‘A Book that Shaped Me’ Writing Competition at our Local Library

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If I were to be asked that question: What is a book that shaped you, and why?, I would find it very hard to reply, but you might be interested.  I read an awful lot of crap as a kid, and some of it probably did shape me: children’s books; The Saint books, by Leslie Charteris (probably not a common experience for most of my readers who are more likely to have seen Roger Moore starring in the TV series),but I also read some awesome books.  However, I'm trying to think which were the ones that might have shaped me, and I'm having a hard time remembering.  When I was a kid, books shaped me mostly by encouraging me to read more.

Our local Library works hard to get the populace to use the Library, in the first place, and secondly, to provide evidence (to various funding sources) that it is being used.  (This is one of those things that make me furious: that an institution that was created to perform a public service, and which has performed, and continues to perform practically from the time it came into being, that purpose with fair dedication and great success, must divert some of its energy and some of its financial resources to documenting those facts.  This is why almost all libraries with a decent budget have huge electronic devices at the entrance, to detect and keep track of how many visitors there are.)  Over the Summer, activities aimed at school students go into high gear.  This helps schools, helps the young people, and helps the Library to look good.  (It also helps Republican members of the funding organizations to cut their budgets if a Library in some locality seems to be seeing a decline in use.  Rather than funnel funds to the limping Library, to encourage citizens to use printed media to better themselves and use their resources more wisely, funding is foolishly diverted to large urban areas whose libraries can report greater traffic.  The flow of population to large cities keeps going; increasing library budgets proportionally does not seem quite as important as to keep small town libraries useful, to provide less of an incentive for people to abandon living in small towns.  I must admit that libraries are probably not the main reason people move to cities; it is the lack of employment in small towns.)

A book that did influence me greatly was Charles Snow’s The Two Cultures, and it turned my attention from being preoccupied with fictional things and people, towards real-life heroes and events with whom I could identify strongly.  Snow described such fascinating characters as G. H. Hardy, a much-beloved mathematician who flourished in the early part of the 20th century in Cambridge, and Hardy's almost more celebrated protegé, Srinivas Ramanujan, the South Indian mathematical genius who discovered vast numbers of approximations and formulas for well-known functions and constants; and Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Pauling, and other famous figures who became important during the great wars.  It’s been a while since I read the books--about forty years--so I don’t remember the personalities Snow discusses that belonged to the other culture.  The book was about scientists on the one hand, and intellectuals on the other.  Snow admired them both, and wanted to compare and contrast their ways of thinking, which at the time I found very interesting and useful (though I’m fairly certain I didn’t understand the greater part of what Snow was describing!)

Another book I found fascinating was the 1974 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.  I learned just how interesting advanced mathematics could be, and I was determined to learn more about this subject amongst which I had fallen (if amongst is the word I want), and about which I had been taught so much.  Some of the books we used in college were amazing, and I was finding out how fascinating reading about the subject of mathematics could be when an author with wit and personality wrote.

Interestingly enough, a person about whom I learned in another interesting book I read: Robert Jung’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns, popped up as the author of a strongly recommended book on my college reading list, namely Richard P. Feynman.  The Feynman Lectures on Physics (about which I have written previously) is a three-volume book written by Feynman, Leighton and Sands, as part of a survey course in theoretical physics given at the California Institute of Technology.  Feynman’s greatest achievement is not only conveying his fascination with various facts and connections, most of which we all know about, but explaining why they were truly amazing.  He could deliver excitement about physics as few others could.

I’ll describe these next books as quickly as I can, because you must be getting overloaded with mathematics and science by this point.  The first is Classical Mechanics by Herbert Goldstein, a wonderful book that is chiefly interesting interesting because of its choice of material and economy of presentation, and the next is a book by the publishers of Scientific American called The Physics and Chemistry of Life.  It is a reader, with contributions by Watson, of Watson and Crick fame, the two biochemists who were principally responsible for establishing the helix structure of DNA.  Finally, I would like to nominate Wolfgang Rindler’s Essential Relativity, which got me started on the road to General Relativity, a subject that kept my interest for several decades.

But this question of: What is one book that shaped your life, and why did it do so? leaves me baffled.  On one hand, it is a heartwarming thought that a single book could change the course of your life.  Authors, particularly, would like to believe that this happens all the time, and would validate their profession.  But for the vast majority of us, it would be difficult to point to a single book that influenced us so dramatically.  If your mind is completely empty, I suppose, a single book could blow you away.  The most one can hope for is to be so inspired by a book that it makes it possible for other books to continue the work that was begun by the first.

To my mind, there is nothing really magical about books, and this is probably true for people who read a lot.  If you’ve never read a book, I daresay the first one you complete will affect you strongly.  But a well-written book can present a complete, well-thought-out argument to persuade you to accept a particular line of thinking.  If your thoughts are in line with, or have the potential for aligning with, the thoughts of the author, something dramatic could possibly happen.  It is rare for anyone to pick up a book that has the potential to do this, but in a society where reading is not a common activity, a book could fell an unsuspecting reader as if he or she had been poleaxed.  Perhaps I’m just jaded after having read tons of workmanlike books.  (I can just hear some literary freaks crying Yes, yes!  You’re jaded!  If you read the right books, you would be a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHAPE ALTOGETHER!)  I’m willing to conceded that perhaps you don’t have to be entirely soft in the head to be rocked to the roots by a single book, but in my opinion it is the cumulative effect of scores of books that actually shape a person, if shaping is the word I want.

A most wonderful thing is to have such an open, receptive mind that a good book could sway you.  If you do have an open and receptive mind, and you are so fortunate as to have been led to read a valuable book, or a book that will be valuable to you, and who knows how many of those in your immediate circle have the wisdom to do this for you?  If you do, then you are in for an experience that you will treasure for a lifetime.  But once your life has been shaped, I sincerely hope you allow a dozen more books to continue to shape you, and I hope it shapes up OK!  Here’s looking at your shape, kid!

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