I have a bit of an off-topic question for you all: Did a book ever ruin your life?
Well, maybe that’s overstating things a little, so let me rephrase: Did you ever read a book that had a giant effect on your life, only to realize later that this effect was basically a negative one? Maybe you read Ayn Rand in high school and became an insufferable junior Objectivist for a couple of years? Maybe you gobbled up conspiracy theory until it finally occurred to you that Reptilians aren’t the real problem with the world today? Maybe you read a book that inspired you to join a cult that you later had to extract yourself from painfully?
It doesn’t have to be this dramatic. I’m just wondering how many of you all have stories like these, and what these stories are.
I might have a little bit of an ulterior motive. But it’s a good one, honest!
Eff it, I’ll TLDR the list:
Books that influenced my politics growing up in the Bush-Chretien-Martin years:
Slaughterhouse-Five
Cat’s Cradle
Handmaid’s Tale
A Game Of You (Book 5 of Sandman)
Catch-22
Hamlet
Books that influenced my writing style:
Dune
Sharpe
Books I read but didn’t like for various reasons:
Great Expectations
Catcher In The Rye
Brave New World
The Once And Future King
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
@ Weird Eddie
I’m not really criticising The Selfish Gene, my impression was always that it’s an at least ok book, probably even a good one. I certainly loved it when I first read it (otherwise I wouldn’t have gone down the rabbit hole in search of more of the same). I’ve heard nothing to make me think there’s anything any more wrong with it than there is with any other slightly dated science related text. I’m not even sure any of the worse parts of Dawkins’s personality comes through in it.
It’s not the science’s fault that it has the power to make teenagers who read about it turn edgy.
Well said, WWTH. We all get this bullshit thrown at us, but it tends overwhelmingly to be men who get the bullshit+entitlement package.
When I was maybe 9 or 10 I read a book about the St. Louis World’s fair and it just really upset me that they had people caged up like it was some kind of zoo attraction. They abducted these people from their homes to gawk at them and this was considered perfectly normal and acceptable to everyone. I just couldn’t understand it and it haunted me for a long time. I wouldn’t say it ruined my life; quite the opposite, it made me more readily see the racism around me.
According to menzers I was probably ruined by the Valdemar series. Women who fight with swords and don’t really give a fuck about romance? Probably what made me such an insufferable SJW. /s
I was similarly distressed when we watched the Elephant Man in seventh grade.
It’s unbelievable that something like that could have been published!
My dad actually told me the same myth when I was about 12 but told me that gay men have to put butt plugs in to stop the poop coming out. It wasn’t until I was like 15 that I realised that butt plugs aren’t used for that.
As for books that have ruined my life… all of my uni course books for the past 2 years. Send help!
Oh and when I was young I read some self help relationship book by Steve Harvey that basically said that women should pretend that they can’t do stuff so the man feels like he is useful. It was a fucking gross book and I listened to it and had shitty relationships that made me unhappy.
I love the Valdemar books! My favorite is the ‘Magic’s Price’ series, with Vanyel and Tylendel but only by a faction, I love all of them.
@ NicolaLuna
The weird thing is that I’ve come across books on sex from forty years *before that one* which aren’t that bad.
Hey ya’ll, haven’t commented in a while.
Well, this question made me laugh. My parents had the weirdest rules regarding their children and media. Movies were strictly controlled-if we were under 17, we saw no R-rated material. But at the same time, we could read anything we wanted and listen to any music we wanted. The first rule was dad’s, who really believed in self-teaching, and the second was mom’s, who thought kids needed their own music.
I abused these rules to hell and back. This is the reason that I was an adult before I saw an uncensored version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but I managed to get my hands on the Marquis de Sade at 12. I am not kidding.
Lasting repercussions: I have a very strong tolerance for literary mayhem, very little can make me put a book down. But movies are another story-there’s whole subgenres of horror movies I refuse to watch. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing.
I haven’t needed the help of a book to ruin my life, I’ve been quite capable of doing so all on my own. 😛
One book that did have a negative impact, although slight, was Dune. The machinations of the Bene Gesserit and their (somewhat unintentional) success did encourage an acceptance of eugenics ideas that took me nearly a decade to outgrow.
@WWTH
That’s why I stopped reading L.A. Myers. As the series went on, his main character (Jackie) turned into a obnoxious Mary Sue. She was instantly talented at everything she tried, from music to swordplay to dancing, and of course every red-blooded male she encountered fell in love with her. At any one time, she usually had 2 or 3 competing suitors. The plots got to be tiresome and predictable.
That seems to be a common trap for men trying to write female characters. They can’t help lusting after them, resulting in awkward descriptions where the main character spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about, and admiring, her long hair and luscious curves and pert nipples and their effect on the rest of the world.
You know, as women routinely do.
…I just remembered another book that weirded me out at age 10: The Joy of Sex, full of line drawings of seriously hairy hippies demonstrating each position. I learned that shaving the armpits removes important pheromones, men are turned on by seeing horse’s rear ends (seriously) and if you’re not into 3-ways you’re a prude.
It wasn’t so much the book that was ruinous as the fact that I found it in my parents’ bookcase.
I’ve been here before, read the blog for years, but am bad at commenting. I grew up in a Christian cult and was honestly kept in for the last few years by books by cs Lewis. I think the problem is he writes things with such a sympathetic, *nice* tone, and for many people (especially queer people with poor boundaries like myself) Christianity can be so very toxic.
On the plus side I’ve never found myself in the strict atheist crowd, even now that I kind of want to, so i go by agnostic instead and leave it at that.
Hi everyone,
It’s been awhile since I have commented. First of all I’m very happy to see that David is feeling better and has returned to whtm.
Second, to answer the question about what book really messed me up.
Well, when I was 16 I was assaulted by a man. Initially I didn’t report it and since I lived with my father I didn’t know who to talk to. I turned to books for an answer as to why it happened. My dad loved Camille Paglia at the time. Unfortunately, I read her books and her take on the subject really messed me up for years.
Speaking of books on sex, one book that I actually found on one of the racks in my English class that might be worth mentioning was The Sensuous Man by “M.” Certainly dated by today’s standards, but being an adolescent, I gave it a flip through and I do remember it having some good tips on sex that I’ve used to the delight of more than one woman.
There was also a counterpart called The Sensuous Woman by “J”, but I never read it. Anybody here give it a read?
It didn’t ruin my life or anything, but ‘Watership Down’ was certainly not quite what I expected. “Ah cool, bunnies” *Reads* “Why on Earth is this in the school library! We’re like eight.”
Gr8dane
Hugs if you want any
Thanks, David. Apparently saying (in extreme frustration) ‘Fine! I’m going to give up both religion and sex for a while. Whichever one comes back first wins’ works pretty well. 😀
Oh, lordy, I just remembered that the reason I went into denial about my bisexuality was from reading a sex ed book that stated (more or less) that ‘experimenting with the same sex was normal and people would grow out of it’. 😛 Yup, bisexuals are mythical beings. 😛
Welcome back Peaches and Gr8Dane.
Re Dawkins
As a teenager, I read The Selfish Gene (not with quite full comprehension), The Blind Watcmaker and whatever was the original title of that third book on evolution in the 90s. This was their chronological writing order. Later, when he became an atheist writer, two things seemed obvious to me (I was already an atheist myself):
1. He was riding on his scientist/science writer fame, branching into a personal interest topic where he’s probably not that original a thinker.
2. In the above mentioned books, you can see between the lines that he’s getting progressively more frustrated with creationism. Likely, his celebrity “evolutionist” status made him a target of a lot of deeply stupid creationist proselytizing over the years. Not that it excuses his eventual descent into asshattery and intellectual cult leading.
Hey NicolaLuna, peaches and Gr8dane. Good to see you all again.
Hugs if you want them, Gr8dane, otherwise best wishes.
Narnia sparked an interest in Catholicism for me. I became obsessed with angels and saints.
I’m not even of a Christian heritage!
@ Lumipuna:
River Out Of Eden?
I think the most important lessons I’ve gotten out of the books I read are:
1) We are not cockroaches, and are not at the mercy of any genetic dispositions
2) Regardless of what our genetic predispositions might be, if we make social policy out of them it is because of our bigotry, not our genetics
E.T.A. missed the edit window… I should say “because of our choices”, not “because of our bigotry”… though I believe our bigotry leads us in making social policy way more often.
I was very confused when I finally got around to reading the Last Battle as a young adult, it was like I was reading someone else’s book. Overall it was rather disappointing.