I remember in grade school, my mom told me I should read these books about a wizarding school and I dismissed it at first because I thought it sounded lame. Nonetheless, she brought the first Harry Potter book home from the library for me to try. A couple days later I was already on the second one. It’s hard for me to pick only one book out of this entire series but there was one factor that made me choose the fifth one and that was the introduction of Luna Lovegood. Growing up I was a weird kid and like most weird kids, I was picked on and bullied throughout grade school. I became very quiet and kept to myself a lot. Which is why I related to Luna so much. She was fucking weird! And she was picked on, too. But unlike me, she didn’t care at all. That never stopped her from being herself so why should it stop me? It means a lot when you can find someone to relate to, even if it is a character in a fiction book.
James Gleick's Chaos (Viking, 1987) changed my life. Quite simply, I was on a path, and after reading it I was on a different one. I was a music journalist. When I came across Chaos, I had spent a lot of time and effort becoming a music journalist. The book is about chaos theory. It's about the disparate scientists who were working between the lines of different disciplines. It's about sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It's about how paths can change unexpectedly. Reading Chaos blew my head wide open. I was suddenly aware of so many other possibilities. I quit my job and went back to school. Now I teach college and write my own books. I still write about music, but now I write about a lot of other things. Also, after a few false starts with books that didn't stick, Chaos turned me into a reader. I starting reading it 20 years ago this month, and I haven't stopped reading since.
