THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WAY YOU SEE THE WORLD

 

May 4, 2023

 

When I first read Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, I realized that literature could be even more powerful than I had known. Powerful enough in this novel to make me feel acute embarrassment, shame, and humiliation–unsavory, and unforgettable emotions. It was, in that sense, one of the most unpleasant books that I have ever read–but I suffered those ugly emotions because I was in empathic thrall to the characters, which was thrilling. Christina Stead had such power over me that she could compel me to keep reading even against my own will. Sixty years later, the book stays with me.

 

—Ken Margolis

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The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison

 

https://eliotpattison.com/behind-the-inspector-shan-series/

 

As the first book in the Inspector Shan series this book gave me a glimpse into the history and current status of the relationship between Tibet and China. It also gave a different perspective on Tibetan Buddhism, a more human practical one, and it opened me to a world of beliefs deeply different from those I had learned about in the West.

 

There are ten books in this series.

 

When I first met Andrew, he had an “Endlessly Connected” bumper stick on his car that was flanked by two Meander Knots. A simple design, the endless knot iconography symbolizes samsara—the endless cycle of suffering of birth, death, and rebirth within Tibetan Buddhism. The intertwining of wisdom and compassion. Also, the Interplay and interaction of the opposing forces in the dualistic world of manifestation, leading to their union, and ultimately to harmony in the universe.

 

The books have a starkness to them. As mysteries they are dark and sometimes brutal, but the characters, particularly the lamas have stuck around in my head since encountering them. Andrew and I read them at approximately the same time, sharing tidbits and references and when it came time to name our poetry press, little magazine and open mic, Meander Knot was the obvious choice.

 

We even got identical tattoos as both a branding exercise but also an expression of perhaps a deeper connection between us and the possible connection over more than one lifetime.

 

And then, when I started teaching yoga, I called the business “Meander Yoga”. The endless knot is not featured specifically in the books, (although I suspect it is mentioned. I am planning on re-reading them this year and will find out) it symbolizes to me the deep cultural richness in the books and how that richness has enhanced both my spiritual, but also my artistic life.  

 

—Elizabeth Domike

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Hi Johnny!

 

There are so many books that have changed me and/or inspired me but the one that comes to the top of my mind is Hope for the Flowers. I’ve read this book so many times and have shared it with so many people. It’s such a sweet and simple illustration of transformation but also of embracing who you are right now. 

 

 

On a totally different note, I remember reading Johnny Got His Gun for the first time and being in awe. It was the first time I really sat and pondered what it means to be human and what makes life worth living. 

 

Oh, and of course, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth!

 

I’ll stop before I start listing 100 books. 

 

—Nicole Rush

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The Mahabharata retold by William Buck

 

I first thought Peter Brooke read this.

I found it falling apart in a free box or a yard sale.

I found I couldn’t read it.

It sat on the bookshelf for a couple of years. I kept an eye on it.

 

One morning in Parkrose neighborhood, on a north deck, watching the planes glide in over the trees and rooftops, following the river west to PDX, I saw the sun was shining after endless rain.

A cup of coffee was there, and the time had come to open the book of wonder.

 

—Charles Erickson

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beautiful morning, Johnny. good question!

 

I immediately thought about how I felt after reading Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson. I had never had an English teacher in High School assign anything like it to read. I think I was the only one in the class who liked it or even read it. So for one thing it forged a bond with my fascinating lovely teacher.

 

Mainly it opened up a world of wonder about the wild, where savage had the meaning of wild/wyld people in a forest wilderness unmitigated by modern civilization. It is about true freedom compared to that of the birds.  

 

Hudson writes with a clear style that matches his view of beauty and wonder being the essence of life. It is a love story as well as a tragedy of what would come of nature. 

 

Now I’ve pulled it out to read once again. I had forgotten the main character’s name is Abel—my first son’s name! I think this story has stayed with me in my deep consciousness. 

 

In the forward, John Galsworthy wrote in 1918 that Hudson was the most valuable author of his Age. He says of  Hudson, who was a naturalist as well as an author: “his nomadic records of communing with men (women), birds, beasts, and Nature, has a supreme gift of disclosing not only the thing he sees but the spirit of his vision. Without apparent effort he takes you with him into a rare, free, natural world, and always you are refreshed, stimulated, enlarged, by going there.” 

 

—Katie Radditz

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About ten years ago a good friend of mine urged me to read Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert Massie. I was reluctant, because, as I told her, “I don’t do history.” She said, “Well, do!” I said that because up until then the only history I’d read had been high school and college textbooks. I’d read, study, take a test and then forget everything (hopefully in that order). I read hundreds and hundreds of novels from junior high school on—Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, etc.—so it wasn’t for a lack of love of reading, just no desire or aptitude for history.

 

But I read Nicholas and Alexandra and loved it! It’s the story of the last czarist Romanov dynasty and its fall. I’d never known much about Rasputin, but he figures in powerfully, with the strange spell he held over Alexandra and her hemophiliac son, Alexi. It was probably more biography than accounting of events. It led me to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, both of which were also biographical, with dominion, control, conquest, acquisition and rule over dozens of countries in that region threaded into their stories.

 

So perhaps it’s biography rather than history that has opened up a new world of reading for me. 

 

In that vein, I also read American Prometheus, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb.” Strange reading material, eh? But he was such a brilliant polymath and was forever conflicted about how his genius was put to use. 

 

Right now, it’s The Orientalist, by Tom Reiss, the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best selling author in Nazi Germany. It looks at the early 20th century and the origins of our ideas of race and religious self-definition, and the beginning of modern fanaticism and terrorism. 

 

So now it’s geography in addition to biography and history, and I’m sitting with the big World Atlas and a magnifying glass, scrutinizing Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, Georgia, Turkey…

 

To wrap this up, explorations in readings of geography, biography, and history have expanded my vision, experience, and understanding of the world in these last ten years, thanks to my friend, Nikki! (But I still love novels.)

 

—Jude Russell

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Alice Miller’s book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence changed the way I look at individual acts of violence and collective acts of violence—war. The basic thesis is simple: abusing children—physically, psychologically, emotionally, sexually—wounds them. She says that when we grow up, we unconsciously and compulsively re-enact the violence that was done to us. Randy Newman’s song “I want you to hurt like I do” sums it up. The violence can also be directed against ourselves. There’s more to the story than the idea that we are, by our nature, violent apes. We certainly have the potential for violence, and we also have the potential to be loving and kind. It depends which seeds we water. 

 

It follows from this that to the extent that we can be loving and kind to our children—instead of mean and cruel—the world will be transformed in positive ways. Conscious awareness of what we suffered and how it has affected us can help us to not act out the same things that were done to us. Her book helped me to better understand how “hurt people hurt people.” Instead of judging people for the suffering they’ve caused, I want to know about the pain they’ve suffered.

 

Susan Griffin’s book Woman and Nature brought home to me the relentless way in which men have defined, dominated and oppressed women over the centuries. Her book is also a visionary call for women’s (and men’s) emancipation from this tyranny.

 

Antler’s poem “Factory” changed the way I see the world around me. Having read the poem many years ago, it still manages to regularly remind me that the paint on the walls, the windows in the walls, the lightbulbs, the refrigerator, the glasses on my nose, the computer that I’m typing on—almost everything that surrounds me—was made by men and women working in (ugly, noisy) factories (which pollute the air, the water and the soil).

 

Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” inspires me to see beauty everywhere, to love everyone, to be astonished by the miraculousness of everything I touch, taste, see, or imagine.

 

—Johnny Stallings

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FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

Thanks for the reminder, Johnny,

You introduced me to that book ages ago, and I carried it around with me for a long time.

It says lots about childhood and being treated as a child by adults who are very busy in their own sphere.

It has left a lasting impression on me.

I’ll see if I can come up with another that has been useful as a life reference.

 

—Todd Oleson

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In the recent Open Road letter you asked about life-changing books—or at least life-influencing ones. Many of the titles you sent me fall in this group. However, due to space limits, I’ve sent the most helpful ones home and forgotten the titles. Some others include: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison by Shaka Senghor, The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose by Chris Wilson. I’m working through My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem—a bit “woke,” but still has relevance. Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw. Mmm…I’ll have to come back to this.

 

There’s a small-ish list of books I hope to read this next year—after ordering, of course. Some may trigger comments and feedback for others I’ll need/want to read, or even avoid: 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes, something by W.E.B. Du Bois [his two most well-known books are The Souls of Black Folk and Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois—ed.], Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development by Ann S. Masten, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker, Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer, and Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

 

Oh, The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk, on trauma—this was helpful. So many helpful books, and all the best are at home. This is great for when I get out (15+ years), not great for now. Oh, and I have crossed the halfway on April 9th: 50% done, 15¾ years left.

 

—Michel Deforge

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Dear Reader

 

Next month (June 1st), our theme is Peace.

Send me something.

 

peace & love

Johnny