Other Strange Books For Strange People
Many years ago, when I was 17 years old, I became acquainted with the work of Stephen King, and my life was changed. It would be impossible to really describe the effect reading King had on my still fairly young and sheltered mind. By forcing me to directly face them, SK's books freed me of any number of irrational fears I didn't even know I had, created a few new ones (albeit these fears were more fun) and made me more aware of any number of perfectly rational fears I might have to deal with at some point. King also showed me that someone could really write anything, as long as it was honest, and succeed. He helped me to become comfortable with a world from which I'd deliberately isolated myself for five years, as I was just preparing to re-enter society. It really isn't possible to explain the degree to which reading King changed my life, as I can't effectively recall what my mind was like before. I do know that, odd as it may seem, reading fantastic fiction brought me out of the confines of my carefully structured personal universe and back down to Earth; that's the best explanation I can come up with. At the time, I probably learned more home truths from the work of Stephen King than from any other source in the backward, under-educated hell of rural New Mexico I was stuck in. Those books provided much more than just the escape valve all good fiction can give the reader; they also taught me all kinds of useful things about human nature and introduced or inspired an infinity of thoughts, theories, ideas, philosophies and interior debates, many of which keep my grey matter active to this day. I reread many of them periodically in order to assess my own progress through life, to see how far I've come since I read any particular book in my misspent youth.
Anyway, I started this thread to mention other books, mostly non-fiction, that have had the same kind of effect upon me, albeit much later. I don't know if I can say that any books have had as profound an effect as King's, as it was his books that started me off in this direction, but if any have, it's the ones I'm here to talk about. I wholeheartedly recommend every book mentioned here, and I would likewise encourage all of you to come in here and provide your own lists of life-changing books and writers, fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between.
First, I'll mention the collective works of Robert Anton Wilson. Unfortunately, Bob shuffled off this mortal coil earlier this year, so now I'll never meet him- which I might have, as he was an old friend of my roommate and employer, Pasq. At any rate, Bob's books are all about change, brain-change in particular, and freeing oneself from the programmed reality-tunnels most of us don't even know we're in. There's never a dull moment; Bob will challenge your every assumption, every superstition, every dogma, every certainty, until you come out the other end with a mind fully capable of critical thinking and the ability to easily shovel your way through the steaming pile of pure nonsense that is most public discourse. Whether in novel form, like Illuminatus! or Schrodinger's Cat, or in the form of essay collections like the three Cosmic Trigger volumes, The Illuminati Papers or The New Inquisition, or even the screenplay format (The Walls Came Tumbling Down, Reality Is What You Can Get Away With), every book in the R.A.W. canon is a truly psychedelic experience: thought-provoking, incredibly funny, endlessly illuminating, detailing the weirdnesses that fill our world and the universe of which it occupies an infintesimal part. Prometheus Rising is nothing less than an instruction manual for the use of our higher levels of consciousness. It teaches readers to programme her/his own mind for him/herself rather than allow society or other untrustworthy forces to do it them. Prometheus Rising is a good place to start with Bob, in fact; it was the first of his books that I read, seven years ago now, due to the recommendation of my wisest friends. And yet, perhaps Cosmic Trigger, Vol. 1 is the best place for the beginner to enter Chapel Perilous; it's less serious, more humourous, and still representative of the R.A.W. approach to life, the universe, and everything. Nothing in Bob's ouvre is what you'd call 'light reading'; yet he wrote the kind of clear, sharp prose that shines a light through even the most dense and murky subject matter with ease. Bob can explain the most complex elements of quantum physics and the most convoluted details of political or spiritual conspiracies in language anyone who can read the English language can follow. In Coincidance, he describes the strange connections between the I Ching, DNA structure, Kabbalah, binary code, and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, as well as those between General Relativity and Joyce's Ulysses. In Illuminatus! (co-written with Bob Shea) and the three-volume Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, he provides a sane, philosophical, satirical explication of the competing conspiracies that have fought amongst themselves and each other for the authorship of history; after reading these books, you almost feel like you've been through it all yourself (and, according to some possible models of 'reality', perhaps you have). Through all of the R.A.W. canon, the reader comes face to face with many realities: UFOs, occult societies, sinister government plots, unexplained apparitions, communications from beyond the sloar system and the grave, shamans, outlaws, porno stars, gods, monsters, witches, politicians, great scientists and magicians (the fine line between the two frequently erased), demons, angels, movie stars, master criminals (you know, aside from the politicians), Irishmen, bizarre rains of frogs, coins, stones and English breakfasts, and an endless variety of oddities beyond my ability to recall. Like any other psychedelic experience, the actuality of reading these books, absorbing the incredible information in them, and having so many of your old fears, assumptions, prejudices, beliefs, and mental programmes either challenged or annihilated, is beyond description. At this crucial point in human history, I consider it not merely useful for people to know the things they can learn from the works of Bob, but absolutely essential, and it's easier to learn them by reading his books, doing the excersizes in some of them, and reading the other books he recommends than it is to learn them from experience, as he did (and as, to a lesser degree, I did before reading him). I heartily encourage any and every one of my fellow SK/Dark Tower freaks to have the R.A.W. experience, ASAP. Unless there's some dogma you hold dear and don't want challenged, or you have some severe attachment to the illusion of certainty, you will not regret it.
Basically, though I've had many wonderful encounters with literature that have enriched my perspective in a variety of ways, I have had two serious, life-changing experiences with the written word in my adult life. The first, being turned on to fantastic fiction through the work of Stephen King, I have already described and all of you have, to one degree or another, shared. The second was in some ways a result of the first (I wouldn't have moved to Boulder if not for King, so I wouldn't have met the people who turned me on to Bob), but was, in other ways, more drastic, truly world-altering, mind-bending, Earth-shattering, and I'd like to share it with as many people as possible.
Now, this is just my first recommendation, to open up the thread. I hope you all have recommendations of your own as well, partly because I'm looking for new authors to read myself. And I hope that at least a few of you will find this particular piece of literary advice useful; I hope some of you will be successfully introduced to Bob, and will find the relationship as profitable as I have. If so, drop me a PM or come in here and tell us all about it. More importantly though, as I've said, tell us who your major, life-changing writers are, and how they've made your lives better. I think this is the kind of exchange from which we could all benefit, as there's little in life better than discovering a great writer or artist of whom one was previously unaware. And if there's anything that gives me as much pleasure as discovering great books or authors I haven't already read, it's introducing them to others.
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Originally Posted by OchrisO
Its in my top ten list in the other thread!
