Ten Books that Influenced Me

Not sure if I can keep it to just ten, but I will try. I made a promise to a friend and she liked my reading history, so...

1. The Atlas – my parents did not have anything that you could call literature in the house, so I would read whatever was lying around. My father had some political writing (Mao’s Little Red Book was part of my childhood reading!) and showed an interest in the world. And it was his atlas that I read the most, along with his split dictionary: A to Lobar; Lobate to Z.

2. The “Choose Your Own Adventure” Series – honestly, I thought that someone was smiling down on me when our school said that we could order these books through our library (not sure why they did not wait to stock them there). Edward Packard should take a bow (the founder and creator of the series, that is).

3. Waiting for Godot – a confession: I read Beckett before I read Shakespeare (never admit that to an actor or academic; they start to look at you with a strange face). I saw the play on a shelf at the local library and I just had to read it. Did not understand it, but I did not care. Still learning from him.

4. The Outsider – Camus’ book was not called “The Stranger” in the edition I found. And the only reason why I read it was because we read one of his short stories in school and I remembered the name when my mother went shopping with me downtown and we passed by a bookstore. First real philosophical book I ever read, besides “Godot”.

5. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut! We had to write a final essay based on a list of choices the teacher gave us, and I was the only one in the class who chose the “black humour” option, so I read Mordecai Richler, Harold Pinter and KV Jr. And the reason why he is still relevant to me is that when I received my essay at the end of the term, the teacher wrote on the front of it, “No good; not good enough for an academic, etc.” As I panicked and flipped through it, I noted that the teacher was staring at me as I got to the last page and received my grade: 98%. He also wrote, “How do you like my example of black humour?” Ha, ha, Mr. Delville.

6. If on a winter’s night, a traveler… - Italo Calvino wrote one of the most interior types of stories I ever read. And I found this at the local library after I returned from Japan and was trying to get my head together and figure out where to go next. Something about the fact that the title was a fragment appealed to me (please find it and read it).

7. Letters to a Young Poet – Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young man who was attending his old school and wanted to know if he should become a poet. I still cannot think of a better guide to figuring out what you should do with your life if you aspire to be a writer. And I think I passed all of the questions he posed.

8. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole – Sue Townsend ruled the 1980s, at least in young adult literature from England. I still am not sure how I found my way to this and the other books in the series, but I am still a fan. Almost too eerie how well I identify with the title character (and it beats Bridget Jones’ collection by a country mile).

9. The Dr. Seuss Series – yeah, yeah, we are all sensitive about the depiction of certain races in certain books (amazingly enough, the very people who do not care are the ones who are being caricatured), but I have a story to tell about them: when I was child, we often visited various relatives and would sometimes sleep over or spend the entire day at their homes. One family always made me feel like I was being tested and I was very uncomfortable as a child in their presence…until I discovered an untouched nook in their basement that had a complete set of the Seuss. Not sure why it was there (their kids did not read anything), but I am glad it was. I still have whole sections memorized and can recall rhymes the way other people remember last night’s scores. Man, I owe him…

10. A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul may not be the most politically correct writer who ever lived, but I cannot imagine trying to understand what it means to be a representative of the post-colonial world without his essays, stories, and this first true masterpiece. No one else could have written this novel and no one else has even tried to create such a narrative. I owe him, too.

Okay, I am limiting things to this top ten, but there are others that are just under the list: Siddhartha (Hesse); Ulysses (Joyce); Maus (Art Spiegelman); The Missing Piece (Shel Silverstein); Gulliver’s Travels (Swift); White Teeth (Zadie Smith); The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Mordecai Richler); Disgrace (Coetzee); Map (Szymborska); Macbeth (Shakespeare); Lysistrata (Aristophenes); The Short Stories: Kafka, Hemingway, Alice Munro, Maupassant, Waugh, Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Poems: e.e. cummings, Shakespeare, Derek Walcott, Yeats, Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Plath, Michael Ondaatje, Hopkins, Dorothy Parker, Ocean Vuong and John Berryman.

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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