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Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

So we talked about authors who influenced us. Today I want to talk about books. I kind of touched on that last week, but that’s not the direction I want to take this discussion. Well, sort of. See, there are core books that influenced how I look at certain concepts to my writing, and even how I consume or enjoy certain concepts. From both Rowling’s Harry Potter and Goodkind’s Sword of Truth I developed a firm decision about how prophecy is unlikely to be something that you can’t just straight walk away from. There needs to be some free will involved or it just flies out of my suspension of disbelief. On the flip side, the only time travel concept I have ever bought into was the five book Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, where random events happen in earlier books, only to be caused later on. But I firmly believe that if a time travel event has not already happened, then it cannot be later caused. In other words, if I did not appear in Paris in 1960, then I can never, ever time travel back to Paris in 1960. There is no paradox. Once time travel has happened, it is locked. All that can change is your understanding of the events, such as the missing keys in Bill and Ted.

There are a few other books that shaped me, such as my love of logic and flawed oracles learned from Asimov’s Foundation Series, and my love of puns and word play introduced by my mother, but cemented in Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. I can’t find the exact quote, but one reviewer stated that the citizens of Xanth would not have to worry about exploding fruit growing on trees if we did not have firecrackers called “cherry bombs” in our world. I love puns, I love word play. I used to get myself in trouble telling very off color or even insensitive jokes just because I loved the turn of phrase, and didn’t think about who might be offended.

I think, however, that even more than the specific books, I was highly influenced by the controversy surrounding several books in my life, or at least the timing. My mother started as the biggest supporter of me and my siblings reading. She was a highly intelligent woman, born and raised on a sharecropper farm in rural Arkansas. She was the first in her family to go to college, and she adored classic science fiction. She tolerated fantasy, but was more likely to be forgiving of the classics, or anything with a Scifi twist. She was disapproving of the Sword of Shannara, having wizards, orcs, and demons, until she found out it was post-apocalyptic. She disliked Card’s Alvin Maker series because it had magic, but loved his Homecoming saga despite the language and sex, all because it incorporated Scifi tech into a fantasy world. I firmly believe this is exactly where I got my love of blending the two genres, from trying to please her.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned this, but I was born and raised in a pretty extreme, fire-and-brimstone, Southern Baptist household, much of it spent in north Alabama, when the Army wasn’t sending us off to other locations. Both of my parents have passed, but I did love them, as much as I was allowed. That being said, my mother suffered from something I often referred to as “spiritual dementia”. She spent my elementary years encouraging me to read, read, read, but by the time I was approaching high school, we started having… issues. She would go on a religious kick, and attempt to purge the house of any “occult” influences. This would involve me coming home from school and finding that my bedroom had been ransacked, and every book that was not by a Christian author, and about Christian topics, would have been thrown out, already driven to a random dumpster so they were not recoverable. Then five or six months later, she would come to me, describe some random Scifi or fantasy novel, and ask to borrow it, saying she wanted to re-read it. I would tell her she tossed it months ago, and she would be all, “No, why would I do that? I loved that book!” I’ll let you decide if this is normal.

Junior year, AP English, I got assigned William Golding’s Lord of the Flies for a book report. Very standard stuff you would think. Except no, a bit before that, they had just released the 1990 version of that movie, which was rated R. Now my parents had this interesting little rule when it came to movies. As long as we lived under their roof or were supported by them in any way, we were not allowed to watch any R movies, and PG-13 movies could only be watched if one of them had watched it first and had pre-approved it. This included at a friend’s house, at the theater, or even when I was 22 and stayed with them a few months when I left college and was transitioning back to the workforce. So here I was, assigned a classic book that millions of students have read, and my mother was up in arms over it because they had made a rated R movie over the source material. Guess which book became a secret favorite for the next year or so, and still holds a soft spot for me?

By the time my mother passed away, sadly, she had slipped further into her spiritual dementia, to the point that she once grabbed my niece’s homework notebook, with homework still inside, and took it out in the back yard and burned it. All because my niece had stuck a Harry Potter sticker on it, and had the audacity to bring it into grandma’s house. Needless to say, by brother was not happy. I tried at one point to ask an honest, non-confrontational question of my mother, as to why Harry Potter was occultic, yet Lord of the Rings was “Godly”. I found out it was because someone had written a book called, “Finding God in the Lord of the Rings” and she had seen the title. I read the book, and it was basically about finding opportunities to see religious lessons in secular locations, such as passages from The Lord of the Rings. I didn’t bother showing her when just a year or two later the same author published, “Finding God in Harry Potter”.

So that’s my take on books and how several of them shaped me. I know I went kind of hard on my mother here in this post, and some of you may find me cold about it. I spent a lot of time dealing with trauma from growing up in that household, as much as I may love my family. I ask that you be patient. Next week we are covering other media that influences us, such as movies and games, but the week after that we are covering people in our lives that influenced our reading and writing, and I have some amazing stories about my mother that are going to make you positively swoon. So give me a chance, consider giving me the benefit of the doubt on this point, and read on!

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham