Books that Inspire the Geek
In MaryLaine Block’s ExLibris, she asked for readers to send her stories of our proudest moments as librarians, "those times when you knew for a fact that librarians change lives." I submitted a story which was printed in the June 11th edition. In it, I mention "books that had inspired the geek in me when I was young." I have received a few requests to put this list up online–so, here ’tis (the ones I remember grabbing, anyway).
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (the whole Ender series, actually)
- Erewhon by Samuel Butler
- Anthem by Ayn Rand
- Sandman series by Neil Gaiman
- Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
For parents with gifted and/or geeky kids, start them off with the Ender series (I’ve recommended this to several kids now) and move them up to reading Neal Stephenson & Neil Gaiman. Those are my three top author recommendations for gifted/geeky kids everywhere. And I should know…I was one for a very long time. Now I’m a geeky adult with a cool job who makes a decent living doing geeky things. Not bad 
July 7th, 2004 at 4:48 am
Only please keep your kids away from the horrible misanthropic ‘writing’ of Ayn Rand.
The woman thought that First Nations folk deserved to be driven off the land because they didn’t have fences and therefore weren’t civilised. And had quite a few other loopy ideas.
Normally I can tolerate a degree of right wing loopiness if the writing’s good (like Yeats fr instance, even Heinlein on some days), but Rand, ughh.
Thumbs up from me for the Ursula, though. Someone at work just lent me ‘Always coming home’, which I am enjoying more than somewhat.
July 7th, 2004 at 9:24 am
Well, yes, she did have some funny ideas about a few things. But she also has a lot of good ideas about self-sufficience, truth to the self, and rational thought. One takes the good with the bad. Heck, I included Orson Scott Card even though he’s extremely anti-gay. The Ender series is still good though–even though he’s a closed-minded ass. Fortunately, his politics don’t come out (too much) in the Ender books…though there is some extreme God-loving stuff in his later work that I could do without.