"My name is Seth Fowler and I chose Oliver Twist as the book that changed my life. I'm not so sure that it actual changed my life, but it did change the way I think. I spent some time traveling throughout India and Nepal over the past year. In that year I encountered many young children who faced child labor in some terrible factories and mills. It relates well with what Charles Dickens had to go through as a child, and what the character Oliver has to go through as well. This book seriously made me sit down and think about the problems with the social classes and gave me a drive to shed light on the many flaws amongst classes. Oliver Twist has given me a desire to pursue social work along with journalism as a career to get the stories out to the world about child labor and the other countless crimes committed towards children around the world."
My friend got me into comic books back in highschool. We read the usual fare: The X-Men, Spiderman, Batman...lots of spandex. Almost every week we'd go to the comic book store and check out what's new. After a while I started noticing this book called The Sandman. The covers drew me in; it was unlike the ones I normally see. It had paintings and photos mixed together. Great stuff! After a while I went ahead and got it. I really didn't care what the book was all about. For all I know it was just a loose adaptation of Robert Smith's fantasy life. For me, I thought the cover alone was worth the price of the book. The storytelling was at first hard to follow. I started with #57, "The Kindly Ones", which was close to the end of the entire series. The pace was slow, not a lot of things blowing up, clever one-liners, fighting (let alone The Cure references). There were gods, yes, and fairies, and monsters but most of the time they just talked and acted like regular people. I guess that made me want to find out more about the characters. They're jerks like any one of us. Cliche as this sounds, they were living. I was amazed at how much Gaiman mixed elements from horror, literature, religion, and created his own mythos on top of it. And how can I forget Dave McKean's art! It made such a big influence in how I see things. For me, it became a portal. Since then I wanted to read and learn more about all sorts of things--art, history, mythology--not just comic book characters; what ties them together, where the key light is.
"They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born."---Olympia Binewski I discovered ‘Geek Love’ in a local bookstore (the now defunct John Rollins, Bookseller) when I was fourteen. At the time, I had no idea what I held in my hand; I was merely looking for the next thing to read in the way that only a lifelong reader (or an apex predator on the hunt) can truly understand. I took ‘Geek Love’ off the shelf based solely on the cover: “Geek.” Hey, that’s me. “Love.” Sure, why not? *Flips book* “Traveling Carnival.” Sold. I grew up a lower working-class brown kid an affluent, overwhelmingly Caucasian suburb. By the time I found ‘Geek Love,’ my parents weren’t really together, but weren’t exactly divorced. I had been introduced to an older brother who I had always heard of but had never met, and had come to believe might actually be just a family legend (Sorry, Scott). I began to question the Lutheran faith in which I had been raised. I started to understand that I liked girls and boys. I certainly looked nothing like my blue-eyed, predominantly Dutch friends, and I didn’t really think along the same lines either. Here’s the part where, in many narratives, I would tell you how I longed to fit in, that I cried myself to sleep at night dreaming of having perfectly curled bangs. In actuality, the only thing that felt off was how comfortable I was in my weirdness. Something inside said I shouldn’t want to be unusual, but it was the only place that felt right. Reading ‘Geek Love,’ I saw a family that was different, and loved differently, but did indeed love. I saw the danger of fanatical devotion. Most importantly, I began to see the beauty in the bizarre. ‘Geek Love’ changed my life by helping to solidify the person I would become. I no longer felt I had to pretend to want to be something I could never be. I could just be the weirdo I always knew I was. That is an attitude I still hold today. I’m not for everybody, and some may even find me off-putting. I’m OK with that.
