped shape my personal theology, strange as it seems.

 

The Making of Star Trek was published in 1968, and was a description of the process of getting Star Trek on the air.  There were chapters on costume and set design, challenges with funding, as well as juicy little stories about the casting process. Thanks to that book I learned that censors in the 1960s permitted a woman’s breast to be bared from the top, all the way down to the areolas, but they would not permit baring the underside of the breast.  As though moss grew there!

I loved that book.  When my son began reading everything he could get his hands on related to Pokemon, then Harry Potter, I recognized his fannish tendencies for what they were.  He inherited them legitimately.

• Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier. I went through a period in high school when I would escape to the school library, just for the quiet, every chance I could.  If I didn’t have homework, I would grab fiction off the shelves and start reading.  I gobbled up Victoria Holt period romance novels. Then, for some reason, I picked up Rebecca.  The prose was wonderfully descriptive and evocative.  I can only call it lush.  But best of all, the story wasn’t a typical bodice ripper romance (which to this day I no longer read).  Rebecca was a story of mental instability, sabotage and murder, and the deep insecurities of a young woman.

“There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the gray stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.”

Gorgeous

• The Jungle – Upton Sinclair  I read The Jungle in high school as a school assignment.  I was horrified by the descriptions of the slaughterhouses, as well as the working conditions of the laborers.  My father was suspicious about labor unions, but this book helped me understand how important unions were historically, and still are to the common worker in America.  I believe this may have been the first time I disagreed with my father, and began my shift to the left politically.  Guess I became a bit of a “wobbly” (IWW) then, and continue to be so. “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!”

 

This book also began my awareness of the horrors of the American Industrial food complex.  See Omnivore’s Dilemma above.

• The short stories of Guy de Maupassant (my father’s book. I can’t remember the title of the compilation), translated into English. My dad had quite a diverse personal library. He had volumes on history, religion and literature.  I read my first Shakespeare play out loud in my bedroom when I was 8, from my father’s volume of the annotated complete works of Shakespeare.  Reading Shakespeare silently is a bore.  Reading out loud, well, that’s another matter.  The odd words and phrases begin to make sense when read as they were intended.

My father was a linguist, and with the study of the language came an appreciation of literature and culture. His volume of short stories by Guy de Maupassant fascinated me.  The stories were concise, not at all flowery, and compelling.  I don’t know where the book is now – much of his library was given away when my mother downsized after he passed.

 

I found an interesting bit of trivia on Wiki while researching de Maupassant for this essay.  According to Wiki, Maupassant’s theory that “the human female will open her mind to a man to whom she has opened OTHER channels of communications” influenced Gene Roddenberry when writing an early draft of the Questor Tapes.  Questor was an android who, in that particular draft, romanced then bedded a human woman in order to get some information he wanted.  While that storyline was never filmed, Roddenberry used it again in the Season 1 episode “The Naked Now” of Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TOS).  Just goes to show that everything was influenced by, or influenced Star Trek.

 

While I enjoy reading the lists of influential books that others have written, I really want to know the story behind those titles. The why is much more revealing than the what.  You now know more than you could possibly want to know about me.  And that’s OK.

 

LL&P