My earliest reading memory
At six I became fascinated with the Lonely Doll books by Dare Wright that I found in the public library of my small town, Northfield, Minnesota. They used photographs, not drawings, as illustrations; they gave me an uncanny feeling of secrets lurking behind the words and images. It is a feeling I have never forgotten.
My favourite book growing up
I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. I found it in my school library in 1965, 10 years after it was first published. I was 10 years old and intensely aware of the civil rights movement, despite the fact that I lived in an all-white town and had seen black people only on forays to Minneapolis every Christmas. I was passionately attached to the story of this extraordinary, heroic woman.
The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 14 or 15 I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Despite my lack of philosophical sophistication, I responded viscerally to the book. Rereading it later, I wonder exactly what I understood at the time. It is not an easy book. I suspect that, despite my struggles with the text, I gleaned its essential message – that women were treated as outsiders to history as the eternal feminine, had always been other to man, and that these injustices ran deep. I became a feminist.
The writer who changed my mind
I was in my early 30s when I first read the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose book Phenomenology of Perception reordered my thinking about the mind/body problem. His work changed my “mind” by bringing it into my body. He skewers the mind-body substance dualism in the philosophy of Descartes and his heirs. The philosopher’s interest in the science of the moment and its flawed assumptions, as well as his use of neurological case studies to illustrate his thought, have remained highly influential for my own thinking.
The book that made me want to be a writer
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I was 13. It was the summer of 1968, and I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, where my father was studying the Icelandic sagas. Political upheaval was dimly present in my consciousness, but I lived on and in novels. The sun never set, and my disturbed circadian rhythms kept me awake. I read and read, one novel after another, but it was that book that set my nerves on fire. One night, moved to tears by a particular passage, which I no longer remember, I walked to the window and made a vow – if this is what books could do, then this is what I wanted to do. I began writing. Years later, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Dickens. Although I sometimes tired of me and my insights while working on the thesis, I never lost a feeling of awe for the inimitable CD.
The book or author I came back to
I didn’t “get” Gertrude Stein as a teenager. I had to grow into an adult to feel the music, humour and rigour of her work.
The book I reread
I have read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights five times now. I read it first at 13 during the same Icelandic summer, and it scared me witless. The older I get, the more profound and radical the book has become. I have come to view it as an insurrectionist text that razes our assumptions about borders between this and that, I and you, life and death and grinds them into dust.
The book I could never read again
I am ashamed about Gone With the Wind. I read it that same fateful Icelandic summer. I checked it out of Reykjavik public library, didn’t understand that the author was writing about the Ku Klux Klan, and I had to ask my mother what the word “rape” meant. This horrible, cheesy book advanced the disgusting “lost cause” narrative still dear to the American south and parts of the north.
The book I discovered later in life
I did not read Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace until I was well into my 40s. I now think this was exactly the right moment for me because I was able to place the text in a broader context. At the same time, the lightning precision of Weil’s extraordinary mind would no doubt have bowled me over as a young person too.
The book I am currently reading
A wonderful recently published book, In Defence of the Human Being by Thomas Fuchs. Fuchs is a professor of philosophy and psychiatry at Heidelberg University and is a lucid, brilliant defender of a new form of humanism.
My comfort read
Fairy and folk tales – any kind from any country.