 The Land of Literary Memories Earlier this week I was “challenged” to provide, in under fifteen minutes, the names of fifteen authors “(poets included) who have always influenced you and will always stick with you.” The listing was not to be in any particular order. I allowed myself to think about it for a few minutes, then glanced at the computer clock and began writing. I did get up a couple of times to sweep my glance over my bookshelves in a gentle reminder to myself, but I found the information unneeded. The names came flowing out and with them the memories of their books and the times I first read them. Though I posted my list quickly enough the nostalgic journey of memories I embarked upon took the better part of one day—and what a trip it was! Not only did a new world open up but so did the emotions of those first readings. And while I do return to these books and feel some of that same thrill, there is nothing quite like that first experience. And now I share them with you. In no particular order, they are: Dorothy Parker. Okay, she’s not an author but she was a powerful writer whose short stories—a genre I normally read little of—invariably left me distraught. I was in my early twenties when I first read her, full of non-virginal but notable innocence and young love. Everything was possible, and everything was good. Until I came to the first story I ever read of hers: “Mr. Durant.” It is a devastating story, at least it was for me at the time, for very personal reasons. Durant was a bastard. That’s the nicest thing I can say about him. But so were most of her characters. If they weren’t screwing people (literally as well as figuratively) then they were whining. I rarely liked any of them, but I was drawn to them in ways I couldn’t explain. They were so real, so fleshed out, so damned annoying that even in such small doses they were able to dominate me for days, even weeks afterward. I wanted to strangle the women for their simpering styles and sly “female” power plays and punch the men for either catering to them or for abusing their male power. I hated the stories yet I could not let them go. And my addiction to them pulled me into everything else—poetry, criticism, and essays—that she ever wrote. Carolyn Keene. The pseudonym used by various writers over the years to produce one of my favorite childhood series, Nancy Drew. In many ways, I envied Nancy—no mother, a “professional” father who was pretty much hands-off, a caring but non-interfering housekeeper/substitute mother with no power, a sports car or a roadster as it was termed, a real boyfriend, and two great girlfriends who weren’t quite as perfect as her. Plus a lot of scary but not truly frightening mysteries to solve. Wonderful! Nowhere in there was homework, housework, or soda fountain work, nosy parents, much school, or those thousand-and-one things that make up most lives. I dreamed of being Nancy. Lord Byron. A romantic poet in more ways than one. Bryon’s poetry has always spoken to my soul. And it was especially sensual when I first began reading it—about a year after I lost my virginity at age twenty-one. I’ve never lost that connection between my sensual and sexual experiences and Byron. His words play with me much as his fingers might have done. Sinclair Lewis. Main Street was my first introduction to Lewis. Though I liked Carol Kennicott, especially at the beginning when she had plans for her life, I grew more and more frustrated with her. While I understood that her continuing struggle with her life in Gopher Prairie took more courage than leaving the marriage, I was very much into the women’s liberation movement at the time and kept pushing her, in my mind, to leave it and become her own woman, the town be damned. The ending made me mad enough to put the book away for more than twenty years, but it did not discourage me from reading most of Lewis’ oeuvre since his cynical view of America (Babbitt, anyone?) seemed very much in tune with my rebellious one. Elmer Gantry made me even angrier a couple of years later, increasing my long-time odium of the religion in which I had been raised. Nothing like a bastard preacher for reinforcement. Jane Austen. I think one of the reasons I favor classics for my fiction reading is that they invariably take me to times and places and situations in which I have no personal knowledge and will never have the opportunity to experience. (That’s not to say that fiction set in modern times can’t do that, but with classical literature there are no modern-day connections for me.) And I think there are no writers better than Austen at presenting English life in the nineteenth century, a time and place that holds a special appeal to me. I would not liked to have lived then—all those gender expectations and class restrictions!—but I love visiting it through her eyes. John Steinbeck. A Californian through and through. I don’t come from nor have I lived in the central valley, but I am a native of this state, fourth generation on one side, second on the other. Reading The Grapes of Wrath at age fourteen shocked me. Sure, I knew the history of California, the kind told in approved textbooks but I really didn’t understand it. It was just . . . a recitation of things that happened. But the Joads humanized that piece of history and gave me the impetus to continue to read beyond the standard explanations of school assignments and seek a deeper understanding. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina had the same impact on me that The Grapes of Wrath did, and it had the same results—only in world history. Though I first read it later, it stunned me with its depiction of nineteenth-century Russian society, and with first-class writing. The pages devoted to Levin’s time in the field and to Anna’s frantic thoughts in the train station taught me how powerful description could be in the hands of a master writer. I became and remain a Tolstoy fan, but AK remains a favorite. Oscar Wilde. I never looked at paintings the same way again after reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. I think what struck me most profoundly, and what compelled me to read several other of his works including The Ballad of Reading Gaol was Wilde’s depiction of a painting as alive, as possessing the ability to breathe life into its admirer. Wilde’s story was discomforting for sure, but what I took away from it was a depth I had not, at least in any conscious way, applied to art prior to reading the story. Jules Verne. Oh, the imagination these stories took. Scuba diving, space travel, the future! I particularly reveled in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea because it seemed so real to me—the submarine, the sea creatures, the captain, the walks in the ocean. I believed that every word of it could be true because I read it exactly one hundred years after it was published and after I had achieved certification as a scuba diver, and it only took a slight stretch of my imagination to be on that submarine and in one of the diving suits with the Professor and Captain. Or it seemed that way until I got to the final two paragraphs where all the possible reality came crashing down. That crash-and-burn didn’t destroy my enjoyment of Verne’s writing, but it made my subsequent reading of his other stories a bit less magical. Henry James. I came to this author late, and it’s a good thing I did for I would not have appreciated the rich, complex, and minute portraits that makes his novels so Jamesian. The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were my introduction to this compelling writer who though being dense and difficult at times taught me that books could be worth working hard for. Martha Gellhorn. This is an author for whom I don’t have a lot of warm feelings, but she is someone I respect and admire a great deal. Admittedly, she grew up in a time when women were, or at least presumed to be by many, closer to the Dorothy Parker version than the Gellhorn reality. She had to fight a lot of sexist doors to achieve her goals, and on the way she produced some of the finest nonfiction writing I’ve read. David Halberstam. The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, The Making of a Quagmire, The Fifties, and more are all books that inflamed my passion for nonfiction that could be as intimate as fiction yet more interesting because it is real. As they were written on the larger rather than smaller scale I never felt the intimacy of the people he wrote about, but I did sense I had a stronger insight into the events that they were part of. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby has haunted me from my first reading, done in my late teen years. Nick didn’t do much—after all, he’s the narrator and didn’t until much later assume any kind of role in my consciousness—but Jay Gatsby always seemed so decadent yet so empty of anything besides desperation. I was searching for my own role in a time of enormous societal change, and the vast and deep emptiness that was Gatsby’s time seemed to me (at the time) to be the thing that was still rearing its head and threatening to engulf the ‘60s generation in its empty grasp. Bram Stoker. Dracula is one of my all-time favorite books, which is somewhat unusual given that I assiduously avoid the horror genre, both books and films. But it isn’t your standard horror novel, either. Even still it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I first picked up the book. And was promptly captured by the brilliant style and writing. Stoker is one of the few authors who is as interesting as his book. Mary Shelley. Yet another, and the only other, book that might be classified in the horror genre is Frankenstein. Yet I have never once thought of it as horror. To me, the monster is society’s outcast, the unpopular human treated inhumanely because he is not actually human. I was that social outcast throughout grammar and high school—unpopular, the occasional target of rude teachers and cruel fellow students—and my relationship with the monster was far more than mere sympathy. To this day I cannot read it without crying. Julia Child. Well, she’s an author. That’s why she’s here. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book I discovered when I was about twenty-eight, encouraged me to move beyond the cooking level I possessed before and since moving out on my own. I gained not only new recipes, tried new foods, acquired new tools, learned new techniques, but I discovered a love of culinary arts previously unknown. Being limited to fifteen was, I found, difficult. Other names demanded inclusion: Charles Dickens for his incredible characters and portrayal of society, Simon Winchester for his in-depth explorations of events that encompass numerous areas of culture and science, Arthur Conan Doyle for an unforgettable character, and Guy De Maupassant, W. Somerset Maugham, Thomas Wolfe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky for stories that touched my soul and my heart. And now I wonder who are the authors (poets included) who have always influenced you and will always stick with you? Upcoming Book Festivals: The upcoming Austin Jewish Community Book Fair has events scheduled from November 11-21 in Austin, Texas. Opening the week-long event is Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew and the Lotus and seven other books. His talk and signing will take place from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. On November 13, from 8:00 to 9:30 pm, Tom Segev, will speak about his book, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends. Joan Nathan will appear from 10:00 to 11:30 am on November 14; there is a Book Club Night with two guest authors on November 15; and from 6:45 to 10:00 pm on November 16. two authors will speak on Historical Accounts of International Significance. Then from 10:30 am to noon on November 18, the Book Lovers Luncheon will feature Kevin Salwen. The final event will feature, on November 18, Journalist Thanassis Cambanis and his book A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah's Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel at 6:45 pm and comedian Joel Chasnoff at 8:00 pm. Sunday, November 21, is the final day with “a festival of authors” beginning at 10:00 am with a Bagel Breakfast. On the weekend of November 12-14 Boston, Massachusetts will host the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Hynes Convention Center. Fair hours are Friday from 5:00 to 9:00 pm, Saturday from 12:00 to 7:00 pm, and Sunday from 12:00 to 5:00 pm. This is one of the premier antiquarian book festivals in the nation and well worth attending even if you can’t afford the books. Among the offerings—aside from the 118 dealers offering all types of books and literary ephemera—are a workshop on book care problems, a collector’s roundtable sharing their passions and adventures, a lecture on the “ecosystems of book history,” and an appraisal service for attendees. On Saturday, November 13 Boston will also host the Boston Book, Print and Ephemera Show at the Park Plaza Castle from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, although I don’t know why. I mean, two collectible book and ephemera shows at the same time in the same city? Still, if I lived there I would certainly be at both. The Kentucky Book Fair will take place from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm on Saturday, November 13 in Louisville. More than 200 authors will be there to talk about and sign their books. In addition, a number of events will take place including numerous vendors, several symposiums, readings, a Meet the Authors event, It’s a Happy Birthday Party, and a luncheon with David Baldacci. One of the nation’s largest book festivals is the Miami Book Fair International, this year scheduled for November 14-21. The actual street fair is from is from November 19-21, but the early events include the “Evenings With …” series that begin November 8. Events and include the than 350 authors who will be appearing, the FCLA (Florida Center for Literary Arts) workshops, the Student Literary Encounters program, the IberoAmerican authors program, the Comix Gallery with its four separate and amazing events, Celebrating Mexico at the Mexican Pavilion, Arts @ the Fair, Twilight Tastings, a Children’s Alley (with theatre, arts and crafts, storytelling, and readings by children’s book authors), and the Street Fair with three days of more than 150 exhibitors, and the World Stage with continuous entertainment. On Saturday and Sunday, November 13-14 Storrs, Connecticut will host the Connecticut Children’s Book Fair from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Among the events are presentations and signings by authors and illustrators, storytelling, crafts, holiday shopping, and appearances by storybook characters. There is also the special Breakfast with Clifford, but it has already filled up. They are taking names for the waiting list, however. The Pub House: None of us wants to think about it, but the fact is that biological terrorism is a genuine threat. Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail provides a frightening in-depth look at the biological arms race through the story of the U.S. anthrax attacks in 2001 and their connection to the dangerous underworld of global germ warfare through the combined work of a journalist and a private eye as they travel across four continents. Imaging Books & Reading: Of Interest: Until next week, read well, read often and read on!
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