The Building Blocks of My Imagination

Giving thanks for the influential good books I've read

For the last few Thanksgivings, I've been thinking about what I've been thankful for in the last year; and one of the things high on the list is the good books I've read.

I'm usually thinking there about the books I've enjoyed reading lately. There're a lot of those, some of which get in my Short Review posts. But when I think more, there're books that've been significant in my life, and I'm thankful for those.

I could go many ways with that - there're many ways books have been influential - but here're a lot of the books that've significantly helped build up my imagination and understanding of story.

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I taught myself to read as a kid, around age 3 or 4. A little after that, I remember that as a young kid - maybe around age 6? - I really liked Marguarete Henry's Misty of Chincoteague series; and also L. Frank Baum's Oz series. But, as far as I can tell, those're just historical footnotes. I don't remember much else about them from that era. When I reread them (much) later, they were fun but didn't really stand out as good or resonating to me. There's a lot I could say about the Oz series, and maybe I will later, but that's for another post. Any influence there on my imagination was subconscious.

The title from that era that did stick with me, though, is the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. I've written about them before - but in brief, they're a fun, good portal fantasy series with some depth in some areas even though not others. They introduced me to portal fantasy as well as symbolism, and established my imagination there and gave me more of a picture of what story could be.

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Another notable title from several years later (maybe when I was 10) was Redwall by Brian Jacques. It wasn't great - even as a kid, I noticed it went on too long and got too repetitive. Some of the interesting worldbuilding Jacques had hinted at in the first couple novels was discarded as the series went on and the map was filled out with more Wacky Wayside Tribes.

But Redwall will always have a soft spot in my heart because it was the first fantasy series my sister and I both enjoyed together. I remember when we would get a new book from the series and hold it between our laps peering at opposite sides of the page because we'd both insist on reading it at once.

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Of course, I was reading a lot more too. There was a constant background of realistic kids' books, mostly written mid-twentieth-century - Beverly Cleary was probably the most verbose, but by no means half by volume - which opened my horizons to what childhood could have been. I don't think they opened my view of imagination, but they opened my view of life.

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When I was maybe a little older, my view of possibility was being filled out by my dad's Golden Age science fiction bookshelf. The ones that stick in my memory most were Heinlein's "juveniles," especially Rolling Stones and Farmer in the Sky and Red Planet. They gave me something of the Golden Age's sense of possibility - that somewhere in the world, or the future, things could be done; and here are some things that could be done! And look, they're scientific, so they actually could be done in the real world!

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I can't remember whether it was before or after Redwall that I first read Lord of the Rings. It's still one of my favorite books, and I get new angles from it at every reread. Tolkien almost singlehandedly founded the modern fantasy genre, and there's a beautiful mix in his book that I still don't think any later fantasy author has managed to duplicate. They've found some good new recipes, but not quite the same beauties as Tolkien. I'm glad I came across Lord of the Rings before most of its successors, and I'd recommend the same to any teenager.

A couple years later, I read Silmarillion. Frankly, I was too young then to really appreciate it. But some years later, I read all of History of Middle-Earth that I could get my hands on, and grew to appreciate Tolkien's world on two other levels. First was its fractal depth, which gave me a vision of what a really deep fictional world could be. But the second was the philosophy. Tolkien - in HoME X: Morgoth's Ring especially, but also in his Letters - had asked philosophical questions about his world, and about the implications of what people did, and what worldbuilding choices he'd made. He asked what Orcs were, whether the Valar had made the right choice summoning the Elves, what the theological implications were of his ideas about Elven reincarnation, and more. This opened my eyes to how literary analysis should be done while respecting the work - how it should be done especially to your favorite works. Tolkien was doing it here to his own works! In a way, every blog post I write in my #story tag is thanks to Morgoth's Ring.

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Also as a teenager, I enjoyed reading Dorothy Sayers' "Lord Peter Wimsey" mystery series. This didn't influence my imagination itself (I got more building blocks, actually from Sayers' short play "The Devil To Pay" about the Faust legend when I read it in college), but Sayers also wrote an excellent book about story: The Mind of the Maker.

The Mind of the Maker is simultaneously a very cogent analysis of what story is and how it's distinct from the writer, and a book of Christian theology about the nature of God. Sayers explores God as a storyteller. She's convinced me that's a legitimate way to view Him, which helped me learn to see the story of the world as a story. And, this book also helped me build and edit my own fiction, by explaining explicitly some major parts of how that should be done.

It isn't quite true that every blog post in my #history tag is thanks to The Mind of the Maker; I was avidly reading history before I'd seen Sayers' name. But my self-conscious view of history as a story is largely thanks to her.

(Speaking of which - other theological books that stuck with me include Heaven by Randy Alcorn, Miracles by C. S. Lewis, A Practical View of Christianity by William Wilberforce (yes, that Wilberforce), Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, and On the Incarnation by Athanasius of Alexandria. Life on the Vine by Philip Kenneson was also a significant influence to me, but that was more that I read it at the right time than that it's exceptional among its subgenre.)

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When I was in college, I read Diane Duane's Young Wizard series. What stuck with me there is how she integrates a modern scientific view of the universe with the poetic feel of fantasy. Moonlight is reflected sunlight, but there's also a magic book that can only be read by moonlight - and these are in harmony with each other, such that moonlight reflecting some other source of light also works!

As Tolkien said in his poem “Mythopoeia”, the beauty of legend is there in the real world, if you look at it from the right angle. Duane convinced my imagination and emotions of that by showing the converse - that scientific realism can get into a poetic legend.

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I don't think I've read any novels quite so significant to me since. My view of story has already been forged; my imagination is already full of so many different ideas and angles that I couldn't write them all even if I knew how. There're still books that resonate with me, of course - I'm sure I'll be finding those all my life - but the spots of influence have already been taken.

On the short list of other books that really resonate with me are David Brin's The Postman about a post-apocalyptic rebuilding of the ideals of America, Michael Flynn's Eifelheim where aliens crash-land in medieval Germany and the village priest acts heroically, and Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard; I'd recommend all of them.

This Thanksgiving, as usual, I'm planning to be thankful for all the authors throughout history who've given us such a copious library of good books. But I'm going to be especially thankful for the ones who have helped build up my imagination. Books can be good building blocks for that, and I think I found some really good building blocks.