Reading

My own list, a very minor and incomplete one, might include some of the following books. The list is in as close to the order in which I first read them that I can remember.

"The Holy Bible", by various authors. This book, more than anything by Voltaire, is primarily responsible for putting an end to my faith in god. This despite the fact that I attended a Roman Catholic private elementary school. The beauty of the poetry of the King James edition fills me with wonder, but the rawness of its self-contradictions fill me with worry when I contemplate the hundreds of generations of readers that have failed to decry them. I am forced, reluctantly, to conclude that the vast majority of Christendom has never read it in full.

"The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", by J.R.R. Tolkien. I'm placing both in the same paragraph here, though of course they are not the same book. "The Hobbit" is one of the three or four earliest books I can remember, and the only one my father ever read to me, which gave it special significance. The imaginative qualities of these tales spawned a lifelong obsession with fantasy and science fiction, which probably is one of the root causes of my becoming a writer.

"Ender's Game", by Orson Scott Card. Yes, it's certainly not "high literature", as Card is the first to admit. Yet when I was a child, it was the first thing outside my immediate family that ever hinted to me that it could be OK to be different, to be a too-smart wimp who liked books and didn't like sports; that it was possible to find comradeship with others like myself. And it spoke to my deep feeling that my rate of maturation was grossly underestimated by the adults surrounding me. At the time I couldn't have put it in words like that, though, so I merely adored the story without really knowing why.