I myself am more of a drive-by reader. I read fast, noting important passages for later review, but ultimately feeling the need to move on to other books. This strategy has its ups and downs, but one of the ups is that I always feel welcome to return to a book, feeling that I may have missed something in an earlier read-through.
So, while reading the Wendell Berry chapter in Bill Inchausti's Subversive Orthodoxy, I realized a desire to revisit The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, The Wild Geese, etc. This quickly blossomed into a desire to re-read all of my favorite, formative books; my Ur-texts, to use the German (and if you want to know more about the prefix "ur," just let me know -- it's one of my favorite German prefixes). A quick perusal of my bookshelf, my earlier post on my favorite books, and my memory yielded these results:
The Dharma Bums (Kerouac)
East of Eden (Steinbeck)
Cannery Row (Steinbeck)
For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
One Man's Meat (White)
The Practice of the Presence of God (Brother Lawrence)
The Prophet (Gibran)
and of course, the poems of Wendell Berry.
Bear in mind, the notion of the ur-text is not just "books I like a lot," but rather "books that are the basis of my founding mythology as a person." If it was the former and not the latter, the list would be much longer.
So, dear readers, I leave you with the question, to be answered in the comments or in your own blogs, facebooks, etc. :
"What are your ur-texts?"
4 comments:
P.S. If you haven't heard the news, please get in touch so I can share it. It just doesn't feel right to tell you about it via blog yet.
I was gonna say, Greg, you choose to blog about ur-texts NOW at all times? Hahaha.
That having been said, I would say that reading Howard Zinn in high school really altered my political perspective, probably permanently. In high school I probably would have said Kerouac too, but I reread a bunch of his stuff this past summer, and it just seemed kind of irredeemably patriarchal and privileged to me. I guess Swat does that to us. As for my own literary work, I would probably cite Sylvia Plath as foundational, just in terms of the realization that I can legitimately plumb the most intimate, and at times repulsive, details of my own life as a source of literary art. In terms of religion, I would say that my outlook is highly informed by Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Karl Barth, and Julia Kristeva. Jeff Cao will hate me for just saying that.
Hell if I know, I'd probs have to be doing some re-reading to recognize what I've absorbed into my "founding mythology." Super interesting question, though.
LOL I found this particular post amusing as well. I think most of SCF knew your news by Thursday night. News travels FAST in SCF, apparently. I was like wow
Anyway...my Ur-Texts. Like books that are part of who I am? Les Miserables, definitely. The Secret Garden, Le Petit Prince, The Jungle Book. The Call of the Wild, and Old Yeller.
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