I was a precocious reader, and the days of Nancy Drew were short lived. At the age of twelve I was reading Heart of Darkness, Peer Gynt, The 50 Minute Hour, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty – none of which made any lasting impression on me at all, but which I remember only for their shock value. My favorite books at the time were the historically based but fictionalized biographies such as Nicholas & Alexandra, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and Lust For Life.
In recent years nonfiction readings dominate, and lean heavily in two directions: biography or memoir, and books about writing. The latter category no longer outweighs the first, but I still have some favorites. It doesn’t matter if it’s about fiction or nonfiction, craft or creativity, I read it all; Word Painting by McClanahan, Follow the Story by Stewart, The Art of Creative Nonfiction by Gutkind, Story by McKee, Writing For Story by Franklin, and dozens more all share space on my bookshelf.
I read Marilyn French’s A Season in Hell while recovering from my own illness and was inspired by her resilience in the face of one disaster after another. If she could survive, then I could too. And with that reading I realized once again, and on a much more personal level, the power books have to truly touch the lives of readers. Then I read My Year Off, Robert McCrum’s memoir about recovering from a stroke. I didn’t identify as much with him, so I was better able to pay attention to the construction of his book and was intrigued by the way he was able to integrate his first person narrative with excerpts from his own diary as well as that of his wife.
I also like to read autobiographies by artists I admire. Isaac Stern: My First 79 Years written with Chaim Potok was magnificent! By the end of the book I felt as though Isaac were a close personal friend. I was working on my husband’s ‘autobiography’ then, and I kept trying to detect just how Potok was able to make Stern’s life so vivid. Then I slapped myself, realizing that I was comparing myself to Potok, a more experienced writer of many bestsellers, gave up trying to pinpoint “the answer,†and went back to writing it as I felt it. Sidney Poitier’s book, on the other hand, was a severe disappointment. This is a man who I have had the pleasure of talking with on several occasions, an eloquent and elegant man, and none of that came through on paper.
No one book has been so influential as to stand out from all the rest. Most often it is a single thought or a well-turned phrase that resonates for me, and I save up these snippets and store them away in a notebook to be rediscovered. When it comes to style, I revere the simple and succinct, especially when it is imaginative and unexpected. “At ten in the morning, heading out the front door, Mrs. Reed is a vision of vitality in slow motion.†That is one of my favorite sentences from Walt Harrington’s At the Heart of It: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives.
But I am also I am a sucker for elegant or poetic prose such as “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries!…This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all – what is it?†So begins The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.