I perused a library, its young adult section brimming with books. Books set in the past and future, but mostly set in fictional universes in which our hero discovers she/he is the Chosen with great powers and given some important purpose.
In that they are not wrong. In fact, the cliche works because there is so much truth in it. It resonates with some part of the unjaded little souls because the resonant frequency programmed into them senses some truth.
Each of us is breathed in by the Breath of God, created for a mission and a calling, sent forth into a world at war between Evil and Good. Evil beyond our comprehension and Good beyond our wildest imagining.
But what struck me was how young a lot of the authors looked in their back-jacket pictures. It may be simply photoshop or judicious use of sunscreen, but a lot of those authors looked to be in their twenties. In your twenties, writing books that teens read that will shape their understanding of the structure of reality.
As far as the book-jackets could show, these young authors didn't seem to be war veterans, or peace-keepers from soup kitchens, coming out of the trenches of war or humanitarian aid, with lots to tell of what they had seen. A lot of them seemed like just young people themselves who gathered their ideas from the world from other young adult novels they had spent the last decade reading.
The serpent is eating its tail.
The AI is creating answers based on its own answers.
The computer program is stuck in a loop, recursively spitting out its cyclic version of reality.
George R. Martin, comic book nerd and draft dodger, tells other comic book nerds what true gritty war is like, from a lifetime of consuming novels and comic books.
In contrast, by the time J.R.R Tolkien wrote The Hobbit he had fought in a world war, grieved his best friends, convinced his teenage crush to marry him, held down a job interacting with other humans, raised 4 kids, and then was sending The Hobbit in chapters to encourage his son fighting another world war.
He had seen a lot. He had experienced a lot. He had interacted with others who had experienced a lot.
He'd lived.
(In defense of George R Martin, perhaps he based a lot of this on reading his fellow men who did go and fight in wars he didn't believe in. But if I had a choice of hearing about war from the minstrel, or the soldier, I'd rather pick the soldier. Guns Up or something by a man of George's generation who actually fought)
L. M. Montgomery's genius was writing her own village church people....Anne of Green Gables, Rilla of Ingleside...all the side characters, all the real people she wove into her stories....now, nearly 200 years later I can love her nosy neighbor, and laugh and cry over the struggles of this small town in the throes of being the homefront in WWI. The most forgettable of her stories are the ones I suspect she strayed most from her lived experience "Anne's House of Dreams", where as the romantic writer proposes to the girl with the floorlength hair of swirling gold, it feels like we really have wandered into one of Anne's dreams. Give me Ken and Rilla's awkward date on the porch while Old Susan crashes the party and starts sharing embarrassing stories of them as children. One of those scenes felt so much realer, because I would bet $100, it was.
Can young people write good books, my son asks? Is it required to actually live everything you write about? No. Tolkien didn't become king, or destroy a ring of power.
But on some level the stories (and people) we write must come from somewhere.
- Your life of the life of someone you know [primary]
- The life of someone you know, who wrote about it [secondary]
- The novel of someone you hope got it from reality, or at least, another novel based in reality.
Books about reality
In no particular order
Autobiographies---Primary Sources
- The Word Came with Power
- Search for the Source by Neil T. Anderson
- ?Mission Possible by Marilyn Lazlo
- Guns Up, Johnnie M Clark
- ??Korean War book
- ?book by Amy Carmichal? Mimosa?
- The Cross and the Switchblade
- Through the Valley of the Kwai
- Guadalcanal Diary
- Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Farmer Boy
- Caddie Woodlawn
- First 2 Ralph Moody Books [Little Britches, Man of the Family]
- Water by the Inch
- Cheaper by the Dozen
- The Hiding Place
- ?Surviving the Angel of Death by Eva Moses Kor
- ?Leap into Darkness, by Leo Bretholz
- ?Diary of Anne Frank
- With God in Solitary Confinement/In God’s Underground/With Christ in the communist prisons
- Pastor’s Wife
- Between Hammer and Sickle by Mihai Wurmbrand
- If Prison Walls Could Speak
- ?Gulag Archipelago
- Son of Hamas
- Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus
- ??Unbroken, Louis Zamperini
- Joker One
- Guns Up by Johnnie M. Clark
- The Search for the Source
- ????Daylight must come.
- ????The insanity of God
Biographies
- Joan of Arc: Her Story by Regine Pernoud
- Kit Carson by Ralph Moody
- ?Christopher coulubus by Fernando Aresto
- ?Mary Lincoln by Ruth Painter Randall
- ?William Wilberforce, by Eric Metaxes
- William Wilberforce by Belmonte
- ???TO the golden shore, [adoniram Judson] by Courtney Anderson
- Never Say Die (Gladys Aylward) by Cyril Davies
- Sundar Singh by Cyril Davies
Epics & Legends & Ballads
- Illiad & Odyssey
- Beowulf
- Song of Roland
- Silmarillion
- The Lord of the Rings
- George MacDonald The Golden Key
- Fairy tales (Lang, irish one, etc)
- ???Viking Sagas???
- Demon Lover, Wanderer, [Medieval Ballads]
- Ballad of the White Horse
Novels
- All the Trailblazer books (Dave and Neta Jackson) especially “Bandit of Asheley Downs” and “Listen for the Whipoorwill” and “Captured by the River Rats”
- God King
- Narnia Books CS Lewis
- CS Lewis’ space trilogy
- Till We Have Faces
- LOTR & The Hobbit
- Roll of Thunder, Hear my cry
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries, Four Faultess Felons, Man Who Was Thursday
- George MacDonald something
- Strangers and Sojourners & Plague Journal
- Sophia House
- ?Bronze Bow
- ??Rolf and the Viking Bow
- Cry the Beloved Country
- Crime and Punishment
- Number the Stars
- Allegiance & Choices of One by Timothy Zahn [Star Wars]
- [The Giver]
- Huckleberry Finn
- Mark Twain's Joan of Arc
- ?Jane Eyre? mixed feelings on this. It's a Christian response to a gothic novel, but it's still a gothic novel....my favorite characters die
- ???Starship Troopers
- ????something by Isaac Asimov?
MORE BOOK RECCOMENDATIONS, I haven't read all of these....
For kids and teens to read:
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