Books That Made Me

Books matter. It’s the one concession I’ll make to the book-banning fanatics who harass our local school boards. They know that the books children read can be influential—can inform and help shape their worldview, their moral compass, their empathy, even their sense of humor. That importance is exactly why we need to make sure children have exposure and access to as wide a variety of authors, styles, genres, voices, backgrounds, and opinions as possible—unless you want your child to grow up narrow, limited, two-dimensional, and afraid of the world beyond their home. I don’t think the Moms for Liberty crowd think that’s what they want for their children, but it’s what they’re going to get if they’re successful.

I’ve been thinking about books and authors, and it made me want to write about the books that made me. Not my top ten list or my all-time favorites: not Vonnegut, Waugh, Bradbury, MacLean (Alistair), or King (Stephen). No, these are the books that helped shape my mind and my heart—the books that helped me become who I am. Some of them, anyway; there have been many.

Subscribe now

Winnie the Pooh

Books were a huge part of my childhood, and there are many that I remember fondly, many that I forced on shared with my own children. But the A.A Milne books—this one, House at Pooh Corner, and the poetry collection, Now We Are Six, are special. More than any other, they helped me become a lover of books and stories and characters. Part of their importance was that my mother loved them dearly and read to me from her own, well-worn and well-used childhood copies.

What mattered so much to me in these books? I think it was the fact that Christopher Robin had a such rich, well-populated, imaginative world available to explore and live in. That was intoxicating. It was the humor and gentleness of that world. And it was the decency and stalwartness of Pooh Bear, that great and loyal and non-judgmental friend to the anxious, the depressed, the bossy, and the pompous alike. I think he was probably my first fictional role model. In later years, I would come to admire and try to imitate the wit and snark and wily resourcefulness of characters like Bugs Bunny, but it was Pooh Bear who lived and lives in my secret heart.

The Thurber Carnival

Someone gave me this book when I was in my early tweens, and I didn’t know what to do with it at first. I knew who Thurber was because of his children’s book, The Thirteen Clocks, which I loved, but this was adult prose, and I was suspicious of it. The drawings in the back section of the book were funny, though, so I started there—with his old, New Yorker cartoons, and then his illustrations for famous poems, and then his snide takes on Aesop’s Fables, (especially “The Unicorn in the Garden.” I liked those. They seemed more or less in line with the humor I liked in his children’s book. So, once I had used up all of the bits with pictures, I went back to the front of the book and started reading his stories, and I fell in love. They had the same wit and wordplay I loved in my favorite children’s books, but they were not written for children. Each story was a perfect little gem, and this book held a wide variety of stories, including those that made up his childhood memoir, “My Life and Hard Times,” and classics like, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I think Thurber opened the door to grown-up reading for me. And the way I read Thurber’s book, reading all the fun stuff at the back first, and then starting over at the front to do the real work, is the way I still read Thurber’s magazine, The New Yorker.

Franny and Zooey

I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school, like pretty much everyone else in my generation—except for the kids in the neighboring Island Trees school district, where the book was banned (yes, children, even back then), an act which led our school’s sports fans to wave copies of the novel instead of pom-poms whenever we played against them. Did I like it? I liked it. Did I love it? Kind of—parts of it. But years later, when I stumbled across this book, made up of two longish and connected stories, it was a whole different ball game. The big, weird, raucous, over-educated Glass family, which Salinger wrote about here and elsewhere, and which later inspired the movie, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” engaged me more than poor old, lonely Holden Caulfield ever did. As an extended conversation about ideas more than a traditional narrative, it was something brand new to me, and something I continued to seek out in fiction. The speech at the end about shining your shoes for the Fat Lady said something about how faith and spirituality could be bigger and more interesting than organized religion—something that resonated with me and reawakened a curiosity that had lain dormant for a long time.

The Women's Room

My first year of college was a revelation in so many ways—leaving home, leaving New York, befriending kids I never would have met before, learning about things I had never had access to before (Philosophy! Anthropology! Beowulf being chanted in Old English!).

One of my classes as a baby English major was an elective in feminist literature. I don’t remember much of what we read besides this book and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice. And I don’t remember much of the plot of this novel, aside from the bits of it that Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner lifted (or were inspired by) for the second act of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. But I remember the effect the novel had on me as an 18-year-old fledgling male. I was just old enough to be able to start to understand the anger that coursed through the book, and to be able to see, through new eyes, the 1950s and 1960s that French grew up in, and the 1970s that I grew up in—the decade that she struggled with as a young married woman trying to lead an authentic life.

It made me see the women in my own family differently: my grandmother, educated and feisty, but surrounded by domineering male doctors who only wanted servility; my mother, more like my grandmother than either of them ever dared to admit, who held her beatnik soul at bay for years to be a good housewife and mother, and who let it all flourish in later years as a larger-than-life and beloved fifth grade teacher; and my mother’s first cousin, who saw what being a woman required in America and ran away from all of it, literally, to become a world-renowned photojournalist.

A book that helps you see the world, your family, and yourself differently: that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Someone bought this book for me as a gift when it was first published—my mother, maybe, or my grandmother—someone who was reading the New York Times Book Review. I had no idea what it was, but when I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. From the first chapter, it was clearly a novel about ideas, which I liked. It also had an author intruding into the narrative to talk about the main characters in a way that I had only ever seen Kurt Vonnegut do—and I liked that. And it was thrillingly political and erotic and not-American in so many ways. Kundera became one of those authors whose works I had to hoover up and read as soon as I could get my hands on them. And he started my fascination with Prague and Czechoslovakia, and then my hero-worship of Vaclav Havel, all of which led to my brief teaching stint in a small, Slovak town a few years after the Velvet Revolution. And a play based on that experience, once I had settled in New York to make theatre with my friends.

The Empty Space  

As a New York and Long Island theatre kid in the 1970s, I loved musicals, and I loved Neil Simon, and I loved Kaufman and Hart, and…that’s pretty much all I knew. Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, blew my mind when I was a senior in High School, because the high theatricality of how it was presented, with the whispering venticelli and the use of silhouettes, and Ian McKellen changing from old man to young man in a split second with no tricks or effects, was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Later that same year, I saw Sweeney Todd, and it, too, rearranged my brain cells. Then I went off to college, where, after a year of conventional and old-fashioned plays, a new team was brought in to reinvigorate the program and do something innovative and new. The first play they did was the medieval morality play, Everyman, which we staged at multiple locations around campus, bussing the audience from place to place as they followed Everyman on his journey towards death.

This book, by Peter Brook, helped me put words and ideas behind the new kinds of theatrical experiences I was seeing, challenging my old fashioned idea of what a play could be and helping me put the old living-room plays of my childhood to rest. This book is how I could be open and willing and ready for new things after I graduated, when a new Artistic Director came in from England and hired me as his assistant. That was the beginning of my 15 years of making theater, post-college.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I don’t remember how I came across the book originally, but I associate it, along with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, most strongly with my friend, Thor Hesla. I know that he and I were discussing both books when I went to visit him at Yosemite National Park in the late 1980s, where he was living in a M*A*S*H-style tent compound and working as a dishwasher, his way of making a small living off the grid while writing a book that was part childhood memoir and part treatise on nuclear defense strategy. Only Thor could have made that combination work.

Annie Dillard became another of those authors whose every work I had to seek out and read immediately, as soon as I became aware of it. I loved how she combined deep, quiet observation of the natural world with ruminations about God and the god-smacked, and thoughts about the fate of us little humans in a big old universe. She talked about Emerson, and Martin Buber, and the Baal Shem Tov, and how weasels had something to teach us about how to live. She connected a lot of strange dots for me.

Horace's Compromise

For a lot of my young adulthood, I tried making my way in the world as a playwright while supporting myself as a schoolteacher. I cared about them both, and wanted more out of both than traditional structures seemed to offer. Eventually, I had to choose one over the other. I tried sacrificing teaching to put more focus on theatre, but in the end, it worked out the other way around.

Why was I frustrated and disappointed with traditional structures in teaching? This book is one of the reasons. I started teaching at a small and very alternative high school in Atlanta, Georgia—a place where all of the teaching was 1:1 and all of the learning was self-paced. Nothing in the school looked like a school or worked like a school. Kids could get up and move around. Kids could go into the kitchen and make a snack for themselves when they needed to, or sit outside in the garden to read a book. It was a deeply human and respectful way to organize time, and it ruined me for the more traditional 45-minute-period/8-period-a-day schools I taught in subsequently.

In Horace’s Compromise, Ted Sizer goes back to school and walks through a day like a kid, horrified at the shattering of attention every time a bell rings, and by the insistence on thinking about X and then stopping thinking about X, on other people’s timelines, regardless of his needs or his moods or his interests. It’s easy to forget how strange and artificial and sometimes brutal a traditional, American high school can be. And once you start asking, “Does it have to be this way?” it’s hard to go back.

Just like it was hard to go back to being a thoughtless dude after reading The Women’s Room. Just like it was hard to sit still for a drab and static living room play after reading The Empty Space. Just like it was hard to pass a quiet, wooded area without pausing to look and listen after reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Books are a virus. Books get into your cells and change them. Books are not to be taken lightly.

We shouldn’t roll our eyes when the fearful among us want to ban books or exclude them or limit our children’s exposure to them. They aren’t silly people. They are angry and scared people, and they have their hand on an iron door, desperate to slam it shut. We need to join the fight and create a counterweight to keep that door open.

They understand that there is Big Magic at play in books. We should, too.

Share

Leave a comment