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Writers on the works that influenced them You could think of it as a big bag of literary potato
chips. Bet you can’t read just one.
In fact, there are 71 essays to
savour in The Book that Changed My Life (Gotham Books), a
compilation edited by Roxanne J. Coady, founder of R.J. Julia
Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut, USA and Joy Johannessen, who has
been an editor at several major publishing houses. Every essay has
something interesting to say, and the books that are praised make a
valuable guide to good reading. Coady says that of the 2,000 or so
authors who have spoken at her bookstore, she asked about 150 to
contribute essays about the books that made the most impact on
them. The writers who said yes represent a wide range, from novelist
Amy Bloom to literary critic Harold Bloom to columnist Lary Bloom as
well as former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins; children’s author
Tomie DePaola; novelists Wally Lamb, Anita Diamant and Jacquelyn
Mitchard; memoirist Frank McCourt; and non-fiction authors Sebastian
Junger, Tracy Kidder and Jane and Michael Stern. Stern, by the way,
picks the Sears catalogue, but not for its deathless prose. "It
was my window on the world," Stern writes. "Poring over the
Sears catalogue and looking at its pictures taught me more about
everything than anything I have ever read." Coady says she
particularly liked the way mystery writer Anne Perry begins her
essay: "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 usually make you think.... "For me," Perry writes,
"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." Her essay "is worth the price of
admission," Coady says. Several authors celebrate the same,
familiar classics. Elizabeth Berg and Alice Hoffman chose J.D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye,and Wally Lamb and Susan Vreeland cite
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Others agree on less
well-known titles. Ben Cheever and Robert Kurson both admire Ernest
Becker’s The Denial of Death, a work of psychology and
philosophy that won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in
1974. "He writes like Muhammad Ali used to boast, with a wild
abandon that at first alienates and ultimately charms," Cheever
says. Collins chose two wildly disparate books: The Yearling, by
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Lolita, by Vladimir
Nabokov: "If reading enlarges our sympathy for others, strangers
mostly—here are 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," says Coady: "Only Billy
Collins could pull that (comparison) off." Coady, whose immigrant
mother read stories to her children by sounding out the unfamiliar
English words, will donate all her proceeds from the book to the
non-profit organization she founded in 1996, Read to Grow, a Connecticut
charity. "As parents, we need to introduce kids to the idea of
reading," Coady says. Her essay collection demonstrates how certain
books changed the lives of authors. Read to Grow, she says,
"helps poor parents, free of charge, to change their kids’
life."
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