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.
I read Albert Camus' "The Plague" around the time I was twenty. It made a huge impression on me, and still ranks as one of my favorite books. But that's not why I chose this book. The "The Plague's" existentialist themes would come to inform my worldview (and later, my atheism) I did not know that at the time. Rather, my reading of this book stands as a totem marking a particular place and time in my life. I'm not trying to be arrogant when I say I was a smart kid. I was, but I abused and neglected this gift. So it was a bit of a shock when I found myself flunked out of college and on the verge of marriage and fatherhood, twin financial responsibilities that would shut the door on a return to higher learning. It was then that I read "The Plague". The profound emotional reaction I had to this book made me see two things: how badly I had frittered away my intellectual opportunities, and that henceforth I would have to seek out and create those opportunities myself. I may have lost my chance at a meaningful career, but I would strive to lead a meaningful life. Thus, the bleakest novel I've ever read became for me an enduring call-to-arms as well as a symbol of hope.
