Books are brilliant
Quite a few books I've read have had a big effect on me.

Jazz, by John Fordham, aided and abetted what I suspect will be a life-long love affair with that great music when I was about eleven. It helped a lot that it was written by someone who clearly is genuinely passionate about the music and vastly knowledgeable about it, rather than all too many jazz guides which focus on how 'cool' jazz is, yeah, man, wasn't Miles Davis hip, and not treating it with the reverence and dignity it deserves.

Also Prime Obsession, By, I think, John Derbyshire. I'd always been good at maths, but it never really captured my imagination, mostly, I suspect, because maths at school is taught in such an uninspiring way as to put off as many people as possible, but that book showed me just what a powerful and beautiful thing it can be and now I'm about to embark on at least three years of doing more or less nothing but for my degree, so that is pretty much the entire course of my life changed by that book.

Also, I forget what it was called, but when I was about 14 I read a book about autism (not the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, it was a solely factual one) and suddenly everything became clear - why I am like I am, or was like I was, why my mind works the way it does and why I hate the beach and why, nomatter how many friends I seem to have these days, I always feel like a little bit of an outsider. I'm not a complete autistic, although having talked to my mum about it since it would have been absolutely no trouble to have got me diagnosed as such when I was younger, but for reasons I quite understand she thought that wouldn't be a good course to take. I've more or less got better, since, I don't see the flashing lights anymore and I frankly welcome unexpected and unplanned and exciting things, but still, the aspergic little boy is till in there somewhere and now I understand him a little better.

Finally, I was getting a bit depressed lately, what with one thing and another, when I found myself reading the fabulous Joseph Campbell's 'The Power of Myth'. It is a brilliant book that I think everyone should read and packed full of insight and profundity, but a few bits in particular really just gave me a massive paradigm shift of perspective, and now, whilst I'm still not exactly a cheerful soul, life seems a lot more friendly. Which is good, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Reading that back, I'm quite disappointed by the frankly substandard quality of my prose, which I usually pride myself on for their dynamic flow and elegant logic, but that'll have to do for now as I'm really very tired and don't think I can do a lot better.
(WarneMarsh My priority for frivolity begets quality jollity, Thu 15 May 2008, 22:30, Reply)