Your ten most influential...

Cafe Society
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…anything! In one medium.

This is a bit different from pseudotriton’s thread (and I honestly did not notice it before I had the idea for this!). Not necessarily your ten favorites, but the ten that have had the most influence on your life, on who you are.

Movies, books, TV shows, albums, stage plays, video games, whatever. Ones that changed the way you think and look at the world. Ones that might have pulled you out of a depression – or spun you into an existential funk. Ones that made you do a 180 on how you view that genre or the medium itself. Perhaps you’re really into theater, and you want to include the first show you saw, and the first one you were in. It just has to be ten of one thing.

Some guidelines:

  1. Comic books can be included in a list of books. However, a list of just comics would be interesting, and if that’s what you’re into, go for it.

  2. I’m not into anime, so I’m not sure how to classify it. TV shows? But don’t be shy about making a list of just anime.

  3. With TV shows, you have a wide open field. You can include one episode of this series, one season of that, and another in its entirety. Whatever was influential to you.

  4. They don’t have to be in any particular order, but if you’ve got the High Fidelity mindset, have at it. They could be in chronological order, now that I think of it.

Okay, my list. (No particular order.)

  1. Winnie the Pooh. There’s a long, run-on sentence at the end of one chapter that made me realize, for the first time, that stories don’t exist without someone creating them.

  2. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. Woke me up to the concept of taking control of one’s life.

  3. That book on filmmaking, whatever it was called. It was just lying around in the living room (books were always just lying around in our house) and I opened it. It wasn’t about movie stars, or the best films of this decade or that era. It was about how films are made. I’ll never know how it just happened to be there…

  4. The Killing Doll, by Ruth Rendell. I cannot describe the love I have for this woman’s work, and this was the first I’d heard of her.

  5. Satisfaction, by Rae Lawrence. Yes, I know it’s a beach read, but it woke me up to the concept of ambition and laying the groundwork for one’s life.

  6. Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan. “All I’m saying is that sometimes you have to work a little harder at starting the fire, and it may burn a whole lot longer.” Without that, I probably would not be with Mr. Rilch.

  7. The Gift of Fear, by Gavin De Becker. 'Nuff said.

  8. Silver Pennies, a collection of poetry. I will not be parted from this book. It’s how I discovered William Butler Yeats, for one thing.

  9. Whatever those two books were that catalogued just about every catch phrase in the English language. I just read them from cover to cover, and they saved me from years of “What does that mean? What does that mean?”

  10. The Straight Dope! Seriously.

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Books, stories, etc.:

  1. Titan by John Varley. Before I read it, I was a science fiction reader. Afterwards, I became a science fiction writer. Damned if I can explain why.

  2. In Search of Wonder by Damon Knight. Great critical study of SF. His chapters on “Chuckleheads” are a terrific guide to writing; if you avoid the mistakes he points out, you’re in great shape.

  3. Trying Hard to Hear You by Sandra Scoppettone. Sandra was the first author I met personally, and her novel was very impressive, especially since all of the characters were based on me and my friends.

  4. A letter to the editor I wrote when I was in high school. Someone had said that most of the students in the local school were smoking pot. I had evidence otherwise. It got an editorial in the local paper and a few interviews.

  5. The World Book Encyclopedia. I read it cover to cover when I was in junior high.

  6. Don’t recall the name, but a story about houseplants taking over a house. It was written in a writing class and I went over afterward to tell the author how much I liked it. We’ve now been married 26 years.

  7. The April Bunnies. My daughter’s favorite book. One of the many high points of being her father.

  8. The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark by John Tauranac. I wrote an entire (alas, unpublished) novel using it (and its first paragraph) as a touchstone.

  9. The Straight Dope (of course).

  10. “The Munij Deserters.” My first published story.