Millennial (1988)

I’ve tried to separate “stuff I enjoyed” from “stuff that defined me” but probably both failed at times and also forgotten some things that did help shape me.

Child:

When I was still really young, I asked for a real Bible instead of my children’s Bible “so I could read the rest of it” and read it repeatedly until it literally fell apart. I also read a college textbook about the chemical elements over and over.

Māori, Chinese, Russian, and Western European folktales.

I was already obsessed with self-sufficiency and science fiction. Audubon field guides, several nonfiction books about wilderness survival, Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, the first Boxcar Children book, The Girl Who Owned a City, Goosebumps, Animorphs, Others See Us, Dragonriders of Pern, choose your own adventure books.

Star Trek TNG, Voyager, and DS9. I particularly loved (still do) sci-fi where a really different kind of world or way of thinking was being explored. The more alien the perspective and the more it stretched my brain, the more I liked it, and I firmly believe this helped grow my ability to consider other points of view or ways of being and question assumptions.

Teen:

Rumi, Bradbury, Vonnegut, A Fire Upon the Deep, C. S. Lewis nonfiction and science fiction, Oliver Sacks’ books and lots of others about neuroscience and cognition.

Because I hated them so much, I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus along with similar books radicalized me even further than I already was against fear-based parenting, sexism, and people adding to the Bible.

Adult:

Natural Rights — A New Theory (Fuerle), Heirs Together (Gundry), I Am a Strange Loop, Lesswrong.org, Greg Egan, Neal Stephenson, Solaris, Alice Norton, Daphne DuMaurier, Borges, Mother Earth News magazine.