My Top Shelf Reads
the gems that continue to inform me over the decades...
Springtime. I’ve been failing in my commitment to craft a weekly drop of my thoughts to share. Visiting friends, traveling, giving shape to intentions in The Real World keeps me distracted. Spring fever is a thing. Particularly for those of us who’ve weathered record cold and snow these past months.
I’m also only 4 subscribers away from my first goal of 100 (would love for you to share!), which lessens my drive here just a touch. That and I’m updating my weekly habit-building of blog-writing with a forty-day Lent prayer habit. Welcome to middle age.
Hail Easter season.
All these things contribute to my decision to back-track a bit and compile one of those “Top Ten” list recommended by bloggers and SEO advisors. Starting with my most beloved literary influences of all time. I’m hoping that by sharing context for my worldview, I will inspire you to step into this landscape with me, dreaming up our visions of what we can create together in this one true life.
My Top 10 (give or take) Literary Influences
In addition to all the heritage books written by the authors of Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Jane Eyre, and children’s classics including The Chronicles of Narnia, there have been a few gems that have so defined my world outlook that I’m always referencing them.
These are among the most influential literary forces in my life, in no particular order… the threads of structure that I’ve built my life on, since discovering all but Seth Godin as an unschooling teenager.
Blessings on my bohemian-era1 mother for letting me read as I wished, often at the exclusion of other chores, who supported the process of heeding the beat of my own drums.
My All-Time Favorite Reads
East of Eden by John Steinbeck … the idea that the story of Genesis, the first book of the Biblical Old Testament, is built on interpretation of a Hebrew word, timshel, translated as “thou mayest”.
“The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in “Thou shalt,” meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—“Thou mayest”—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if “Thou mayest”—it is also true that “Thou mayest not.” Don’t you see?” -John Steinbeck
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, both by Ayn Rand … many people are fond of saying they outgrew her in college, which explains the rate of prescribed anti-depressant/anxiety meds in circulation these days, if you ask me. No one escapes themselves in this life.
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” -Ayn Rand
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn … I suggest this to every adult who’s concerned about the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of a teenager they love.
“The way our society is set up now, something’s got to prevent visionary experience. People who are fully and permanently awakened to the wildness and beauty in and around them make lousy wage-slaves… School is not the only bad guy in the war against whole adolescence, that’s true. But it is our culture’s primary substitute for more potent experiences. It is the way we take your time so you don’t explore your own inklings of truth. It is where you learn to be passive instead of proactive. Quitting school won’t guarantee you a healthy, passionate, adventurous youth — but it just might remove the biggest obstacle to that birthright.” -Grace Llewellyn
How Children Learn and How Children Fail, both by John Holt … the originator of the un-schooling movement.
“Schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's appropriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat.” - John Holt
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education, The Underground History of American Education, and Weapons of Mass Instruction all by John Taylor Gatto, 1989, 1990, and 1991 NYC Teacher of the Year. He resigned in 1991 with a full page editorial in the Wall Street Journal.2
"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned."
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”
- John Taylor Gatto
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan… she brilliantly wrote “one of the cornerstones of American feminism”, describing what she knew of the first and second wave of feminism as it developed in the 1950-60s. So much has shifted in the last three generations, in the shifting power dynamics our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers have both blessed and cursed us with. Sixty years later, here we are, still figuring out what it is to be a meaning-full woman in the world. It tickles me that I now live and work from the same Buffalo as her pediatrician daughter.
“It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.”
“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.”
“Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?”
“We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?”
-Betty Frieden
And anything by Seth Godin, who, I was delighted to discover, graduated from a Buffalo, NY high school around the time I was born. He’s an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and Marketing Hall of Fame-er who writes and speaks about effective marketing and leadership, the spread of ideas, and changing everything. He’s known for his profuse insights about marketing, being yourself, and finding your people in his many best-selling books, including Linchpin, Purple Cow, Tribes, and What To Do When It's Your Turn (And It's Always Your Turn).
“The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.”
So there are a few of my beloved influences… what are yours?
“To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment—to laugh at Fortune alike whether she be generous or unkind—to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none—to fleet the time carelessly, living for love and art—this is the temper and spirit of the modern Bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the Gospel of the Moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion; and if, in some noble natures, it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of Hypocrisy. ...
His faults are more commonly those of self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity and procrastination, and these usually go hand-in-hand with generosity, love and charity; for it is not enough to be one's self in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves, as well. ...
What, then, is it that makes this mystical empire of Bohemia unique, and what is the charm of its mental fairyland? It is this: there are no roads in all Bohemia! One must choose and find one's own path, be one's own self, live one's own life.” - Ayloh, 1902
Burgess, Gelett. "Where is Bohemia?" collected in The Romance of the Commonplace. San Francisco: Ayloh, 1902. pp. 127–28
Against School, John Taylor Gatto’s 1991 “I Quit, I Think” op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal after being 1989, 1990, and 1991 NYC Teacher of the Year
Good list.
Yay! That's awesome tilt o' the hat coming from you! 🌟