Books That Encourage "Alternative Thinking"

"Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless cold deeps of space! You have this thing you call...boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song--it went "Twinkle twinkle little star..." What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!"

That's a quote from Terry Pratchett's YA fantasy novel, HAT FULL OF SKY. There are many reasons why I love Pratchett but perhaps the most important one is that he writes in a way that makes you look at things differently. I had never seen boredom as a talent before, never thought about how we protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by the world we live in by building "little stories, little shells around (our) minds." But of course that's completely accurate, it's what we do. It's what we have to do to get through every day.

Any book that can make me look at something differently is book that I will most likely end up reading over and over again. Any author who manages to consistently frame things in unique and interesting ways will make me fall in love with them a little and will inspire my writing for life. It doesn't have to be "deep" necessarily.

For instance Jennifer Belle gave me a whole new way to look at vasectomies.

Admittedly, it wasn't something I spent a lot of time thinking about before but when I did I never thought of getting a vasectomy as a romantic gesture...at least not until I read Belle's book, THE SEVEN YEAR BITCH. In that novel Izzy is having trouble with her marriage but when her husband tells her, about a year after their son, Duncan, is born, that he's thinking about getting a vasectomy she softens. Quote:

"A vasectomy implied having sex with abandon.  Lots of it, anytime, anywhere. But even more than that, it meant to me security for Duncan, that he was enough, and even after we divorced and Russell married a much younger woman, he would not have children with her.  It was a kind of vow of fidelity stronger than the bonds of marriage or the cut of divorce."

Now that's a different view point. Even though the above statement doesn't hold true for everyone I love the framing of it.

Or Anne Rice's THE VAMPIRE LESTAT. When Lestat awakes to the late 20th century he sees it with the eyes of a 18th century man and thereby brings the readers attention to things that I don't think most of us have ever considered. The first being that "...something all together magical had happened to time. The old was not being replaced by the new anymore." He goes on to note:

   "In the art and entertainment worlds all prior centuries were being "recycled." Musicians performed Mozart as well as jazz and rock music; people went to see Shakespeare one night and a new French film the next.
  In giant fluorescent-lighted emporiums you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and play them on your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down the freeway.  In bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with the novels of Dickens or Ernest Hemingway."

In a time when we all wait anxiously to replace our iPad 4 with an iPad 5 I had failed to notice that we  stopped demanding that our world be exclusively modern. We do still listen to music of the past, mixing it in with today's popular singles. It's perfectly logical to me that someone who enjoys Shakespeare would also enjoy modern french cinema.   And why wouldn't you listen to Mozart while driving around in a Tesla? And yet the very fact that I don't find any of these things peculiar is proof that our time in history is so peculiarly unique. I owe Anne Rice for pointing that out to me.

In a way all of these authors inspired the JUST ONE NIGHT series. I thought about them as I wrote each novella, forcing myself to look at things through the eyes of Terry Pratchett's mystical creatures, Anne Rice's vampires or Jennifer Belle's quirky heroines. Little details in Kasie's internal monologue point to their influence, like in JUST ONE NIGHT Pt.2: EXPOSED when she takes a new twist on the idea that love is transformative:

"Maybe it's the lack of love that is transformative. Maybe it's the distance between what we want and what we have that sculpts our behavior." 

Or Asha's different take on how women can "use" sex in the upcoming JUST ONE NIGHT pt.3: BINDING AGREEMENT:

"When I use sex as a tool it's as a knife not a stepladder." She finally looks at me with a thin smile.  "You use sex as a skeleton key. It opens doors for you. Your way appears to be amazingly effective."

There are dozens of little examples in those books that reflect my love of..well, of what I would call "alternative thinking." It's not everybody's thing. But it's mine. And I will always be grateful to the authors who taught it to me.

For me, it's the books I love most that have been transformative.