{"id":2178,"date":"2015-06-08T06:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.writerscookbook.com\/?p=2178"},"modified":"2018-02-19T21:57:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T21:57:00","slug":"books-that-changed-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.writerscookbook.com\/books-that-changed-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Books That Changed My Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like so many writers, as a child, I loved books, especially old \u2018important-looking\u2019 books by \u2018important-sounding\u2019 people like Shakespeare and Dickens and someone called \u2018Encyclopedia.\u2019 I loved the look of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. I just couldn\u2019t read them. They were mysterious, alien hieroglyphics to me, because—unlike my clever elder siblings—I couldn\u2019t read until relatively late, and was seen as the \u2018backward\u2019 one (my father\u2019s term, not mine). I was a slow learner (still am, in many ways) and couldn\u2019t read or write till I was seven or eight. This made reading and writing seem all the more strange, desirable, fascinating, like a secret code.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I did finally crack the code, it was with Dr. Seuss\u2019s Green Eggs and Ham<\/em>. The mixture of storytelling and poetry made it memorable, and I remember my sister accusing me of just learning it by rote (and not really reading it). But I think that memorability, the musicality of its language, which made it so easy to read aloud (and I love reading it aloud now to my own twins), have stayed with me. To this day, these things (poetic, musical language; storytelling as an oral art, memorability) are markers, for me, of an enjoyable book.<\/p>\n

I also retained that early sense of strangeness and fascination with, but also crucially alienation from, the written word. I\u2019ve since come to believe that most writers and perceptive readers are, in some ways, alienated from the written word, and it is sense of alienation that makes people want to write. Of course, the commonsensical view is precisely the opposite: that writers are people who have some kind of innate facility with language, people for whom language comes easily. I don\u2019t think this is true; and nor did Thomas Mann, who famously claimed that: \u2018A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.\u2019 This is why, I think, so many writers are dyslexic, and also why so many writers stand outside, or at an angle to the dominant language in some way. For example, the many successful authors who write in a second language, or from a post-colonial perspective. To write well, a writer needs to have an uncomfortable relationship with language, and especially written language. By contrast, those entirely inside the dominant language, those for whom language comes all too easily, often don\u2019t make good writers, but rather slick politicians or bargain-basement journalists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Books

Suddenly, I realised stories can be mirrors—or, at least, distorted mirrors—of one\u2019s own life. <\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

The books that really reach me, then, are ones which do unusual things with language—things which politicians don\u2019t do. I think style is an underrated facet of book loving; often, without knowing it, it\u2019s the style of a book which gets to the reader even when he or she thinks it\u2019s something else (like subject matter, or plot, or characters). It\u2019s for that reason that I love Dickens above (perhaps) all other writers: more than just a comic and sentimental Victorian, more than just an astute social critic, he\u2019s actually the most amazing stylist. Parts of Tale of Two Cities<\/em> and, even better, Dombey and Son<\/em>, could easily be set out like poetry<\/a>, because that\u2019s precisely what they are: Dickens uses rhyme, alliteration, extended metaphor, allusion, refrains—all to create this musical prose. No wonder his work was read aloud in families so much: again, it\u2019s great oral storytelling. Every time I pick up a Dickens novel, I learn something, about myself, about writing, about the world.<\/p>\n

Storytelling doesn\u2019t have to be fiction, of course. And I sometimes have problems with the cultural dominance of novels. I love novels, of course, but I think there are other genres which are just as important. Another book which had a huge effect on me when I first came across it (and I first came across it, significantly enough, at a public reading) was Blake Morrison\u2019s memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? <\/em>This is a touching and beautifully-written account of his relationship with his father as he grew up, and his father\u2019s illness and death. I want books to be like this: to deal with real-life: difficult issues like grief, family relationships, illness. That doesn\u2019t mean that the book is all tragedy: it\u2019s not, and there\u2019s plenty of humour and wit throughout.<\/p>\n

One thing Blake Morrison\u2019s memoir taught me was that there\u2019s powerful drama, tragedy, comedy, in what seems like the everyday and commonplace. In fact, that\u2019s what literary memoirs—like Blake\u2019s and Linda Grant\u2019s wonderful Remind Me Who I Am Again?—<\/em>achieve: they show how important the seemingly everyday is. Proper memoirs—as opposed to celebrity memoirs and politicians\u2019 memoirs—are a democratic form in this respect. These stories don\u2019t have to be set in apocalypses or post-apocalypses, featuring presidents and celebrities and the super-rich; stories can be just as powerful if they\u2019re about the seemingly obscure, the provincial, the everyday tragedies of life. This is what one of my favourite novelists taught me—Arnold Bennett, late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century author of novels like Anna of the Five Towns<\/em> and (best of all) Clayhanger<\/em>. I first read many of Arnold Bennett\u2019s books as a teenager when I was still living with my parents in Stoke-on-Trent—where many of them are set. Having spent most of my teenage years reading science-fiction and fantasy by Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss and Tolkien, it came as a revelation to me that good books might be set in my home town, and that I might recognise certain aspects of my life in a literary text. Suddenly, I realised stories can be mirrors—or, at least, distorted mirrors—of one\u2019s own life. And mirrors which sometimes beautify: as a teenager, I\u2019d hated my home city, wanted desperately to get away, but reading Arnold Bennett made me realise that it\u2019s possible to find beauty among the most provincial and ferociously-industrial (or post-industrial) landscapes.<\/p>\n

Within these harsh landscapes, Bennett finds stories which are obscure tragedies and comedies. And the writing which has always interested me most is writing which mingles both tragedy and comedy, partly because, in my experience, that\u2019s what life does: life is never emotionally monolithic, and people laugh at funerals and cry at parties. The best writing, I think, often manages to be comic and tragic, funny and poignant, all at once. Dickens and Blake Morrison certainly manage this mingling of emotion—as, of course, does Shakespeare in many of his plays. Hamlet is funny as well as horrific; The Tempest is a kind of tragi-comedy. I don\u2019t want single-minded earnestness from what I read, because that\u2019s not how I\u2019ve experienced real life. There is humour in the most extreme circumstances: Primo Levi\u2019s amazing and horrifying memoir about the concentration camp Auschwitz, If This is a Man<\/em>, is at once horrifying, heroic, deeply disturbing and, well, horrifically funny—-much of what he describes is simply absurd. The writer Wyndham Lewis—a much over-looked modernist writer, who is probably overlooked because of his dubious and changeable politics—does much the same in his memoir of the First World War, Blasting and Bombardiering<\/em>, which is an account of the excesses and absurdities of the trenches. What these and other writers understand and manage to capture, in extreme circumstances, is the mixture of absurdity, horror, comedy, laughter, tears, pain and pleasure that is real life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like so many writers, as a child, I loved books, especially old \u2018important-looking\u2019 books by \u2018important-sounding\u2019 people like Shakespeare and Dickens and someone called \u2018Encyclopedia.\u2019 I loved the look of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. I just couldn\u2019t read them. They were mysterious, alien hieroglyphics to me, because—unlike my clever elder siblings—I couldn\u2019t read until relatively late, and was seen as the \u2018backward\u2019 one (my father\u2019s term, not mine). I was a slow learner (still am, in many ways) and couldn\u2019t read or write till I was seven or eight. This made reading and writing seem all the more strange, desirable, fascinating, like a secret code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-2178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","tag-creative-writing","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\nBooks That Changed My Life | The Writer's Cookbook<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jonathan Taylor talks about the books that have affected him most throughout his life including Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens and Blake Morrison.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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