Anna S. (eliade) wrote,
Anna S.
eliade

meme a little meme of me

I suspect that the most formative books in my life are ones I've completely forgotten about. They lie face down with outspread wings like dead birds littering my subconscious. But here's a list anyway:
1. A Wrinkle in Time: Neurotic kids. Tesseracts. Children bouncing balls in unison on an alien planet. Disembodied brain of evil. All of it a true story.

2. The Price of the Phoenix: HoYay discovered at the cusp of adolescence.

3. The Glass Teat: "I am a misunderstood genius sneering at America's capacity for crap. Love me."

4. Lolita: I.e., this is what it means to truly write.

5. Little House in the Big Woods: Life is meant to be cozy and warm! A belief I will spend the next twenty-odd years pursuing to recapture the safety of an imaginary childhood.

6. Sweet Savage Love: Or somesuch title and its mutant offspring, which introduced me to breeding farms for white slavery, brothels of raped innocents, pederasty, blow jobs from the valet, cross-dressing, whipping, and snuff-fucking. From my mother's bedside table, kink travels deep into the psyche, embeds itself there, gestates for fifteen years or so, then spawns a slash ouvre.

7. Daisy Summerfield's Style: Lesson learned: You can run away and have another life. Not entirely untrue, but I still feel insufficiently reinvented.

8. The Snow Queen: Splinter of evil in the eye, frozen heart. That pretty much sums up my inner child in a nutshell.

9. Harriet the Spy: I spent decades of my life not knowing what an egg cream was, but certain that it was the most wonderful thing in the universe.

10. Sybil: The most influential of them all, probably. I was eleven when I read it for the first time. It captured my emotional morbidity and fractured sense of self perfectly. It still resonates. Life really isn't much more than a lengthy, tiresome struggle to overcome your stunted malformities until you reach and sustain a plateau of mundane existence, where you rent a one-bedroom apartment and hold down a boring job, and consider this an actual achievement because at least you aren't wandering the streets tugging out clumps of your hair and talking to a lightbulb.
There. All is explained! Except for all the other titles I've forgotten which were no doubt far more significant and would explain my predilection for cross-dressing in a butler's uniform and frequenting fish markets.
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  • (no subject)

    Just posting to wave hello, I'm alive, I'm maintaining. I haven't been online; mostly, I've been pacing out daily routines, or holding onto the rope…

  • (no subject)

    The week to two-week placement I'm currently in has turned into a potentially long-term month-to-month opportunity, and I accepted the offer this…

  • (no subject)

    LiveJournal is branding itself as "A global community of friends who share your unique passions and interests." My unique passions; those which I…