Books That Saved My Life

Editor’s Note:  I first met Dave in New York several years ago after reading some of his great author interviews on the  Powells Books website.  As an ex-Portlandian I occasionally need a City of Books fix.  I also discovered  that Dave was hard at work creating Powells’ breakout series of films about books.  That’s right, not book-to-film but “al reverse”, letting the medium serve the message. Out of the Book is “a series of literary films screened in more than seventy cities around the United States. The most recent featured John Hodgman, Susan Orlean, Anthony Bourdain, David Rakoff, and a dozen other contributors to Ecco’s State by State collection.”  Dave Weich is Powells Books’ director of marketing and development.

Rather than write about books that saved his life, Dave wanted to write about….

Books That Ruined My Life

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Two grades straight, fifth and sixth, my teachers assigned The Red Badge of Courage. You’d have thought our elementary and middle school teachers would have shared reading lists, but no. Horror of horrors, in sixth grade, my mother actually tried to make me read it. I could not. Not even in our dull cabin, in the woods, with no TV, over several days of pouring rain. I turned pages as fast as seemed reasonable. More than once my mother caught me skipping ahead. The Red Badge of Courage set me back years, novel-reading-wise. Mom caved. Good grades pending, she left me and my friends to the basketball hoop in our driveway. I didn’t read a book start-to-finish until freshman year of college, but you should have seen my baseline jumper.

Season Ticket by Roger Angell
When Season Ticket was published in 1988, USA Today profiled Roger Angell. Among the excerpted snippets, they reprinted these lines, from a chapter entitled “Not So, Boston,” about the 1986 season:

Glooming in print about the dire fate of the Sox and their oppressed devotees has become such a popular art form that it verges on a new Hellenistic age of mannered excess. Everyone east of the Hudson with a Selectric or a word processor has had his or her say, it seems (the Globe actually published a special twenty-four-page section entitled “Literati on the Red Sox” before the Series, with essays by George Will, John Updike, Bart Giamatti — the new National League President, but for all that a Boston fan through and through — Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and other worthies), and one begins to see at last that the true function of the Red Sox may be not to win but to provide New England authors with a theme, now that guilt and whaling have gone out of style.

This explained so much about my young life in the suburbs of Boston.

Was Season Ticket the first new book I bought in hardcover? It turned this casual baseball fan into an obsessive overnight. Three summers later, I visited all thirty major league stadiums; and six years after that, more than sixty minor league parks.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
What if Alison hadn’t introduced me to Cat’s Cradle? I doubt I’d work in the book industry. She left it on her end table one morning — the orange, Dell paperback — and then left me alone for a while in the house she shared with her Deadhead friends. We dated for just a few months. Plenty of fun times, nothing but good memories, but it would have been worth several more months just for that book.
Soumchi by Amos Oz

Quite possibly the book that’s given me the most pleasure, but not to be confused for an outright recommendation.  It’s a particular edition you’d need to get the spirit of the thing: Harcourt Brace, trade paper, 1995. Quint Buchholz’s shadowy illustrations open the story to another dimension entirely. For a couple years, the book lived in my backpack; we were never apart. I bought a second copy to keep at home, in case my backpack got stolen, I guess.

For full effect, imagine me reading along, sighing:

Near us in Zachariah Street lived a girl called Esthie. I loved her. In the morning, sitting at the breakfast table and eating a slice of bread, I’d whisper to myself, “Esthie.”

To which my father would return: “One doesn’t eat with one’s mouth open.”

While, in the evenings, they’d say of me: “That crazy boy has shut himself in the bathroom again and is playing with water.”

Only I was not playing with water at all, merely filling up the hand basin and tracing her name with my finger across the waves on its surface.