Days 17 & 18: The Truth Project (30 Days of Truth Telling)

This truth thing could get tedious. Lying is so much more...creative.

Day 17 → A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.

I'm a big reader--or was, before the internet brought its addictive self into my life. I've absorbed a lot of literature, so much so that I don't know if I can pick one book that changed my views on something.

Here are a couple of books, though, that did bat my life into an interesting direction:

I guess we could start with the basic biology text that accompanied biology 121 so many years ago. Even though I nearly failed biology in high school, I now have a degree in biology. Of course it wasn't just the book, but it also was the book, if you know what I mean.

I also could mention an earlier book, Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I clung tenaciously to that book when I was a little girl because as far as I knew growing up, there were no other interesting, amazing books with little girl protagonists. I carefully engraved every passage in all of Wilder's books on my heart because I wasn't sure any other little girls protagonists were going to come my way again. And, to be honest, few others ever did. I'm not talking picture books, for babies, but honest to goodness real books. Oh, I read Little Women (when I was about nine)--but those were young women practically. I read The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, but those little nineteenth century English girls were so remote from the little brown American girl I was. I loved their stories, true, but there was no trace in them of the wild child that Laura Ingalls was. I needed desperately as a young girl to read about Laura's struggle against the rebelliousness in herself.

Books are still relatively important to me, but since I don't need them now to save my life their intense charm and transformative powers have lessened, of course.

Day 18 → Your views on gay marriage.

My views on gay marriage are very simple: Anyone who wants to be married should be legally allowed to be married. And anyone who says otherwise is a bigot.