Five Books That Influenced My Life

photograph of my bookshelf

What follows is not a quiz, there is no right, no wrong. It is simply an exercise all writers might try as they consider why and how they caught the writing bug in the first place.

So, if you find the time, read on and find my five choices, complete with my reasoning. You might already have posed that question and found your ‘gateway’ books. If so, you will understand how difficult the task is. How do you sift through the influence of all the books you have read and narrow your selection to a mere five.

Each choice boils down to opinion and personal preference, shaped by one’s own life experiences.

My involvement began when Dr Tom Christie, publisher and owner of Extremis Publishing Limited, invited me to participate in one of his podcasts. Incidentally his company has just won, ‘Scottish Independent Publisher’ of the year, 2023. Oh, and for the two years before.

Check out the website at; https://www.extremispublishing.com

That is how I found myself with the challenge of selecting the five books, religious books aside he said, that had made a difference to my life, to my thinking and to explain why.

He was not asking for the five books I had simply enjoyed reading.

So here is my choice. The five books that opened my mind or led me somewhere I might not have gone had I not read them.

My Gateway Books.

As I considered, my thoughts took me to my first reading experiences. Paper Comics from the early 1950s. I was born in 1946, no television, no ‘social media’, no mobile telephones, ‘cellular telephones’ if you prefer. In fact, we did not have a landline telephone in my parent’s house.

During these post-World War Two days in the 1950s, before I had read a proper book, there were, certainly in the UK, comics like The Hotspur, The Adventure, The Wizard and my favourite, The Rover. I cannot be sure when these comics came into existence or the order they appeared. There were others, but it was The Rover that really attracted me. It was mostly text, with, if my memory serves, a limited amount of cartoon-style strip images. Out of its pages as I read, emerged my early heroes, Braddock; a World War Two bomber pilot, who would go on to feature in his own book, I flew with Braddock and my all-time favourite, Alf Tupper, Tough of the Track.

He was a rough, unkept, character who defied convention and took on the establishment, the elite on the running track. His opponents were always gleaming in their spotless vests and shorts and fancy spiked running shoes.

Tupper came from the other side of the tracks, the poor side. He had a pair of simple rubber-soled plimsoles, as some might say. In Scotland we called such shoes, gutties. A term that came from the rubber composition of the soles. Gutta-Percha. No matter what he wore or had on his feet, he always caught the Brylcreem Boys in the final straight and emerged with the Trophy, much to their annoyance. So I did ponder including The Rover, however I had to relegate it in favour of the first actual book that I read.

That book, and first on my list is; The Hill of The Red Fox, Allan Campbell McLean. It came out in 1955 when I was ten or eleven.

I was engrossed in the story, I could not put it down. I even read it using a torch, under the covers in my bed on school nights, a heinous crime, certainly if my mum caught me. It was a story of a teenage boy, 13 or 14, called Alasdair. He moved out of London to live with relatives on the Isle of Skye during World War Two. Due to his adventurous nature, he soon became embroiled in a gripping adventure, involving wild countryside, dangerous cliff-lined coastlines, the Gaelic language, brave crofters, U-boats in the bay, Russian spies and death.

Looking back and I have read it as an adult, I concede I may well have read better books. So why include it in my top five?

Because, it was my first book, the very first. I still remember the joy, not only of the adventure within its pages but of simply holding it, turning it over, feeling the texture. Allowing my creativity to shape the characters, and give them faces. Each person was set in MY imagination, not that of the cartoonist. It was my gateway to literature and reading, it was that important.

Oh, maybe others would have come along, probably they would have, however, it was The Hill of the Red Fox that did come along and opened the gateway to the wonderful world of imagination and the written word and the thrill and adventure that can bring.

I have bought a copy for each of my children and subsequently my grandchildren. One could not finish it, he did eventually. He told me I was the first person to give him a book where the hero dies, not Alasdair. It made him cry. I told him to leave it aside and that he would return to it and finish it one day and he would understand. He did both.

I have to include, And Quite Flows the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov next in my list. My dad spoke about this book often. It was his favourite book and he urged my brother and me to read it.

It came out in the UK in the mid 1930s, translated from Russian, and he managed to obtain a copy when a prisoner of war during WW2 and read it when imprisoned in Torún prison camp in Eastern Poland. My dad was a hero figure to me and I resolved to read that book and the sequel, ‘The Don Flows Home to the Sea’. I loved both, not simply because of Sholokhov’s descriptive writing skills as he leads us through his expansive narrative about Russia, The First World War, The Russian Revolution, the Reds and the Whites, and the grisly horror of that time, the killing, the battles and the losses, he was also able to describe it with sensitivity and humanity.

The vehicle he used to carry us on this breathtaking journey is Grishka, a Don Cossack, and the interaction between him and his family, other Cossacks and many powerful characters involved in the Revolution. All played out on a huge stage, set up to highlight man’s inhumanity to man, the treachery, the cowardice and the bravery.

It is a massive tale. A story of ordinary- people, exploited and expendable, many going along with it all in the hope of surviving and perhaps being favoured in some way, all caught up in the power games of countries and politicians. Mere pawns.

Eventually, Grishka, tired of it all, longed to be home on the family farm, amongst his own folk and working with his horses. However, he was too valuable a leader for the system to allow that.

And in the ‘scene’ where he galloped away from it all on his beloved horse, all I could think was, there is no escape Grishka.

For me, the whole book, the far-ranging tale all boiled down to a metaphor, for — no choice.

That is only part of its lasting influence on me, the most important influence it had was that it brought me closer to my life’s hero, my dad and helped me understand him better.

I will now take you to my third choice, Consider the Lillies, by Iain Crichton Smith. It is a wonderful piece of writing by Smith at the top of his game. A powerful novel, that tells the story of one small part of the Highland Clearances, through the eyes of an old woman caught up in it and despite her age, evicted from her house, with no other place to go. While it is not a History book in the true sense, the book is based on truth and reflects a shameful episode of Scotland’s history.

It covers how the Church betrayed these poor people by being complicit with the land owners, who in turn used people’s trust in the Church and their local Minister, to convince them to move out of their houses and crofts.

Why was this book influential? I think I was in my 30s when I first read it. Like The Hill of the Red Fox, it was a gateway book. A gateway to my own Scottish history, a history I did not learn at school. We heard a lot about Kings and Queens, of whom I had little, if any interest in, of battles such as Trafalgar, Waterloo, The Battle of Hastings, even Bannockburn, as if that was all the history we had.

I was brought up in the centre of Scotland and yet the Clearances, which took place only a couple of lifespans before my birth and not much further than 100 miles away, were relatively unknown to me and not just me. Consider the Lillies opened my eyes.

I headed for the Library after reading it and over the next while read books on that period and bought a few. Not many years later my work took me north of Inverness to Ross-Shire and Sutherland. I learned more then and not only that, I also learned of the anger and resentment many still held.

I now have a house on a croft on a Scottish Island, surrounded by crofts and crofters and I have visited some of the glens that were cleared of people to make way for sheep, a far more lucrative option for the landowner. I travelled the length of Glen Calvie and stood in the graveyard of Croik Church, which still has names and dates on the window glass. Scratched there by the beleaguered in 1845 after their houses were cleared of them and burned.

I sometimes wonder if anything has changed.

I have taken poetic licence with the next. I have combined two different books which offered me, in different ways, the same gateway.

Letters to a Young Contrarian — Christopher Hitchens — For the Sake of Argument.

and

Surely Your Joking Mr Feynman — Richard Feynman

If I could start with Christopher Hitchens.

Arguably one of the best essayists Britain has produced. Some may well perhaps suggest George Orwell for that accolade. Hitchens, I believe does not take a contrary view simply for the sake of it. He develops his views through a forensic curiosity, a huge intellect and a wide perspective. In addition, he has a wit that slices like a scimitar.

Hitchens encourages free thought and evidence based critical thinking as well as seething against oppression, injustice, hypocrisy and corruption.

His book reinforced my default position in life and gave me courage to keep going, to be brave, to adopt, if reasonable, a contrary position, often against the odds, bucking the trend. He helped me understand that a consensus, does not always equate to ‘correct’.

Surely Your Joking Mr Feynman; is a book I could not neglect. It contains stories told by Feynman about himself to his friend Ralph Leighton, who collected them and wrote them down to amaze and amuse us.

Feynman has much in common with Hitchens. Not in the way he expresses or presents. He is Mr benign to Hitchens, Mr edgy. While they are out of different stables, their intellect is unsurpassed, even if expressed differently and gleaned from totally different experiences. Feynman often presented as though he was overawed by his knowledge, his genius, displayed with a child-like quality.

But do not be fooled, he was ruthless in his pursuit of both knowledge and understanding and he understood the difference, and that they are not the same. He was a born storyteller and he often used that simple skill to eloquently explain his reasoning. One example I recall, in terms of the difference between knowledge and understanding, is when he explains how the Mayan culture in South America knew when and where the sun, the moon and other astral objects would appear in the sky above them at a given time. To impress the less knowledgeable they built edifices that caught these objects between pillars or through arches or some other part of the build at the relevant time.

However it was simply observation, it was not that they understood the objects or why they appeared at these times or how they stayed in the sky or moved around it.

Feynman also helped me separate the how question from the why question. The ‘why’ we do something from the ‘how’ we do it. One may well be about science and one may be about psychology. They lead to different alleys.

So how did Feynman change my thinking: He encouraged me to think for myself, not to simply opt for popular opinion, not to blindly follow the consensus, question it all. Read, research, get out and ask, seek out the truth. Be Brave, because questioning popular opinion, questioning the consensus, can be a lonely place.

‘There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician’.

Theoretical Physicist and Nobel laureate, Hans Bethe.

I make no apology for overstepping my allowance. In their own way, both Hitchens and Feynman were a breath of fresh air and were in some ways, both contrarians. And that is good enough for me.

Last, but by no means least, I have to include, Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. Why was this book a gateway and where did it lead? It led me to Cormac McCarthy.

In this selection, I have passed over these literary icons; John Steinbeck, The Pearl , Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged , Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance, John Le Carre’, A Murder of Quality and The Spy who Came in from the Cold, Fitzroy Maclean Eastern Approaches and many more.

The mother dead these fourteen year did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in the world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history presents in that visage, the child the father of the man.

Stark, stripped of normal emotion, Blood Meridian continues in that despairing, forlorn manner.

McCarthy plays fast and loose with English Grammar at bits and in many sections the coma is innocent. He paints a lurid image of vivid, burning skies over endless arid landscapes, inhabited by brutal, merciless, wretched characters. It is a book that assaults your senses, takes your breath away. Well, if not yours, certainly mine.

A review from the Maccabee Society suggests it is ‘Bloody Boring’ because it has no plot, the prose is described as negative, aimless, nihilistic and that McCarthy fails to describe the violence clearly.

I am clear in my thinking that he does what precisely he intended. He describes with the skill of master penmanship the reality of such a wretched place, where your only wish is to survive. In such circumstances, in the real world, there is not always a plot. He is not describing a John Wayne, Garry Cooper type of Hollywood dream of the West. Much of the violence depicted in this book is about chaos, panic and raw survival, with nobody recalling exactly what happened.

Just like in real life actually.

Blood Meridian, in my humble opinion, offers us a significant, if perhaps, controversial contribution to literature, and it was my gateway to the wonderful literary giant that is McCarthy.

So there you have it, my five Gateway Books and why I selected them.

Don’t be shy, have a go. It might open up a new door.

In conclusion, having been inspired by books, I have been lucky enough to write and have published what you see in the picture that follows.

All written and published since reaching 70 years of age