Books that shaped my reader and writer heart

The quintessential scary book. I read this when I was a teenager, sometimes late at night when I was babysitting small children (bad idea). The depth of the disaster, the good vs. evil, the characters that King placed in the tangled web were equally horrifying and magnetizing.

 

I began to reread it during COVID, but it hit too close to home; I got about a hundred pages in and had to abort the mission.

Who is John Galt anyway? This is my version of a beach read. I love the complexity, if not the controversy of Rand's writings and when this book was complete, I thoroughly missed the characters in my daily life. 

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Some read Rand for her underlying political messaging. Personally, I appreciate that she's a brilliant person who used that big brain to entertain the rest of us.​​

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I discovered this book randomly in my middle school library and was instantly lost in the civil war era and the life of Scarlett O'Hara. I wanted to be Scarlett. I loved her wardrobe, I envied her brazen attitude, I bristled at her hubris, but also rooted for her to best Rhett Butler along the way.

 

This is the only book that I reread about every five years. And I enjoy it the same as I did the first time. 

I discovered Wally Lamb randomly, having plucked his first novel, She's Come Undone, off a bookstore shelf and loving his storytelling and writing style instantly. Wally is simply a good writer, something I greatly appreciate as a reader. He is one of the first authors (since the Stephen King of my youth) whose next book I consistently and anxiously await. 

 

And, when Wally began to work with women in a Connecticut prison on their writing skills so they could tell their stories, he and I became besties (in my mind.) 

A Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn created a three-volume series about the Russian labor camp system, constructed both from interviews and diaries of others and his own experience in the gulag system. It was wildly unpopular in Russia; then it became required reading as cultural reference.

 

For me, the intersection of incarceration and human resilience struck home, obviously. And it's Russia, something I have an unusual fascination with for reasons I have yet to determine. Bucket list: gulag tour.

Introduced to this book while getting my criminal justice education, I was immediately challenged by the density and brilliance of Rawls's writing. His principles of justice and fairness have stayed with me throughout my career and I have both discussed and considered his theories and social contracts (i.e. Original Position and Veil of Ignorance) in numerous personal and occupational settings. 

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Someday, when I have less things competing for my brain cells, I will enjoy another read-through.

Augusten Burroughs doesn't know this, but he is one of the few authors I have internet stalked. There. I've said it.

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This raw landscape of his tumultuous childhood made me laugh all the way out loud, and the fact that I was the only person in my suburbanite book club who fell instantly in love with his tale and humor hooked me even further. I am certain that some of Augusten's memoir-ness shaped mine in tiny ways. I am also certain Augusten and I could bust out the world's funniest screenplay in a Conneciicut writer's weekend.

Psychological analysis. Sign me up. ​

 

We know the tale: murder, suspicion, the noose of conscience and outrunning our own selves. Not to mention there are prison camps and the battle between what is right and what is known, and how humans traverse morality and justice. And what is it with me and Russian authors already? Crime and Punishment is but one of Dostoyevsky's books that I love, but it is the one that I love the most. 

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No summer reading is complete without a Bronte sister in the mix. I could pick just about any of them, truly, with Jane Austen close behind. When I was a teen, a copy of Jane Eyre landed on my bookshelf somehow and I had many false starts with it. I'm glad to have rediscovered it as an adult.

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It's got the usual suspects: love, disappointment, secrets, reconciliation. But it seems to have an extra dollop of resilience and forgiveness, which I like a bunch. 

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I'm so not alone in my love for Liz Gilbert's journey of self. Not only was her book aligned in a spooky way with how I was grappling with my own life in 2006+, but her humor and writing speak directly to me and my writing style. 

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"I bought all those embarrassingly titled self-help books (always being certain to wrap up the books in the latest issue of Hustler, so that strangers wouldn't know what I was really reading)." (Eat, Pray, Love ) Yes, please.

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I can't wait for Liz to realize that she and I should be hanging out together. 

"Forced" to read this classic as both a high school student and college english major, I didn't actually fall in love with this story until after two non-related life moments: when I tutored high school students in my twenties and this was the first book I was assigned; and when I actually visited London and Paris as a grown persons (vs. a student) and "felt" the cities and their histories in a way that translated. Then, I appreciated this book and Dickens in a brand new way.

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Plus, there's a bunch of prison, a smidge of martyrdom, and a sprinkling of redemptive suffering.

That tracks. 

This is among the, "Hell, yeah!" books in my collection, the authors who say out loud what I have been thinking.

 

Dan's ability to trace the reasons we view charities the way we do in this country, and his willingness to call out the ineffective strongholds tied to our perception of charitable giving pave the way for change. As someone who regularly gives to charity, runs a non-profit, and salutes those who make philanthropy their mission, I share Dan's impatience with the country's ignorance and assertions concerning how to best raise and spend charitable dollars. We're in our own way, which Dan is happy to tell us. Bravo.

As my husband will attest, it took me three years to finish this book. It was recommended to me by a dear friend (RIP, Matthew) because of its rich writing and the revealing and stark look inside the poverty of India's slum villages. But because of the rich writing--and my hectic life when I happened to choose this book--I had to read it in the tiny moments when my brain was clear and open to the beautiful prose. Hence, three years to finish.

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Fun fact: The author is a prison fugitive (since captured and finished prison-ing)! Love that for me. 

There are few books that I have loved that my children have also loved, but this is one of them. That's fun.

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The Outsiders mesmerized me in middle school, the tough boys and the hardscrabble life. I, like millions of teens before and after, saw pieces of my own teenage angst, the search for community and identity. And, let's face it: every girl wanted to be linked up with some mashup of Pony Boy, Soda Pop, and Dallas. The cast of the 1983 movie sealed that deal a thousand times over.

Stay gold.

Of course this was a crowd favorite in my house. Each of my kids had their own monkey, my three boys and two girls aligning with the characters. When I read it to them, they laughed like it was brand new information every time they fell off the bed and bumped their head. 

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We cycled through hundreds of children's books in our home. None was as special to me as this book. In 2008, my kids bought me a keepsake board book for my birthday, each of them "autographing" their particular monkey.