Firstly, it's very pleasing to see you here again Donna! You're away too much.
Second, yes, quite often, though it's hard to pin it down. I'm just thinking through my favourite novels, and they do have an impact. They skew my view of the world, the ideas I most easily have, and so on. For instance Sam Delany's Dhalgren made me look at other people in a different way from Alice Hoffman's Seventh Heaven. Both have that sense of everyone being interesting and special and different and so on, if you get the chance to find out, and that's always appealing, but the way that is expressed, and what interests Delany and Hoffman, are so entirely different. Then something like Les Miserables would mean my mind was constantly jumping to moral issues, problems of doing the right thing and so on. Some things - 1001 Nights, say, which I adore more than any book, I think - are too far from my life for this to happen, but it's not that rare for me.
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 3 May 2003 14:29 (twenty-two years ago)