I’ve always been the sort of person who is profoundly affected by fiction. When I hear people talk about the importance of reading, only to discover that every book they ever read falls in the category of non-fiction, I get a little testy. Okay, I get mad. Non-fiction isn’t reading; it’s being lectured at.
Recently, it’s come to mind that there are three stories that have profoundly affected the direction of my life, and under the guise of being brief, I’ll tell you their titles and authors without explaining wherefore:
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Vorkossigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold
The last one’s a cheat, I know, since it’s a series of some 20 books, instead of a single volume like the others, but you have to read most of them to get the full effect.
neumatikos 