Welcome to the first day of our 30 Day Book Challenge! We’ve had a lot of fun this year in doing comic book, movies, Disney, and anime challenges and we’ve got more lined up through the end of the year. We’re excited to do this book challenge because it offers a lot of very different things than we normally talk about to come up and really dig into something different things. We’ll continue to try and keep some optional/bonus questions in the mix for some of the days as well!
Our first day is the one that I think is one of the most important as we want to know what book defines you. Often, there’s a book you read as a teenager that shapes part of your worldview, exposing you to new things, and getting you to think beyond the sometimes provincial life that a lot of us lead at that time. Sometimes the books come from a parent, a friend, or just a random discovery off the shelf. Which book was it for you and why?
For me, it was Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. I had read a couple of his other books as a young teenager (I was a voracious reader at a very young age), and the ’70s cover (not the one here) was one that really intrigued me. Lazarus Long would be a complicated character who houses a lot of ideas of Heinlein’s that can be contradictory at times, certainly not politically correct, but unafraid of exploring things that others may shy away from. Through this,s I learned things like keeping one’s clothes (and weapons) close to the bed, as the Notebooks of Lazarus Long have long stuck with me. I discovered polyamory through the series, and I really found out that I enjoyed books that took a big picture look at the scale of time along with exploring social issues. It also exposed me to the many different forms of love that exists and helped to shape how I interact with others.
