Life of Pi
Life of Pi is always the book that jumps to the front of the line when I think about books that had an impact on me or changed my life. My experience with it was deeply personal and I don’t expect that others will undergo something similar, but Life of Pi gave me permission to believe in whatever brings the most joy, meaning, and sense to my life. For this I will always be grateful. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the unknown and unknowable, to the transcendent, to the depths inside of us, to universal connection, to the divine force. To all of the things that would be encapsulated by the word “God” except that the first association of that word conjures an image of the Judeo-Christian god, which does not match at all what I want to think about when I think about the divine. Until Life of Pi, I felt torn about this mismatch, and about what I can or can’t believe about God. Now I believe exactly what I want to believe, and I have fun with it, and it feels real and right to me.
Roots
Though it’s been many years, Roots by Alex Haley also had a deep impact on me. I was maybe in my twenties when I read it, and it was the first piece of art I’d experienced that showed slavery in an unabstracted, un-whitewashed way. It was the most brutal book I’d ever read at that point in my life. It humbled me.
Roots opened my eyes in a way that no public or private schooling in Georgia did. Last year I read How to Say Babylon by a Jamaican author who escaped her patriarchal Rasta home and landed at UVA in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was shocked there to be confronted constantly on campus by statues and monuments to Confederate “heroes.” In Jamaica, the statues and monuments were to those who overthrew slavery, not to the ones who perpetuated it. In the South when I grew up, we didn’t go deep on the realities of slavery for the enslaved nor how it continues to reverberate in the Black American experience now. My guess is that Southern schools don’t go there now either.
I remember I kept thinking, in and around the heartbreak and shock of reading Roots, This wasn’t that long ago. I know now that Roots is problematic for plagiarism and because Haley didn’t outright represent it as fiction, but I read it as a novel, and I stand by its impact. Literary fiction helps us understand one another. Understanding helps us love one another. We could use a lot more love among one another right now. Roots showed the realities and ramifications of slavery in a way I never had been exposed to before. It made me want to understand deeper, to bear witness, and to not forget. In doing so, it paved the way for some of the richest reading of my life, like The Color Purple, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Trees, James, and most recently, Beloved.
Ducks, Newburyport
Other than the two people I know who already read this — both of whom recommended it to me — Ducks, Newburyport is not a book I expect anyone in my life to read or ever have any desire to read. It is a single sentence that goes on for 1000 pages, which I know sounds awful and terrible and the worst thing ever, who would want to read that? Where do you stop when you need a break? I totally get that, which is why I don’t expect anyone to read it, and is also why I love it so much and why it goes on a list of three books that had an impact on me. The audacity! Who would do this? What writer would have the guts to say, you know what, I’m going to write an entire novel in one sentence, and not only that, but it’s going to be a good novel, with characters and plot and a phenomenal central conflict that is going to come out of nowhere at the end (or maybe the reader got a tiny hint, because I did throw in some foreshadowing) and it is going to BLOW the reader away?
A true artist, that’s what writer would do it.
I wrote about this book right after I read it (see Gobsmacked), so I won’t repeat all that again. If you do think you might want to read the book, maybe don’t read the blog post, it might have spoilers.
Butterfly Mind 