10 Books That Taught Me How To Live My life

I was raised by wolves, I learned nothing by example…thank god for books

1) Harold and the Purple Crayon - Crockett Johnson

 This  book taught me that we invent the life we want to live..

2) Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

 This book showed me a man who invented his life, from scratch. Scrapping the old easy way of living that he fell into and following his dreams

3) Camera Lucida - Roland Barthes

This book showed me that we see what we want to see…and that we take away from a situation what works for us and leave the rest behind…we don't have to understand our enormity every second of our lives

4 ) The Boy who Followed Ripley - Patricia Highsmith

This showed me people following their instincts and the amazing adventures that resulted from being true to oneself

5)  Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin

This book showed me a regular old gay gay, who had the same feelings and motivations as anyone else….a revelation..that yeah, I was different , but I was also just like everyone else

6)  Christine - Stephen King

I love seeing what happens when things have feelings

7)  Shakespeare's complete sonnets

Pure verbal art, brilliant like a David Bowie lyric

8,9, 10 )  Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso - Dante

For me college was all about ideas…. and reading Dante, in Italian, under the direction of the brilliant renaissance scholar Joseoh Mazzeo was life changing. It was subversive in that it turned conventions on their head…it fleshed out the rules of christianity in such as a way as to highlight their role as allegory and fable, as ideas on how to live one 's life and not rules to follow slavishly….easily some of the best art I have ever encountered