Photo: Markus Rödder
Use your favorite book as a source to stay stoked.
Every reader, certainly every writer, has their book. Your book is not simply your favorite story, but your source of literary inspiration, your measure of what can be achieved by a writer. Reading it for the first time is something as remembered as when you lost your travel virginity.
My Book is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This novel influenced the course of world literature and my life. Reading it moved something within me that no other book has. It knuckled me up for a fight and got my fingers flying. It gave me a context for the great literary tradition of social action, and it planted the seed within me to try to flesh out a few words of my own.
When unsure about my writing, my life, I go back to my book. What is your book? Where were you when you read it? What happened? Please tell us about it in the comments below. What is it about your book that keeps it numero uno?
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16 Comments... join the discussion!
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I went through a phase where I read war novels endlessly, specifically books about the holocaust. “Elli” by Livia E. Bitton Jackson is still one of those books that I can’t get out of my head…I think that book turned me onto non-fiction.
I know I love a book when i want to reread it…my theory is that life is too short to reread. “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is one of those books for me, I’ve never read a romance that could make me cry like that!
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I keep going back to Orhan Pamuk, I can’t decide between My name is Red and Snow (or maybe Istanbul). He has a lyrical quality to his writing that I enjoy and identify with.
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There are so many books that have influenced the way I think and fired me up to get writing.
One of those is 100 Years of Solitude, which I read while taking a much-needed break on Jeju Island in South Korea a few years ago and that has always stuck with me.
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Agreed with all my writer friends here: I can’t choose just one. But among the books that have traveled with me everywhere I’ve lived and which will never go in the box in the basement are all books of poetry: Neruda’s Odes to Opposites and Odes to Common Things; Ray Carver’s A New Path to the Waterfall; William Stafford’s Collected Poems, and an assortment of books by Mary Oliver.
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My bff book is the Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. She scratches beneath a seemingly mundane surface to reveal a great story. She also demonstrates the importance of being passionate about what you do.
Another all-time fav is mid-night of the garden of good and evil. He penetrates the unpenetrable society of Savannah, ga
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Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antigue Land. The latter is a hybrid of travel writing and anthropological research
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The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Robert Fitzgerald & illustrated by Rene Bull. An 11th century Persian man’s philosophical take on wine, women, friendship, and death. The poetry is timeless, the illustrations are quite beautiful, and it’s also one of two books I didn’t lose in hurricane Katrina. Every time I read it, it both takes me back and brings me somewhere new…
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I don’t really have a favourite book but I do have a favourite author. His name is António Lobo Antunes and he’s Portuguese but world famous so you may or may not have heard of him.
His books inspire me to want to write more and to write better.
He is translated into different languages. I’ve only ever read him in Portuguese (but that reminds me that I should pick up an English translation of one of his books, just to see if they managed to keep his style intact). I strongly advise anyone to read at least one of his books.
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My plane book is Woody Allen’s Without Feathers. I recently made a new BFF though: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. AMAZING. I cried when it was over.
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Omg, Marissa, I love that book too!
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But Kavalier & Clay is MY BFF.
I’m so glad someone else out there found it and loved it!↵ -
Thanks for bring out John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, I thoroughly enjoyed it when I read it almost 10 years ago.
Another favourite of mine is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
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Siddhartha by Hesse. I read it first when I was in high school and at a point in my life when every word leaped off the page and sent chills into the depth of my being as though Hesse had somehow articulated every thought and feeling I had ever had, perfectly.
The book, to me, is pure poetry. It changed the way I will think about and live my life forever. I carry a copy of it everywhere I travel ↵ -
My book BFF is another Steinbeck novel – East of Eden. I can’t remember how many times I have read that book. I’ve read it in every mental state a person can be in and each time it is exactly what I need. It’s beautiful!
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The title of this article got my attention pretty quickly.
I’ve been consistently surprised to find how few adventurers are acquainted with the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Author of the prolific Little Prince, he was a wanderer who spent the rest of his life in and around planes. His novel, Wind, Sand, and Stars (Terre des hommes) was a gift to me from my dad – a dreamer who, trying to keep up with the costs of raising my sister and I, could never quite break out and just trek Kilimanjaro (I’m still trying to convince him to get in shape and go..).
A small autobiography highlighting Exupery’s favorite, or at least most significant life encounters, it’s only about 240 pages. And yet it took me a year to finish. I read it slowly, with care to digest every paragraph. I highlighted entire sections, set them to memory, filled the margins with annotations, wore out the corners of pages from dog-earing, and hauled that book with me everywhere I went.I finished about two months ago. Exactly a week from the completion date, I found myself sitting in an upturned Hobie with an un-stepped mast and snapped fore stay. My best friend, her dad and I, stranded, in 10 foot swells in the evening, 4 miles offshore and we’d lost our cooler in the crash. Being dehydrated and a little nauseous, it was better for all of us to “chill” than converse – “Gimme a minute,” my friend excused herself. “I’m gonna need some private time with Jesus.” In the ensuing silence, for about an hour and a half, I watched the seas and found myself re-reading entire scenes from Exupery’s own plane-crashes and moments stranded in the Libyan desert. At some point, when I grew more impatient and realized it could be some time, or even a night before anyone found us, I started musing to Exupery, as one would to an old mentor in their mind. About life, the liberating beauty of moments like that one, and the fiery conviction growing deep within to sail more often after the incident. We were picked up within 2 hrs. of the initial crash and were met at the docks by family with uncapped Landsharks in hand – thank God – but ultimately, that night, there was no other choice than to sit under the fool moon and re-read. And ponder and pray and be thankful – and invigorated.
That crash kind of saved my life. You see, that particular month had been a dangerous one for me, being a sufferer of depression. The exact week in which I was finishing Wind, Sand, and Stars I was also debating institutionalization due to a few suicide attempts. But I was afraid of confining my life inside of some building, in a cell, and losing the little beauty I was capable of seeing in those days. Exupery had kept my faith in humanity and in travel strong – burgeoning. it was becoming clearer that I had the potential to heal if I sought beauty and more purpose in daily action. And when the shipwreck happened, I hadn’t felt that alive in years. Despite the intensity of the situation, I knew I would get back out on the water and adventuring. I knew I’d let myself believe in what seemed impossible for someone in my condition to do.
I’m currently planning a huge trip – a trek from Cairo to Jerusalem over Easter, a pilgrimage really, seeking repentance, forgiveness of self, humility, and most importantly, an opportunity to enter into spiritual discipline of the most dedicated form and give thanks for what I learned. And I will only be taking my Bible and this book, Wind, Sand, and Stars, with me. It had brought me closer to God, helped me understand the will I had to survive my own madness and given me healing and peace of mind when I felt totally alone. Talk about a best friend.
And now I’ve told a forum of strangers more about who I am and what I’ve been through than most of my closest friends or family know at all. But perhaps if my testimony can convince a fellow wanderer here to pick up this book, and have their lives enriched, it’s unbelievably worth it. Read away!
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