Three Books That Changed My Life

In 2007, I began tracking my reading habits on Goodreads. Over the past sixteen years, I read or listened to 581 books containing 210,880 pages. Suppose we use my averages over the past sixteen years to estimate my reading habits for the twenty-five years of my reading history before Goodreads existed. In that case, I’ve read 1,500 books containing nearly 524,000 pages.

I’d like to tell you about the three that most changed my life.

My friend, Jess Tanen, found me in the hallway of our high school. The year was 1992, and we were in ninth grade. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to her locker. She took a book from her backpack and handed it to me, saying, “Here. This is the weirdest book I’ve ever read. I didn’t like it, but I think you’ll love it.”

I opened it up and read the first sentence:

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper.

I don’t think I’ve come across a better combination of words in the English language than “wolfmother wallpaper.” Like a heroin addict, I’ve been chasing the high ever since.

Tom Robbins quickly became my role model as a writer, thinker, and philosopher. He luxuriated in extended metaphors, dazzled with whimsical, mind-expanding analogies, and wrote about the history of religion, politics, governments, and culture without forgetting the role of vaginal juices in the lives of his sexually progressive heroines.

I was already a wannabe writer by ninth grade. I didn’t have the size or talent to be a jock, the work ethic to be an honors student, the discipline to be a musician, or the skills to become a theater geek. But I did love books, and I could sit for hours in a room with a keyboard and a blank screen without getting lonely or bored.

Most importantly, pretty girls gave me positive feedback on my writing. If sports, good grades, guitars, or theatrical monologues weren’t going to do it, writing would have to be my thing.

Every high-school writer goes through an emo phase. They believe in big, heavy literature that plumbs the depth of the human soul. They imagine heroes who look out windows into the pouring rain, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the existential French woman who left them for a one-legged veteran of the Great War who struggles with nightmares and smells like boiled cabbage. Suicide figures prominently in the writing of high schoolers.

Tom Robbins saved me from that. He wrote outlandish books full of big ideas without forgetting to make his readers laugh with delight or get turned on by raw descriptions of human sexuality. He embraced the principles of the Enlightenment at the same time as he reveled in the darkness of our romantic, pagan inclinations. He wove together evolution and spirituality, commercialism and divinity, astronomy and astrology, utopia and reality.

He gave me a way to see the world, care for the world, and love the world without taking it too seriously to remember how ridiculous we all are.

Louis C.K. tells the story of his first memory. He is four years old, standing in front of his parent’s house, shitting in his pants — “a massive, terribly painful shit.” He doesn’t remember the first half of the shit — his memory begins halfway through shitting. “I came online as a result of the anal pain that I was experiencing. It actually awakened me — yeeeeeoooooow! — into the stream of consciousness I’m now living. That’s how my life started. That’s who I am.”

I have the same feelings about Skinny Legs & All and Tom Robbins. Reading that book awakened me into the stream of consciousness I’m now living in.

My wife had a boyfriend when we first met. She doesn’t remember this and denies it being accurate, but she told me that she and her boyfriend were engaged. I was attracted to her, sure, and over the next seven or eight months, that attraction would become the love and devotion it continues to be (no feelings were made known until long after she’d broken up with her boyfriend), but in our first months in each other’s lives, we were, more than anything else, great friends.

We were both freshmen in college. We met under a tree. I sat beneath it reading a book, and she had the nerve to approach me (a stranger) and initiate a conversation. One of her first questions was, “What are you reading?” It wasn’t long before it became clear how much we loved books.

We spent virtually all our time together over the next three months. Neither of us enjoyed our roommates, so we exiled ourselves from our dorm rooms and lived in the college library, “surrounded by stories surreal and sublime.”

We wrote papers sitting next to each other in the computer labs, suggested which books the other should read, and printed out short stories the other needed to experience. We ate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners together, made late-night runs to Denny’s, and grabbed ice coffees at Dunks.

At the end of the first semester, she was flying home to Chicago to spend the holidays with her family, and I was driving to Boston to spend the month with mine. I dropped her off at the airport, but before we left campus, she gave me a book to read.

I looked at the cover: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

“Look inside,” she said.

I began to flip through it, and the typography and layout were as much a work of art as the story itself.

The story has several layers to it. The main text is a book-length, critical review of a non-existent documentary. The documentary is made Real World style, with mostly fixed cameras placed throughout a home. It follows a famous filmmaker (the director of the documentary) and his model wife as they buy, move into, and settle down in their new home. They quickly discover an impossible hallway on the house’s outer wall. After further investigation, the married couple uncovers an impossible maze built beneath their home, which they soon delve into.

Hundreds of footnotes comment on the critical study. The footnotes were written by an L.A. drifter named Johnny. Johnny discovered the study in the burned-out apartment of an old blind recluse who died violently under mysterious circumstances. His footnotes often run for pages and contain a novel’s worth of plot within them.

The layout and typography of House of Leaves mirror the maze in the story, requiring the reader to, for example, twist and turn the physical book as the characters climb a spiral staircase or skip dozens of pages when the characters go through a secret door. The spillover of the footnotes also causes the reader to flip through six or seven pages to follow Johnny’s story before flipping back to where the footnote started to return to the main thread.

The effect is that the reader gets as lost in the story as the characters. As Johnny begins to question reality and sense an ever-increasing dread at the unknown monster(s) that stalk the characters through the maze, the reader takes on the same emotions, making the book one of the most engaging I’ve ever read and one of the scariest.

I found it so scary that I couldn’t put it down. I read the book in one marathon sitting because the moment I turned out the light, I could hear Johnny’s monster breathing at my bedside, threatening my sleep.

The next day, I called my friend and told her how incredible it was. That’s when she admitted that she hadn’t finished it.

“It was too weird for me,” she said, “But I knew you’d love it.”

We’d read many of the same books that semester. Some were assigned by our shared professors. Others were the result of recommendations from friends.

But when I finished House of Leaves and discovered that she gave it to me because it was too weird and she knew I would love it, I felt more seen than I ever had before.

We wouldn’t confess our love for each other for another four months, but after reading House of Leaves on her recommendation, I knew I was hooked.

Jesus was not an only child. He had at least two brothers and probably multiple sisters. After Jesus’ crucifixion, his brother, James, became the arch-leader of the movement. James, the Brother of Jesus, attempts to uncover who James was and how understanding him will bring us closer to the historical Jesus.

In my own life, it served as the final break between me and the faith in which I was raised.

James, the Brother of Jesus, is not a great book. At 1,156 pages, it is 700-800 pages too long and incredibly repetitive. It strays for scores of pages at a time, making it difficult to follow the author’s thread.

It also contains (though not by the author’s fault) a cast of historical personages with similar or identical names, requiring the reader to do too much detective work to determine which person the author is referring to at any given moment. True, this confusion of names lies at the heart of the author’s scholarly investigation (he maintains that the chaos of names was intended to obscure the reality of the Church’s history). Still, he could have made it easier for the reader to untangle the relationships and identities of the individuals involved.

Despite its flaws, James, the Brother of Jesus serves as the foundation of everything I understand about Christianity — namely, that it has very little to do with the historical personage of Jesus and everything to do with the words and acts of a man who never met Jesus, a man we now call St. Paul.

This is not a new understanding of Christianity. Scholars have long understood, and the New Testament makes it clear (Acts 15:2), that the Jerusalem community of Christians that arose after Jesus’ crucifixion had issues with Paul’s work among the Gentiles.

But by focusing on “James the Lord’s Brother” (Gal. 1:19), whom Eisenman shows was the “actual, physical successor” to Jesus, the book provides “a historically accurate semblance of what Jesus himself, in so far as he actually existed, might have been like.”

I first read the book when it made its debut in 1998. I was twenty-one years old at the time. Despite having served as an altar boy for three years, despite working as a receptionist for the priests in the rectory, and despite the nuns who led my Catholic education in the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) telling me since the first grade that I would become “the first American Pope,” I had already ventured beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church thanks, primarily, to the journey Tom Robbins had sent me on (see above).

I retained a deep connection to the Church, however. I may no longer have been a Catholic, but I was still, in many ways, a Christian. James, the Brother of Jesus, shattered my perception of Christianity.

The book highlights the biases of “historians” such as Eusebius, as well as the authors of the New Testament and its Apocrypha, in the creation of Christianity, demanding that believers reckon with the political realities of the early Christian writers and the way Roman and Jewish power structures required so much to be hidden away from plain-reading eyes.

While the orthodox-upending nature of the book is not revolutionary, its subject most definitely was. If we accept Eisenman’s conclusion that “who or whatever James was, so was Jesus,” then we have to admit that the all-loving Christ presented by modern Christianity is fake. Jesus was actually a militant Jewish zealot, a member of an oppositional alliance against the establishment of Rome and the Herodian-controlled Second Temple, whose followers went about armed for battle (Matt. 26:51).

Jesus came not to save the souls of the world but to free Jerusalem from foreign invaders, a political messiah more than a spiritual one. The historical Jesus has more in common with today’s militant Muslims who seek to drive the forces of the infidel American Empire out of Saudia Arabia than with the all-loving Christ preached about in our churches. To get closer to Jesus, one must look to the lost traditions that were driven out of the Roman Church in the fourth century.

With that as the basis for my understanding of the reality of Jesus, my approach to received histories was changed forever.

This perception-shattering work has been followed by dozens of others, all of which could be categorized under the grand title of another essential book, Lies My Teachers Told Me.

As a result, James, the Brother of Jesus, caused me to not only break with my faith; it formed my philosophy as an educator. My goal as a teacher has been, first and foremost, to destroy whatever misunderstandings have been delivered to my students by the myths of our time. For twenty-one years, I was beholden to the myth of Christianity, the complex reality of world history hidden from me and (I imagine) from my teachers. I refuse to let my students suffer the same fate.

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Skinny Legs & All opened me up to a universe where humor, sexuality, and profound philosophical inquiry harmoniously coexist. Tom Robbins disarmed me from the stereotypical broody, angst-ridden teenage writer phase and liberated me to become an audacious explorer of thought.

House of Leaves, with its labyrinthine narrative structure, not only tested the limits of my reading comfort but also marked the inception of a deep and understanding relationship with the woman who would become my wife.

Lastly, James, the Brother of Jesus, shook the foundations of my religious faith, transforming my worldview and shaping my pedagogical philosophy. This book, despite its flaws, helped me confront the discrepancies between received histories and the more intricate, often concealed narratives of reality.

These three books have undoubtedly catalyzed significant shifts in my life, and their effect on my personal evolution stands as a testimony to the transformative power of books.

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Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward