‘ The Book That Changed My Life’: Book Review

poems where echoes and internal rhymes piled up on each other like the wrecks of junked cars. Listen to “We Real Cool,” written for the pool players at the Golden Shovel.

“We real cool. We/ Left school. We/ Lurk late. We/ Strike straight. We/ Sing sin. We/ Thin gin. We/ Jazz June. We/ Die soon.”

Its brief, terse lines with their onesyllable words sound like bullets bursting in a borough of Chicago hardened by poverty. If that is short, then

by J.R.R. Tolkien is long. tome that his brother owned, he thought, “I will read all 1,086 pages of it? Are you kidding?”

starting the book, but I can remem come to an end? Only 1,086 pages? I wanted it to go on and on, not because I had escaped into another world — but because I had been utterly captivated by the romance, the fantasy, the sheer epic enormity of the thing. More a prisoner than an escapee!”

and meandering, another favorite

for the intimacy of its voice. Before Salinger burst onto the American literary novelists were Hemingway, with his macho novels, and Faulkner, with his novels of doom and decay in the American South. Sure, the self is also present in their novels, but the thumb mark of the “I” character, with its distinctive voice, captured the attention of an American reading public after the war.

Elizabeth Berg is one of them. Her English teacher, Mrs. Yeatman, had assigned and Beowulf, which she dutifully read. “I read about J.D. Salinger because

transferred to our lame school after being kicked out of her fancy private one, said no, was good . . . I opened the book and read the And then I devoured the book and could write this way! It was so open. So close to the bone. . . “

And thus, writers like sponges soaked up the images and insights from the books of their youth—and later on wrote their own books, in - ness, and its grief. A book that gathers together lodestars of influences on writer, including the seminal book by J.D. Salinger, 'Catcher in the Rye.'