 Books That Made the CutbyRachel HozeyIf you had only a small space in which to store your world of books, which ones would prove absolutely indispensable? I had to ponder this question recently when I left teaching to take up freelance writing and moved from an office with a large bookshelf full and overflowing to a corner of my living room just big enough for a small desk and a very narrow bookcase. As I contemplated the space, I had to make some hard decisions. Which books would I unpack? Which ones would have to stay stacked in the garage? The questions were compounded because I didn’t know exactly what kind of freelancing I was going to do, hence exactly which books I would need. (Which sounds crazy, I know, but it’s a subject for another essay.) The essential reference collection proved easy to choose; these books take up an entire shelf. I needed one shelf for my journals, a shelf for supplies like envelopes and legal pads and paper (since I don’t have room for a filing cabinet) and another shelf for books I’m currently reading and pictures of my children. There was only one shelf left, and my final task was to fill it with books that comfort me, beguile me, and bring me inspiration. Probably the most inspiring book I own outside the Bible is Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. In this novel about two women of different generations who live together and forge an unlikely bond in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the terrible years leading up to the terrible reign of the Taliban, Hosseini breathes life into two of the biggest, least understandable themes in human history—sacrifice and redemption. Mariam, illegitimately born and badly married, and Laila, twenty years younger but orphaned as a teenager, are trapped in the same hideous situation involving abuse and. eventually, death. Hosseini gives us the story from the perspectives of both women. Their friendship, courage and love are presented with no sentimentality, only vivid details of a city torn apart by Taliban rockets and two women sipping chai in the yard, planning an escape that was not to be, and eventually realizing their escape in a way they never could have foreseen. Hosseini’s book epitomizes a line from another of my favorite books, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, in which he says, “In great fiction we are moved by what happens, not by the whimpering or bawling of the writer’s presentation of what happens.” Hosseini never whimpers, never bawls. He simply gives us the twined lives of two women, the decisions they make and their far-reaching consequences, for ill and for good. He takes a magnifying glass to their lives, exposing the very humanness of their hearts, never flinching from the cruel or blushing coyly at the sweet. He presents the facts and lets us decide to flinch or blush. These two books stand together on the shelf in my home office, for they remind me of what great fiction ought to be. Gardner is both a brave man and a genius for beginning his book with a chapter on aesthetics and then keeping me engaged in the reading long after I would have thought I’d have given up. Gardner writes about the metaphysics of fiction with such logic that I am swept away by the clarity of his prose. He does include some practical advice about common errors and techniques in later chapters, but most of the book is an exposition of the essence of fiction—fiction theory 101, if you will—a presentation of why fiction works and what happens when it doesn’t. Reading The Art of Fiction, I begin to understand why I love so much the books I do. Being a writer, I own several books about writing, but other than The Craft of Revision by Donald Murray, none are “technique books,” those with a catalog of Dos and Don’ts; what they are instead are essays or memoirs about what it means to live as a writer, to think as a writer, to be a writer. I turn to these books when it seems that pushing forward with one more phrase is futile, or worse, impossible. When my writing lurches, I turn for inspiration to Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. The intimate picture she shares about the pain and pleasure of spending one’s life with words gives me courage to continue, to press on with another edit, to refuse to settle. I understand what she feels when she writes, “A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. . . . It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!’” The lion tamer’s work is never easy, and when writing seems like too much work, I read Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge for permission to play. “Poems arrive,” Wooldridge says, and it is up to us to be in the right place to greet them. Wooldridge is a hunter-gatherer who collects words, listens to what these words tell her, and encourages us to do the same. With exuberance, she creates with one part mystery, one part science, and one part magic a world that is safe to play in and shares a series of exercises that help us to unlock our shadow selves and see poetry all around. Finally, I couldn’t get by without regular doses of Mark Singer. Years ago, he wrote “Talk of the Town” pieces and profiles for The New Yorker which were later collected in a volume titled Mr. Personality. There’s something fluid yet weighty with promise in the rhythm of his prose, like the rise and swoop of a roller-coaster that in one moment lifts you from your seat and in the next presses against your gut with force. In one essay, Singer shows us the transformation of Paul Schimmel from printer by trade into the clarinet-playing Mr. Personality aboard the F train. In other essays, he offers clear glimpses into the lives of real New Yorkers, the sellers of wedding rings, the fixers of zippers, the freelance charter boat pilots of City Island, these extraordinary yet perfectly normal humans who hold the pulse of the city in their palms. Though these pieces were written mostly in the 70s and 80s, they ring with a clarity about human nature that holds today. What I appreciate about Singer, Wooldridge, Dillard, Gardner, Hosseini and others whose books I could not leave out in the garage is that they bring to me the world, in packages small enough to fit on a narrow bookcase in the corner of a small living room office.
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