QotD: Life-Changing Books

This book is probably the most important book I've ever read, and I connect and continue to connect to it with the same sort of love I have for Marcuse's work, albeit their tremendous differences.  Oh, how to devote a short paragraph to the importance of Dorothy Smith?  This is truly one of those books that turned my way of thinking on its head, which is one of the best experiences one can have as an academic.  At risk of over-simplifying Smith's canon of work, I'll say that the thrust of her work has been to place real people as knowers at the center of our analyses, to begin with the everyday world and then reach from there into an understanding of social relations.  While in a sense this is classic Marxist materialism, it breaks from the traditions of many Marxists and particularly many sociologists who were playing conceptual games and taking the conceptual order as primary, looking to sort our everyday experiences into that logic.  Instead, Smith asks us to invert that practice and take on an entirely different approach to knowing.  She critiques traditional (and much current) sociology as not an objective science, but as an ideology, and at that, an ideology which has inhibited its own discovery through these rigid conceptual practices which maintain various forms of inequality.  Excellent feminist scholarship and approaches to sociology (this is more than a method) have sprung from her work; yet at the same time many of her critiques can be applied to a vast majority of sociology today.  I freaking love Dorothy Smith.

This book is also connected to academe, but it's a work of fiction.  I think I've read this book at least five times, and I could easily see reading it again this summer.  This book makes me laugh out loud, and grants me some perspective about universities as institutions.  In short, we're a bunch of neurotic self-involved social outcasts.  I love it.  This book traces the (entirely fictional) story of  William Henry Devereaux, Jr., chair of the English department at a no-name small college in Pennsylvania.  This next part comes straight from the back cover: "In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television.  All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain bodily functions."  It's one of those books where the main character is such a fuck-up, yet so admirable at the same time.  It exposes all the insanity of academe while displaying its sincerity and humanity.  And the main character would certainly be giving me a C for these last few sentences, which were decidedly hyperbolic. 

While we're on fiction, I have to turn to Sherman Alexie.  God, how to describe Sherman Alexie?  I guess what I like most about him is that he writes about Native American life without buying in to the whole cartoon-character, overly-romantic thing.  He writes about modern Indian life, which is really rare.  So I like it politically.  But more compelling is his writing style.  He writes poems, novels, and short stories.  The book I've chosen here is a book of short stories.  This is from the back cover: "Alexie's characters are quintessentially American --professionals whose upwardly mobile lives make them yearn for escape, married couples struggling with fidelity, ordinary folk falling in and out of love and wondering if they will make their way home."  This very short film is also a good synthesis of both his content and style.  This short article is a good example of his demeanor.  This is his biography.  This is one of his poems.  This might actually be my absolute favorite book of short stories by Alexie, even though I placed a different one to the right.   This is an excerpt from my favorite poem of his.  THIS in no way gets at his work.  I am terrible at explaining fiction.  And his books are so important to me.  Will you just read one already? 

Finally, I have to place this book in the top five.  I've also already blogged about this one.  But it's another book that turned my thinking on its head.  I've long been someone who strongly believed in women's right to choose.  But it was easy, in the midst of those beliefs, to become simplistic in my thinking about reproductive rights.  I had inadvertently failed to see some of the practices of power which take place in this framework, and without intending to, ignored the full range of women's reproductive rights.  So much emphasis has been placed on the right of U.S. women to choose abortions, and so little emphasis has been placed on women, in the U.S. and abroad, who are inhibited from choosing motherhood.  Of course I had always supported women who chose to be mothers, but until I read this book, I hadn't thought about the fullest range of politics which stand in many women's ways.  I personally imagine that it would be far harder to carry a pregnancy to term and give that baby up for adoption than it would be to have an abortion.  But I had never connected that assumption (which women's testimonies validate) to global and domestic politics and inequality.  This is really something I care a lot about, and which changed my own thinking about not only women's reproductive rights as an issue, but as well as my own choices I might make about my own life.  (I used to consider adopting, now I am critical of that privilege while still concerned about the reality that there are children who need homes.)  If this is an area of interest to anyone else out there, I can also recommend the work of Dorothy Roberts, an essay called “Taking Population out of the Equation: Reformulating I=PAT" by H. Patricia Hynes in a great book called Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development, this article, and oh heck, just ask me if you want to do more reading in this area.  I sometimes wonder if I should be doing a dissertation in this area... but that's a whole other entry. 

So there you have it.  I'm sure I'll regret not including some books on this Top Five list later, but regardless, these five books are insanely important to me.