Column: Some books we find life-changing, which started but didn’t end with ‘Bridge to Terabithia’
Social media gets an often deserved bad rap for bringing out the worst in people by, you know, oversharing about personal problems, or promulgating conspiracy theories, or fomenting insurrection against the United States of America.
But it also allows us access to interesting people with interesting questions. One of those people is novelist and writer Lynn Steger Strong (author of one of my recent favorites, “Want”), who shared a question in a short tweet that I’ve been thinking about off and on ever since: “What is a book that made you reconsider what a book can do?”
I think Steger was primarily considering the question from the standpoint of a writer, thinking about the way certain books will scramble your own internal aesthetics in unsettling and powerful ways, but the same question can easily apply to a reader.
In fact, reading the tweet made me feel like I’d stepped into a time machine as the books that had reoriented my own sense of the world flooded through my brain. Some books simply shake you up so profoundly that you’re not the same person after you’ve read them.
A book from relatively early in my reading life that had a profound effect was “Bridge to Terabithia” by Katherine Paterson, which introduced me to the difference between sadness and grief.
I’d read books that had made me sad before — “Old Yeller” for example — but something about how Paterson sketched the dimensions of loss as experienced by Jess following the death of his best friend Leslie hit me with a depth of emotion I didn’t know books could achieve. Prior to that I’d looked at books as excellent, entertaining companions, but clearly this is not all they are.
In college, at the urging of a classmate also interested in writing, I remember reading Evan Connell’s “Mrs. Bridge,” a novel about a middle-aged Kansas City housewife and the family that surrounds her. You could not craft a character further removed from the personal concerns I had at the time, and yet the novel, told in tiny vignettes where events are rendered through indirection, was as gripping as any thriller. I would not say that it was my introduction to feeling empathy, but it has been a constant reminder that everyone has a compelling story beneath their surface.
In graduate school, I recall my friend Nick shoving a photocopy of a Donald Barthelme short story called “The School” into my hands and saying I had to read it. It is a 1200-word antic tale of strange goings on in a grade school classroom ranging from the death of the class gerbil to the teacher making love to his assistant that somehow made the utterly familiar into something deeply strange. The absurdity of so much of our day-to-day existence became clear to me and has influenced me ever since.
Post graduate school, my friend Dave Eggers asked me to read a manuscript copy of a book he was about to publish. “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” it was called, and I instantly better understood the particular wounds my Gen-X generation carries.
Most recently the book that comes to mind is Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick,” a collection of essays which challenged some of the pieties and self-satisfaction I’d been carrying around about being an empathetic, good hearted liberal.
I could write a column 10 times this length and keep naming books, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, Studs Terkel’s “Working,” “Roots” by Alex Haley.
It’s sort of amazing to consider the power books have to rejigger our deepest selves. I’m looking forward to the next time it happens.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Hell of a Book” by Jason Mott
2. “The Promise” by Damon Galgut
3. “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
4. “The Sentence” by Louise Erdrich
5. “The Trees” by Percival Everett
— Jane W., Apache Junction, Arizona
Jane’s got a shelf of recent books not too dissimilar to my own, which makes me feel secure in recommending a book I want to make sure gets in the hands of at least one reader a year, and one that should tickle some similar fancies: “Oreo” by Fran Ross.
1. “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir
2. “Crossroads” by Jonathan Franzen
3. “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro
4. “Assassin’s Apprentice” by Robin Hobb
5. “The Raven Boys” by Maggie Stiefvater
— Elizabeth S., Wellington, New Zealand
Interesting cross section of books. I think Elizabeth will connect with Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which starts with “Annihilation.”
1. “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck
2. “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
3. “The People in the Trees” by Hanya Yanagihara
4. “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir
5. “The Poppy War” by R.F. Kuang
— Karli G., Fort Lauderdale, Florida
I’m looking for something the feels big, but also gets intimate with its characters. I’ve got it, “Wolf Hall,” by Hilary Mantel.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.
