The Book That Changed My Life, subtitled “71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them” is the kind of work you can dip into during the holiday season and feel you have learned something. Edited by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen, the book features mostly American writers talking about the book that led them round the bend — out of boredom, out of loneliness — into a brave, new world. In “The Art of Possibility,” Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander write that art books are “about rearranging us, creating surprising juxtapositions, emotional openings, startling presences, flight paths to the eternal.”
The notion of books as a form of transport — as a way of freeing us from the prison of the room, of our own skin — lies at the heart of this book. Small-town Carolina girl Dorothy Allison sees a parallel between herself and the young, black girls in Toni Morrison’s famous novel, The Bluest Eye. “I knew absolutely that Claudia was black and that The Bluest Eye was most of all about the hatred and contempt directed at little black girls, but in my white heart what rocked and shifted was my sense of great contempt directed also at me and mine.”
As a young girl, the English writer Kate Atkinson read “books.” Later, in school, she was forced to read “literature,” something that she studied in great detail and did not merely read passively, to get good grades in school. “And it was magnificent, it was transcendental. It was the light at the end of Daisy’s clock, it was the wind howling above the moors above Howorth, it was the whale, for God’s sake.”
All of the writers here first learned to love books as children. This shows us the importance – still – of reading books, of printed matter, in this day and age of the internet, of SMS messages, of Instagram photos. When you read a piece of prose, your mind forms images shaped by the sentences that you read. Thus, there is a deeper impression in your mind, an indelible stamp scored in the texture of your memory.
James Atlas of Chicago was visiting Paris for the first time, and entered the iconic Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, where Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein used to hold court. The young man bought three books – all of them dealing with Chicago, so he could hear its accents, view its vistas once more, while on a trip to the Old World that was Europe. Hemingway would stay all day in the cafes of Paris to write chapters for what would become a book of nonfiction called A Movable Feast. Then and now, this is a book that any young person who wants to write should read – and emulate.
James Atlast bought Dangling Man by Saul Bellow, Studs Lonigan (the first volume) by James T. Farrell and Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks wrote about the black slums of South Side Chicago, but wrote about them in a formal voice, her poems following the strict forms of sonnets and quatrains. If not that, she wrote very modern poems where echoes and internal rhymes piled up on each other like the wrecks of junked cars. She was a classmate of my Poetry professor Emmanuel Torres at the famous Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1950s.
Listen to “We Real Cool,” written for the pool players at the Golden Shovel. “We real cool. We/ Left school. We/ Lurk late. We/ Strike straight. We/ Sing sin. We/ Thin gin. We/ Jazz June. We/ Die soon.” Its brief, terse lines with their one-syllable words sound like bullets bursting in a borough of Chicago hardened by poverty.
If that is short, then The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien is long, and magnificently so. When Graeme Base first saw the tome that his brother owned, he thought, “I will read all 1,086 pages of it? Are you kidding?”
But he did. “I can’t remember starting the book, but I can remember finishing it. I cried. How dare it come to an end? Only 1,086 pages? I wanted it to go on and on, not because I had escaped into another world – but because I had been utterly captivated by the romance, the fantasy, the sheer epic enormity of the thing. More a prisoner than an escapee!”
And if Tolkien’s opus was vast and meandering, another favorite of the writers here is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, for the intimacy of its voice. Before Salinger burst onto the American literary scene like a firecracker, the reigning novelists were Hemingway, with his macho novels, and Faulkner, with his novels of doom and decay in the American South. Sure, the self is also present in their novels, but the thumb mark of the “I” character, with its distinctive voice, captured the attention of an American reading public after the war. When you are an anguished teenager reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, you will feel he was talking to you, and to you alone, in this zeitgeist of a novel.
Elizabeth Berg is one of these sensitive readers. Her English teacher, Mrs. Yeatman, had assigned Chaucer and Beowulf, which she dutifully read. “I read about J.D. Salinger because I’d heard about The Catcher in the Rye. What I’d heard was that it was dirty. My friend, Donna, who’d transferred to our tame school after being kicked out of her fancy private one, said no, Catcher was good . . . I opened the book and read the first sentence and thought, Huh!? And then I devoured the book and when I finished I went right back to the first page and started over again. I kept thinking, I didn’t know you could do this! I didn’t know you could write this way! It was so open. So close to the bone. . . “
When you open a book, this world closes, and another one begins.
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