Love for books turns readers into writers
With summer reading days almost upon us — and the dream of hours of uninterrupted time to dive into a book, whether by the pool, the beach or in bed — I asked several Bay Area authors about their favorites. Some picks I’ve read, and others I’m eager to add to my never-ending stack of books on my bedside table.
Novelist Kirstin Chen said that Mary Gaitskill’s short story collection “Bad Behavior” made her want to be a writer. She read two stories for a creative writing class in college, and immediately ran out to buy the entire book.
“I raced through the pages and then pushed the book on my roommate, friends, really anyone who would listen,” said Chen, whose most recent book is “Bury What We
Cannot Take.” “I’d never before read anything so thrillingly ferocious ... (it) showed me that there really were no rules, and, for this kid from Singapore who’d always done what she was told, that was everything.”
Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” — whose narrator recounts how her attorney father defended a black man accused of raping a white woman — made a reader and a writer out of novelist Mary Volmer.
She first encountered the novel in high school, when it seemed “intimidating for its size and the threat of history,” said Volmer, the author, most recently, of “Reliance, Illinois.” “I did not want to like it, but inside was Scout, a tomboy like me, and big brother Jem and motherless Dill, and the mystery of Boo Radley and the ringing insult of injustice, which a child at any age feels deeply. Much of the humor and all of the irony was beyond me. It didn’t matter. I was moved deeply by the story — and more deeply now that my understanding of the book has grown up with me.”
For novelist Ingrid Rojas Contreras, her bookshelf — like the top liquor shelf of a bar, she says — is filled with the highest-quality stuff: Miguel Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” Franz Kafka’s stories, Gabriel García Márquez, Sandra Cisneros’ “House on Mango Street” and many by Virginia Woolf.
Her favorite is Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” another classic that she describes as “a richly textured, ascending, ethereal vision” about a trip to a lighthouse just off the shore of the Ramsay vacation home on the Isle of Skye, a trip that is first delayed in childhood, then delayed for 10 years, then finally taken in late adulthood.
“It contains one of my favorite passages in literature ever, when Woolf writes the lapse of 10 years in between as a tunneling vision seen from the point of view of Time, which noses in, caressing everything, slowly unrolling its destruction,” said Contreras, author of the forthcoming novel “Fruit of the Drunken Tree.”
Tommy Mouton chose Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” in which Bigger Thomas — a struggling young African American — accidentally kills his employer’s daughter, Mary Dalton.
“I have been drawn back, I believe, due to the scene’s poignancy and sense of urgency and its overall race-specific implications — which turn out to be timeless,” said Mouton, who is at work on a memoir. “That scene is still one of the most visceral I have ever read in literature. It acted as a sort of threshold for me. It was a gut check. I felt I understood Bigger’s intentions, the causality in it all. It was at that point in the book, that I had to decide to continue reading or to stop, for I wanted Bigger so badly to transcend his life’s circumstances — the stigma assigned then and even now to black men. And I think I still grapple with what it means that he, in that moment, was rendered both powerless and powerful.”
Rita Bullwinkel returns again and again to Maggie Nelson’s “Jane: A Murder.” “It’s a book that makes me feel like I’ve been plunged into a pool at night. I can’t totally tell where the edges of the book or the bottom lies, which is an incredibly seductive, brilliant and transcendent way to read.”
The book, which circles the brutal murder of Nelson’s aunt, is nonlinear and pulls text from the aunt’s diaries, old newspapers and pulpy books inspired by the killing and “perfectly mimics the way our brains amass evidence,” said Bullwinkel, author of the new short story collection “Belly Up.”
On Tuesday, May, 22, I’ll be in conversation with Bridget Quinn and Larry Rosen — hosts of the “GrottoPod” show about writers on writing — to discuss my favorite book at the San Francisco Public Library. It’s the first in a quarterly series of live podcasts that invite authors to discuss the books that have made an enduring impact on their lives. What’s your favorite?
For more information, go to https:// sfpl.org/index.php?pg=1032264201.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ bookshelf — like the top liquor shelf of a bar, she says — is filled with the highest-quality stuff.