The books I have read on books that influenced or deeply affected or changed a life in some way have all featured writers. What makes The Books That Changed My Life different is that these short essays are penned not only by authors, but musicians, business folks, actors, and others. It makes for a nice mix of titles and some that I was not familiar with.
Here is a sampling:
Al Roker, television weatherman, writes about learning to look for the small clues by reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This makes sense as weather is quite mysterious and small clues often lead to an accurate forecast...or not.
Tim Gunn, Project Runway star and fashionista, fell in love with words by reading James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family.
Eric Idle, of Monty Python, asserts that his life has not been changed by only one book. "My life is changed by books. On a daily basis."
Dan Hesse, former CEO of Sprint, learned to think about how to live from reading Plato's The Republic.
Jack Kingston, attorney and former U.S. Representative, was helped along in his career by reading and following the advice given by Frank Bettger in How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling.
Andrew Soloman, professor of clinical psychology, credits his "tolerance for what's strange or different" from having been introduced as a child to the imaginative Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg.
And who knew that Alexander McCall Smith found a satisfying philosophy of life in the Collected Shorter Poems of W.H. Auden?
I have just been picking and choosing from the one hundred essays that make up this book edited by Bethanne Patrick. The Table of Contents lists the name of the essayist along with the book that changed his or her life. At the end of each chapter there is a short bio of the writer which is helpful because some of these folks I had not heard of.
I started with the ones written by individuals I knew weren't authors, then I read a few based on the books that I had read and that others chose, and I still have many to go.
If you can scrunch out a tiny bit more room on your bookshelves, or if you have freed up a slot or two on your TBR list, this book would be a fine addition.
And, if you had been asked to contribute an essay for The Books That Changed My Life, what book would you choose?
This is a report on a couple of books I finished this week.
Dave Barry's Greatest Hits - As I knew it would be, this is a hoot. It contains a collection of columns Barry wrote for the Miami Herald and was published in 1988. Barry offers his bizarro thoughts on a wide variety of topics from a review of his son's kindergarten play "The Cave Man" to pot shots taken at Reagan, Oliver North, television evangelists, and dinosaurs. He is a funny, funny man.
Diamond Dust - Another mystery starring Bath's most famous murder investigator Peter Diamond. I love this series written by Peter Lovesey. In this, the seventh, someone very close to DS Diamond is murdered. As he is not allowed to be involved in the formal investigation - he is even considered a suspect - he has to conduct his own unofficial inquiry into the crime.
The Southerner's Handbook - A couple of years ago I was spending a quiet weekend at a fine old hotel, the Beaumont Inn, in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. On the bedside table were copies of a magazine I had never heard of - Garden & Gun. I thought it an odd juxtaposition of subjects but found the publication to contain some finely written articles on Southern living.
This book is a collection of short essays on Living the Good Life put together by the editors of G&G. It is a delight and takes a look at the food and drink, style, sporting and adventure, homes and gardens, and arts and culture of the large area of the country that makes up The South. Here the genteel reader will learn how make Southern biscuits and gravy; how and when to wear seersucker; ways to collect mint Julep cups; how to get invited back as a house guest; the intricacies of college football rivalries; and, how to create a year round cutting garden. There is a laugh-out-loud ode to that iconic Southern libation, sweet tea (also known as hillbilly heroin!).
But best of all are instructions on how to stock your home library.
Here is the list of five essential Southern books according to Richard Howorth, founder and owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by James Agee and Walker Evans
The Moviegoer (1961) by Walker Percy (I wrote about this one here.)
The Complete Stories (1971) by Flannery O'Connor
All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974) by Theodore Rosengarten
Long, Last, Happy (2010) by Barry Hannah
Per chance, do any of these books grace your shelves?
