Libraries Make us Free
I've put this in thought rather than literature because I don't necessarily mean novels or poetry, though they can of course be included. What I want to hear about are books that profoundly affected you, so much so that you can think of your life in terms of before and after you read them. Books that opened up new ways of thinking, or sent you off down avenues that you are still following. I don't mean specific writers, i mean individual books that were kind of like events that punctuated your existence.
For me there are two that come to mind, neither of them very fashionable or avant-garde, but i wouldn't be who I am without them. I only read each of them once but I wil never forget them. They are both classic, popularising and very British in a Reithian way.
When I was 17 I took Herbert Read's A Concise HIstory of Modern Painting out of the library in the small Northern Irish town where I lived. Its a lucid, popularising account of twentieth century painting from Impressionism onwards. It was here that I first encountered Dada, Duchamp, Ernst and so on, and after I finished it I felt that i understood something that had previously seemed forbidding, difficult and not for the likes of me. Modern art has been huge souce of enjoyment to me ever since, and it was through getting interested in it that i started to hear names like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan. Which brings me, bathetically, to:
Roger Scruton's A Short History of Modern Philosophy. Now I know Scruton is a bit of a knob, but this book, for all its flaws, is terrific. I got it out of another library, in Battersea, when I was 20 and had just moved to London, working at the Daily Mirror glueing press clippings into files in the cuttings library 8 hours a day, which was as monotonous as it sounds. I would read four or five pages on the tube in the morning, turn them over in my head all day, and re-read them on the way home. I've gone through many primary philosophy texts since, but I have never recaptured the kick, the daily feeling of dawning realization, that I got from that book. It helped me understand ideas I thought were beyond me, and which have informed my life ever since.
I've put this in thought rather than literature because I don't necessarily mean novels or poetry, though they can of course be included. What I want to hear about are books that profoundly affected you, so much so that you can think of your life in terms of before and after you read them. Books that opened up new ways of thinking, or sent you off down avenues that you are still following. I don't mean specific writers, i mean individual books that were kind of like events that punctuated your existence.
For me there are two that come to mind, neither of them very fashionable or avant-garde, but i wouldn't be who I am without them. I only read each of them once but I wil never forget them. They are both classic, popularising and very British in a Reithian way.
When I was 17 I took Herbert Read's A Concise HIstory of Modern Painting out of the library in the small Northern Irish town where I lived. Its a lucid, popularising account of twentieth century painting from Impressionism onwards. It was here that I first encountered Dada, Duchamp, Ernst and so on, and after I finished it I felt that i understood something that had previously seemed forbidding, difficult and not for the likes of me. Modern art has been huge souce of enjoyment to me ever since, and it was through getting interested in it that i started to hear names like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan. Which brings me, bathetically, to:
Roger Scruton's A Short History of Modern Philosophy. Now I know Scruton is a bit of a knob, but this book, for all its flaws, is terrific. I got it out of another library, in Battersea, when I was 20 and had just moved to London, working at the Daily Mirror glueing press clippings into files in the cuttings library 8 hours a day, which was as monotonous as it sounds. I would read four or five pages on the tube in the morning, turn them over in my head all day, and re-read them on the way home. I've gone through many primary philosophy texts since, but I have never recaptured the kick, the daily feeling of dawning realization, that I got from that book. It helped me understand ideas I thought were beyond me, and which have informed my life ever since.
Last edited: