Fred Aiken Writing

Daily writing prompt

List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?

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‘Infinite Jest’ comes to mind first; it taught me that sometimes books are not fun to read, especially when they have an overabundance of footnotes and are overwritten in a semi-academic format with some of the fanciest words ever thought of and strung together. Don’t get me wrong, I still think ‘Infinite Jest’ was a great book and was/is the definitive post-modern story, but I was a dumb teenager that thought I would read Wallace’s magnum opus one summer vacation, and while I did finish it within a month before the end of summer ending, I did not enjoy the experience.

I did eventually go back to ‘Infinite Jest’ when I was in my twenties to reread it, and it was somewhat more pleasant, or at least I felt like I could more easily digest what was going on, but I still have to say that I did not enjoy just how overwritten and bogged down Wallace’s style is with so much description. Way too much description. I’m not one to say that Hemingway’s minimalist style of writing was all that good, since I really did not like ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, but I do think there’s a middle ground between David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway in terms of style and descriptors that is around my tolerance.

While ‘Infinite Jest’ was perhaps one of the first books that I found myself truly not enjoying, I guess the first book that comes to mind that I truly did enjoy and got caught up reading was Mark Twain’s ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. I know it’s not one of Twain’s more well-known books, and I had read both ‘Huckleberry’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’ prior to ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, but for whatever reason I really enjoy the latter. So much so that it was the first book I remember in my childhood that I stayed up to read and finish in an 8 hour span.

There’s nothing particularly special about ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, from what I can remember. In fact, it was essentially ‘Freaky Friday’. I mean, not exactly, and obviously ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ came out long before movies, much less ‘Freaky Friday’, were ever a thing. But it was the movie that came to mind. Plus, the Lindsay Lohan ‘Freaky Friday’ movie had come out around the time that I read ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, and I had a crush on her when I was a kid, which isn’t weird considering we’re about the same age, but I figure that in my adolescent, hormone-addled brain I probably related a lot of books back to various Lindsay Lohan movies, and I suppose ‘Freaky Friday’ and ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ were perhaps the two most similar.

I suppose another comparison one could make between ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ is the story of the life of Martin Guerre, whose biography I read in college. I mean, there are plenty, and I mean plenty, of stories, both fictional and nonfictional, of characters doing a switcheroo both before and after Twain. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is the concept isn’t all that new, and probably at this point in writing it is a bit played out. But when I was a kid and constantly relating books that I read to my celebrity crush at the time to Lindsay Lohan, I suppose I could understand why I might have really liked ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ more than any other book at the time.

There are quite a few books that have had an impact on me. Anything from the Beat Generation to modernism and post-modernism. I think a majority of my book choices have generally stayed within the range of being written in the past 100 years to now. I definitely was never a fan of Romanticism or Shakespeare or the Enlightenment periods and their style of writing. But when I think on it a bit, I suppose I’d have to say the third book that had a major impact on me was Ken Keseys ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.

Again, I was a teenager at the time, though I have since reread ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ multiple times since, and it has stood the test of time as one of my all-time favorite books, but it also happened to be a time where I became really obsessed with psychology and mental illness when I first read the book. I was going through some mental struggles myself, and for some reason the story a psych ward patient, McMurphy, faking mental illness to get out of prison and then rebelling against the authority of Nurse Ratched, who then subjects McMurphy to electroshock therapy and then eventually a lobotomy before being mercy killed by the narrator, Chief Bromden, a Native American psych patient pretending to be deaf and mute, who then is inspired by the spirit of his dead psych-ward friend to escape himself really resonated with me at the time.

I did eventually find myself in a psych ward myself, a couple of years after reading reading ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. It was in the late 2000’s, so obviously lobotomies and electroshock therapy were no longer practiced. But I do feel as if drug-induced, semi-temporary lobotomies are still being practiced through the administration and management of various psychic drugs to quel various mental illnesses. I think that experience even more so heightened my connection to Ken Kesey’s work.

But like I said, there are quite a few books that I’ve read that have had an impact on me, some more than others. I do read quite a bit. I’d probably say I read about 2 books a week on average, so there will definitely be some that don’t really mean anything. I’d probably say at least one book every 2-3 years comes along and has a larger impact and influence on me than others. Though I suppose I do sort of relate the 3 aforementioned books as being the most impactful due to the significance they played in developing my mind at an age where my brain was still forming higher level thoughts and I was beginning to think about my place within the world, philosophically, morally, and all those grand things.