The Temptation of St. Anthony -Salvador Dali
This month at BTSML we’re excited to feature an interview with author Anthony Swofford (Jarhead, Exit A). (I am trying to stop using the royal “we” but I just can’t help myself.) I’ve been a fan of Swofford’s since the first reading I went to of Jarhead, his memoir of being a Marine in the first Gulf War. I showed up late, at the cozy Hawthorne branch of Powells Books in Portland, OR. Stuck in the back peering between people’s heads, I couldn’t help but notice the crowd–Portland hipsters with their glasses and doc martins cheek by jowl with young grunts with buzzcuts and excellent posture, Reed professors and armchair historians. During the reading, the room got hotter and hotter, until at one particularly dramatic part of the book a cry went up from the audience. A man had fainted. An ambulance came and carried the man out on a stretcher, although by now he’d come to and was protesting being treated like an invalid. Anyway, the reading went on and afterward a bunch of people gathered to get books signed. The woman ahead of me hadn’t read the book yet, and had struck up a conversation with two young military guys about whether or not the book would be too incendiary for her book club. She bought several copies so I assume the verdict was no, or else she decided incendiary was just the stuff.
The thing I remember most, though, was Swofford talking about the books he brought with him to the Gulf. He said he always had a copy of Shakespeare stuck somewhere in his pack and would find time to read it in the strangest places. As a fellow Shakespeare junkie, the Bard would be my first desert island book, or something I’d give to anyone going away for a long time. I’ve wanted to ask Swofford about his favorite books, or I should say most influential books (one of my favorite authors is Christopher Pike, but I wouldn’t say he’s been very influential), ever since.
During our conversation I was struck by the idea that we tend to gift most those books that have most changed our lives. In the spirit of the holidays I’d like to venture that we give books not just as something to weigh friends down on their next move, but to give them an experience–books we hope will come to their aid if they end up in the desert.
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