I've started reading Shikasta again, partly as a homage, partly because it is one of those books that underpins and supports me, and partly because it is one of Doris Lessing's best and greatest books, often misunderstood and often disliked by readers for one of two reasons:

1.  It's science fiction, and I don't read science fiction (subtext "I'm not a boy, I'm a feminist")
2. It's not science fiction, because it's not Heinlen, Arthur C Clarke etc. (subtext "I'm not a feminist, I'm a boy")

This how readers create their own worlds in spite of the words - the kind of readers I hate - they resist what's in front of them and twist it to their own world view, won't try anything new, won't think anything new. Dead from the neck up. It reminds me of a Nasrudin* story: 

Nasrudin met two men by the side of the road who boast about their tastes:
"I only eat the finest halva, studded with pistachios and almonds, wrapped in palm leaves."
"Well I only eat the finest saffron rice with chicken and goji berries  and acai berries from the deepest reaches of the Amazon forest."
Nasrudin pauses to think.
"Well I only eat wheat, ground up and carefully mixed with water, yeast, and salt, and then baked at the proper temperature for the proper time."

Doris Lessing was good on reading - said pick up all sorts of books - if you don't like them, if you get bored after the first few pages read somethings else.  Sometimes it's not the right time for you to read a book  - but you may come back to it years later and find that now is the right time.  This happened to me with Henrich Bohl's Group Portrait with Lady - borrowed from Candice in about 1977 maybe, got fifty pages in then couldn't get any further.  Picked it up may be twenty years or so later and read it avidly all the way through, what a great book I thought. Although I can't remember a thing about it now.  But Shikasta still haunts me in the sense of sitting in my consciousness as a kaleidoscopic introduction to a lyrical but stern sense of possibility.

From the first page:

"This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes."

Shikasta,  Doris Lessing p3

There are four other books, all radically different in content and perspective, that give you this thoughtful and feeling distance from the obsessions and givens of our age.

*Nasrudin has a Facebook page now. Of fucking course. Lots of the stories are there with irritatingly little explanations of their meaning underneath. Ignore these as they will limit the way the stories can sit in your consciousness for decades and suddenly pop out.  In the Sufi tradition whenever one Nasrudin story is told, then six more should be told in immediate succession, so that, to paraphrase a lot of explanation and guff, maybe, just, maybe something from one of the stories will stick, usefully.

Here's an apple for the storyteller, and apple for the audience, and an apple for the one person who really listened

Oral saying I heard somewhere- I think I got this from Pat. 

I remember trotting it out at the end of a peformance at a festival, smallish audience of about twenty in a yurt.  Joss came up to me afterwards and said she didn't like that last saying - look at your audience, she said, they all really listened.