Guests
by Roxanne Coady, December 30, 2006 7:20 AM
(Roxanne's Note: Two treats in reading this pair of essays. First, having had the pleasure to meet both authors, their choices were unexpected. I was so taken with both contributions that I promptly read the book they suggested. The Denial of Death has profoundly changed my thinking, and I imagine I will read it again and again.It reinforced for me the notion Italo Calvino expresses in a line I cite at the end of The Book that Changed My Life (introducing the books on my own list): "The Classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual's or the collective unconscious."Ernst Becker's The Denial of Death will most assuredly hide in the layers of my memory and be part of my unconscious ? guiding how I live and think. Not bad from one little book.)The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker Robert Kurson During a series of insomniac nights as a college sophomore, I pondered what it meant to be dead. The idea of not existing, and worse, not existing forever, was terrifying in ways daytime thoughts never can be. Would it be silent? Cold? Lonely? It seemed too much for the mind to grasp. I got to wondering how people walked around every day with equanimity when such a gargantuan and terrible and inescapable fate awaited. A few days later, I happened across a paperback in the University of Wisconsin bookstore. Its title, The Denial of Death, grabbed me immediately. I plopped down on an old black leather chair and started reading. By the time I got up, I viewed the world differently. By the time I got up, I was a different person. The book, written by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, is a brilliantly conceived and beautifully written synthesis of the thinking of Freud, Otto Rank, Kierkegaard, and other giant minds. It addresses what Becker thinks to be the basis for much of human culture, behavior, and character: man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. The reality of our fate, Becker argues, is too much for the human animal to bear; much of the world around us, from art to war to love to hate, from the forming of individual personalities to the construction of civilizations, arises from our desperate and usually unconscious efforts to deny our impermanence, to run from our animal doom. I read The Denial of Death three times that year, and have read it many more times since. In it, I find answers to nearly every question I can think to ask about being human and about being in the world. In it, I find explanation for why men do what they do. It may sound odd to suggest that there is comfort to be found in a book about knowing our own mortality, but that is the beauty of Becker, and his gift is to show us that it is the beauty of ourselves. *** After earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Harvard, Robert Kurson left a career in real estate law to pursue writing. He was hired by the Chicago Sun-Times as a data-entry clerk, a job that led to a full-time position as a features writer. From the Sun-Times he moved to Chicago magazine, and then to Esquire, where he is a contributing editor. He is the author of Shadow Divers, and his award-winning stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. He lives in the Chicago suburbs and can be reached via the Internet at [email protected]. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker Benjamin Cheever When a friend sticks a book in my hand and crows, "It changed my life," my heart plummets. They never say, "It changed my life." They sing it out, as if boasting about intellectual suppleness, while not talking about the book at all. As if change were easy, welcome. I know better. Sure, the Renaissance was change, but so was the Ice Age. Plus, I'm not intellectually supple. When one of those books does come along, it knocks me over. I'll read it twice. If I can possibly get a recording of the book, I'll do so. I'll run with it in my iPod, wash the dishes with it. I'll dog-ear and underline my copy. I'll quote endlessly from the text in email. I'll bore my neighbors, embarrass my friends, infuriate my family. Sometimes it's a novel, sometimes a book of poetry. This year Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death has got me by the throat. Blackstone offers an excellent recording. "This book is a bid for the peace of my scholarly soul," Becker says in the preface. He writes like Muhammad Ali used to boast, with a wild abandon that at first alienates and ultimately charms. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression ? and with all this yet to die. Published in 1973, Becker's book is still a revelation in my little world. I particularly cherish his brilliant exposition ? credited to Kierkegaard ? on the vanity of sorrow. What a view! I'd never seen the world that way. This book changed my life. Argghh!! *** Benjamin Cheever's most recent book of nonfiction, Selling Ben Cheever, was excerpted in the New Yorker, Gourmet, and the New York Times Book Review. His last novel, The Good Nanny, was selected as a New and Notable book by the New York Times Book Review. He was a reporter for a daily newspaper for six years and an editor at Reader's Digest for eleven, and has taught at Bennington College and the New School for Social Research. He's now writing Strides, a book about running, to be published by
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Guests
by Roxanne Coady, December 29, 2006 11:50 AM
(Roxanne's Note: Billy Collins' wit, as evidenced by his poetry and his persona, is in full display in his essay. Who would have thought you could analogize The Yearling and Lolita ? yet you read the essay and wonder why you never saw the connection before. Plus, I utterly agree with his introduction ? every book in some way changes you.)The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The opportunity to single out a book that "changed my life" makes me realize that no book leaves us unchanged, for better or worse. Why read otherwise? Even to be bored is to be changed. Sven Birkerts points out that the act of reading (especially fiction) posits an Elsewhere, another place beyond the present reality we inhabit. We read in order to travel, or be borne, to that other place and thus interrupt the curse of having only one life to lead. Strange to say, but Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling (1938) finds itself in competition with Nabokov's Lolita (1955) for first prize in my life-changing category. As far as geographical tourism goes, The Yearling, which my mother first read to me, lifted me out of a childhood in New York City and set me down in the scrubland of north Florida, where a barefoot boy was free to roam an exotic terrain of palmetto, orange groves, and alligator swamps. Lolita, which I read secretly while ensconced in a Jesuit college, took me on a tour of an America I hadn't seen yet: a land of billboards, western scenery, and cheesy motels. And, of course, a tour of strange love. What more deeply connects the two books ? one written for children, the other about a seducer of children ? is their capacity to expand the natural sympathies of the reader. A boy and his pet deer and a man and his nymphet seem an odd coupling, but they manage a similar effect. The plight of the deer and the fate of Lo arouse pity; but the doomed attempts to capture and control two essentially wild creatures elicit sympathy. No fence, however high, will contain the growing deer, and no amount of scheming and cajoling will keep the girl from growing into a woman. Her death in childbirth underscores, from Humbert's point of view, the fatal consequences of her maturation. If reading enlarges our sympathy for others, strangers mostly ? here a boy and a man whose loves are doomed by their desire ? then these two books, alien to each other, widened my world and awakened empathies I had never felt before. *** Billy Collins is the author of six books of poetry, including The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems; Picnic, Lightning; Sailing Alone Around the Room; and Questions About Angels, which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series. Collins' poetry has appeared in a variety of periodicals and in several volumes of The Best American Poetry. A New York Public Library Literary Lion, he is Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College and editor of Poetry 180, an Internet project designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. He has served as United States Poet Laureate (2001?2003) and is now New York State Poet Laureate
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Guests
by Roxanne Coady, December 28, 2006 11:47 AM
(Editor's Note: The following text is an excerpt from The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them, edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen.)Little, Big by John Crowley As I am now seventy-five and still a nonstop reader, I cannot nominate any single book as the one that changed my life. If only one, it would have to be the complete Shakespeare, with the Hebrew Bible a near rival, and a group of poets hovering not far away: John Milton, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Browning, among others. But I have written extensively about everything so far mentioned, and desire to recommend strongly a fantasy novel much too little known, though it was first published a quarter century ago, John Crowley's Little, Big (1981). I have read and reread Little, Big at least a dozen times, and always am startled and refreshed. It seems to me the best book of its kind since Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Like the Alice books, Little, Big is an imaginative masterpiece, in which the sense of wonder never subsides. Little, Big is a family saga in which several generations live on surprisingly close terms with the faery folk, hence the title. So perpetually fresh is this book, changing each time I reread it, that I find it virtually impossible to describe, and scarcely can summarize it. I pick it up again at odd moments, sometimes when I wake up at night and can't fall asleep again. Though it is a good-sized volume, I think I remember every page. Little, Big is for readers from nine to ninety, because it naturalizes and renders domestic the marvelous. Wallace Stevens said that poetry was "one of the enlargements of life." So is Little, Big. I have recommended it to scores of friends and students, and invariably they tell me they have found wisdom and delight. *** Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard, is the author of more than twenty-five books, including Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine; Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?; How to Read and Why; Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; The Western Canon; The Book of J; and The Anxiety of Influence. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, among many other awards and
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Guests
by Roxanne Coady, December 27, 2006 11:26 AM
(Editor's Note: The following text is an excerpt from The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them, edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen.)To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee I knew from the time I was eight that I wanted to be a teacher, but not that I wanted to be a writer. In third grade, my lowest marks were in reading ("Walter needs to check out more library books") and writing ("Walter needs to practice his penmanship and be less sloppy"). If you'd suggested to my teacher, prim Miss Comstock, that I'd grow up to be a novelist, she might have thrown back her head and guffawed. My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Cramer, took us outside to write about nature (which I liked) and made us memorize her favorite poems (which I didn't). Longfellow's "Evangeline," Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," Vachel Lindsay's "The Potato's Dance": none of these works spoke to me, and anyway, what kind of men had first names like Vachel and Joyce? At a schoolwide assembly, our class was made to mount the gymnasium stage and recite, in unison, "The Potato's Dance." I'd been tapped for a solo quatrain that required me to step to the front of the stage and speak the following lines, which I still remember at age fifty-five, possibly because of posttraumatic stress syndrome. There was just one sweet potato.He was golden-brown and slim: The lady loved his figure. She danced all night with him. As I spoke, I could see the science teachers snickering at the rear of the gym. I forgave them immediately. I thought literature was kind of stupid, too. Later that school year, President Kennedy got killed. Then Beatlemania happened. Then it was eighth-grade graduation. I was only half paying attention when Miss Higgins, the scary teacher at the microphone, called my name. I got off my folding chair and took the perp walk to the front of the auditorium. Miss Higgins handed me an envelope. On the outside, it said, "Julia Pease Award for Writing." Inside was a crisp ten-dollar bill. A writing award? For me? As I returned to my seat, Mrs. Cramer's wink implied that there had not been a mistake. But later that day at Ocean Beach Park, I spent all my prize money on Skee-Ball and mini-golf, just in case. In high school, I read and wrote because I had to, not because I wanted to. In English, a book report was coming due. I was a poky reader who favored short books for these assignments, but I'd already reported on Orwell's Animal Farm and Steinbeck's The Red Pony. From my sister's nightstand, I grabbed the paperback she'd been yapping about, To Kill a Mockingbird. The cover had a Technicolor picture of Gregory Peck and some little girl in overalls. I opened the book and read the first sentence, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." Three days later, I finished the book. A novel had never kidnapped me before. Until Mockingbird, I'd had no idea that literature could exert so strong a power. Like its progenitor, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and its big brother, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a first-person narrative in which conscience is tested and hypocrisy is skewered. There's neighborhood intrigue, a rape trial, the attempted murder of innocents, and laugh-out-loud comic relief. The narrator, a sadder but wiser adult, gives the floor early and often to the child's voice and viewpoint. The reader gets all this good stuff, plus Lee's sensual and evocative language. Listen to how she describes a Depression-era town in the Deep South. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. Pass me a sweat towel and a sweet tea, Miss Harper. It's summertime and I'm in Alabama. In college, I fell in love with other fictions: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cather's My Ántonia, Dreiser's Sister Carrie. In grad school, it was the masters of the short story form who captured my heart: Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus. But like they say, there's something special about your first. *** A native of Norwich, Connecticut, Wally Lamb is the bestselling author of two novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, both New York Times Notable Books and selections of Oprah's Book Club. Among his many honors are the Pushcart Prize, the Connecticut Governor's Arts Award, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which recognized I Know This Much Is True for its contribution to destigmatizing mental illness. Lamb taught high school and university students for twenty-five years, and for the past six years has served as volunteer facilitator of a writing workshop at a maximum-security women's prison in Niantic, Connecticut. From this program came Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters, an anthology of autobiographical essays by his inmate students, which he edited and introduced. He is currently at work on his third novel, The Hour I First Believed. He and his wife, Christine, are the parents of three sons, Jared, Justin, and Teddy
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Guests
by Roxanne Coady, December 26, 2006 1:46 PM
(Editor's Note: The following text is an excerpt from The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them, edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen.)The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton A good book changes you, even if it is only to add a little to the furniture of your mind. It will make you laugh and perhaps cry; it should certainly make you think. A great book will make you dream in regions you have never dared to before, and ultimately it will spur you to create or achieve something new yourself. For me G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday is a book to light fires in my mind, uplift my heart, tell me truths I had only glimpsed before. It makes me feel wonderfully unique, and at the same time part of all mankind. If you think that is too much for one book, read it, and see if it doesn't do the same for you. Read it again a few years later, and find it does so even more powerfully. It seems an absurd title. What sort of a book is it? Chesterton himself, in an essay written in 1936 and published the day before he died, called it "melodramatic moonshine" and pointed out that he had subtitled it A Nightmare. I would say it is more of a vision, in the sense of something unreal that makes reality suddenly easier to understand. Sorry! The Chesterton passion for paradox is contagious. It is a marvelous adventure of six men with enormous courage fighting against the anarchy in the world, against those who would destroy, whether by bombs or by indifference. They battle all kinds of dangers, and are pursued from England to France and back again. Some of the chases are deeply sinister, some wild, some desperate, some hilarious, some totally bizarre. The last is the most fantastic of all. If I say it includes riding on an elephant and in a hot-air balloon, and appears to end in something close to the end of the world, or a fancy dress party in the garden of heaven, you will catch the idea. And yet the issues are as real as bread and butter, or today's terrorism in the streets. It is a fantasy, in the best sense that it is the imagination set free. Within a fantasy's own logic of meaning, its morality, there are no boundaries as to what a writer may use to enrich the picture. It is a poem in prose. The sunset over Saffron Park: ...but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. There is far more, a hundred passages immeasurably enriching to the memory of beauty, the vividness of life, the sheer love of the earth and the gift to savor it and be grateful. I do not see a pink tree in blossom without thinking of the one before which Gabriel Syme fell on his knees when he expected to die. The music of words, the color and depth, are there all the way through. Chesterton was a poet, he could scarcely help it. But he was also a thinker, a believer, a man who dared to dream. The Man Who Was Thursday is above all a journey of the spirit where men love the good in the world enough to fight for it. Even though each believes himself utterly alone, and that the enemy is too many, too strong for him ever to win, he cannot turn away or betray the light he has once seen. One short quotation from the end summarizes the heart of it. "But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope." The Man Who Was Thursday is vast and wise, filled with words and ideas that make sense of pain and loneliness and the length of the whole journey of life. But you need to read it for yourself, perhaps many times. How has it changed me? It tells me that I am only walking the same path as all mankind, and not only that it makes sense but it is the only way that possibly could do. I may imagine I am alone, and that is necessary too, but I am not, I am simply in my own part of the procession. Chesterton's great book gives me food, armor, and a compass for the soul. It tells me yet again that the power of the word is like the power of light itself. I will read, and I will also write! I will write something that will be food, light, and armor for others. Thank you, Chesterton, for the passion of your mind. You died before I was born, but I like to think you would have approved at least some of the things I have done, and will yet do. *** Anne Perry is the widely acclaimed author of two bestselling mystery series set in Victorian London: the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, including Seven Dials and Long Spoon Lane, and the William Monk novels, most recently Dark Assassin. She has also written three novels set during World War I, No Graves As Yet, Shoulder the Sky, and Angels in the Gloom. A recipient of the Edgar Award and the Herodotus Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Historical Mysteries, she lives in Scotland. You can visit her at
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Guests
by Roxanne Coady, December 25, 2006 11:49 AM
Over the years, many many people have asked why the bookstore I founded fifteen years ago in Madison, Connecticut, is named R.J. Julia. The short answer is that it is named after my father's mother. But this year, I've been telling people the long story, because this is the year my beloved, exuberant, wise, hard-working, curious, complicated, loving father died. My father was born and lived in Hungary. As World War II approached, my grandmother ? recently widowed ? resolved that her son would finish high school. This was not easy at that place and time for a Jewish family without resources. But my grandmother was determined. She made the humbling decision to ask for help ? to accept charity for my dad to finish school. Her commitment to my dad's education, and her respect and awe for books and learning were her motivations. She accomplished her dream. My dad finished high school in 1942, despite the odds. His life-long love of books and his insatiable desire to read were launched. But within a year he was imprisoned in a labor camp and was a minesweeper for the Germans. My grandmother was deported to Bergen-Belsen and killed. My dad's life was shaped by her love, and by her loss. Thanks to her fierce love and resilience, he survived and made his way to America, had six kids, opened a string of bakeries, and realized his version of the American dream. I've always wished that I'd had the chance to meet my grandmother, and to tell her that her son ? my dad ? had achieved so much. I think I was always looking for a way to honor her accomplishments, her strength and her indomitable spirit. So when the time came to find a name for a building filled with books, I had no doubt where to look. The small gift I could give to my dad was to name the store after my grandmother Juliska ? Julia in English ? to honor her dedication to learning and love, and to symbolize the enormous power of books and how they can change lives. Sometimes you look back on the past and feel amazed at how your experiences seem as though they were designed to lead to a specific goal ? even if you weren't aware of it at the time. For me, the publication of The Book That Changed My Life feels like the inevitable objective of my years as a bookseller. In recognition of the power of books to literally change lives ? my father's being a dramatic illustration ? we asked 71 authors who have visited the store over the years to write about the books that changed their lives. The result is this beautiful collection of essays that my friend, Joy Johannessen, and I edited. And to complete the circle, the royalties from The Book That Changed My Life will go to Read to Grow, a nonprofit organization committed to bringing books and the power of early literacy to all of our children and their families ? because everyone should have the opportunity to find the book that will change their life. Over the next four days, I'll be introducing contributions from authors generous enough to participate in the project. Readers, I invite you to share titles and stories of your own by posting comments here on the blog. May next year be full of life-changing books for us all. With love and thanks to my grandmother Julia and my father Emerich ? who changed my life, Roxanne J.
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