List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?

Three books that have had an impact on me.

1. FEED – M.T Anderson.

For me, this partly satirical novel from our near-past (2002) painted one of the most prophetic visions of what would come to be.

FEED’s target audience was a teenage/young adult one, so maybe it will never receive the accolade of a more ‘grown up’ Science Fiction novel like 1984, but I believe it deserves it.

Revolving around the teenage protagonist Titus and his friends we are shown a vision of a world of constant connection to an information sphere in a consumerist society, and how this affects both the psyche and society at large.

This may sound a little bit ‘so what?’ in 2024, but it wasn’t in 2002. Our current relationship to technology didn’t seem inevitable back then.

In FEED, Titus has access to any information pouring into his head 24/7. You get the sense that everything from the most important things in history, in life, no longer has any more significance than a new brand of coke. We see a hollowing out of depth, both in society and the psyche, and as the novel eludes to a background ambience of climate breakdown and escalating geopolitical situations, it isn’t only the teenage protagonists who lack the capacity to care less, but also the parents of the teenagers who sometimes seem more infantile than the children. Sound familiar?

It is only when Titus experiences serious loss in his life that a thin vein of hope for the future of humanity is made visible.

(The image is of ‘Ill-equipped’, a work I made in 2011 which was partly inspired by reading FEED).

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2. Capitalism Realism – Mark Fisher

“When I first heard Joy Division, aged 14, it was like that moment in In the Mouth of Madness when Sutter Cane forces John Trent to read the novel, the hyperfiction, in which he is already immersed…”

How Mark Fisher describes first hearing Joy Division is pretty close to how I felt when I read the first 3 chapters of ‘Capitalist Realism’ between a Cafe Nero in Sheffield, and a Wetherspoons in Barnsley, on a warm August afternoon back in 2010.

Fisher put words to things I was experiencing but still unable to express. Reading Capitalist Realism in 2010, I instantly understood my own experiences with depression, and other disorders. Reading Fisher’s interpretation of the suffering of famous musicians like Kurt Cobain helped me understand, maybe for the first time, that my own struggles with mental health weren’t merely down to something ‘wrong’ about me.

More than that the book would open a door to a world of critical theory, and in turn greatly influence the work I would go on to make.

1984 – George Orwell.

I don’t really need to go into this book too much, it doesn’t need an introduction. If anything the vision it paints often problematically provides a crudely simplified reading of our current world.

This said, when I properly read the book aged 20 in 2004 it was one of the first books I had ever read. I wasn’t a childhood reader, I came to reading later on, and perhaps already overly-prejudiced by life experience towards what reading I would do.

But this book allowed me to prove to myself that I could read a book, and not just read it to say I’d read it, but get properly engrossed in it.