the book that changed my life essay

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The Book That Changed My Life

Discovering the whole world in 'lonesome dove'.

“Live through it,” Call said. “That’s all we can do.” –Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

In the summer of 1985, a book changed my life. My eighth-grade English teacher, Marcia Callenberger, gave me Lonesome Dove , just out at the time and yet to win the Pulitzer.

Though I’m not sure she realized it, I happened to be in a period of transition probably somewhat greater than that of the average soon-to-be high school freshman. My parents had relocated from southern New Jersey to a succession of houses in southern California three years earlier—a different house per year, in fact—eventually to attempt roots in the northern California Sierras, a destination which by necessity landed me in public school for the first time after a decade of fairly sheltered private Christian schools. At the same time my dad, a veteran of the Philadelphia Carpenters Union, began to build a sprawling, multi-winged custom home on ten acres, thirty twisting, serpentine, hill-and-dale miles from Placerville, the closest town of any size.

Looking back, I think my parents were in a bit of a transition themselves. Back in Jersey we’d been enmeshed for years in an End Times-obsessed Baptist church, with the central-casting charismatic hustler at both pulpit and helm. At the height of our involvement there—or nadir, depending on how you look at it—my brothers and parents and I wound up holding hands in a circle in the back yard of our tract house, after the hustler at the helm predicted the day and time of the Second Coming of Christ, with further instructions to watch and wait. We gave it maybe half an hour, there in our circle. I’ve never discussed it with my parents, but I’ve come to believe it’s no coincidence we were packed up and fleeing for the opposite side of the continent within a year.

This other house, the one under construction during my eighth-grade year, was intended to be my parents’ dream home, a place where they might spend the next five or six decades in something like the predictable, comfortable stability of the American Dream.

Unfortunately, things went predictably, uncomfortably awry. With the shell of the house put together and the exterior nearly complete my parents ran completely out of money, unable either to start on the interior, or to continue to rent elsewhere. I don’t think my teacher could possibly have known the odd particulars of my background in any complete sense, or the virtual brink my home life teetered on that scorching hot summer before high school. But surely she identified something, some wistfulness or curiosity maybe, or some potential she knew hadn’t yet been tapped or nurtured, or even recognized.

When the call came through we had just taken up residency in the bedroom wing of the unfinished house. Bare stud walls, stovetop and kitchen sink in a makeshift plywood countertop three feet from toilet and tub. For the next three years, my mother would have to cook dinner while I or my dad or one of my brothers took a dump or a leak or a shower literally right at her back, and vice versa. No insulation, and no heat other than a wood-burning stove temporarily installed in what the blueprint of the house designated as the master bath. But we did have a working telephone, and Mrs. Callenberger evidently had my number.

I’d always been a reader, ever since stumbling across an antique Bobbsey Twins book in the pastor’s office of the Baptist church when I was probably five. For most of my childhood I was limited to whatever could be had through the Christian schools—the Little House books, sanitized 1950s-era Hardy Boys and Tom Swift novels, the Chronicles of Narnia—although by the time I reached junior high I managed to get my hands on a pretty good trove of Agatha Christie and Louis L’Amour paperbacks as well. I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but these books for me were an escape from a cloister of circumstance, cultural and physical, over which I had not a jot of control. And genre novels or not, they were irrefutably forming my sense of a wider world, of possibilities out there somewhere, beyond the bubble, mysteries waiting to be solved, frontiers waiting to be explored.

Though I could and frequently did climb onto the Orient Express or trek through Mesopotamia with Dame Agatha, my first love was the mythic West and its central characters, cowboys and Indians both. On an unconscious level, I must have identified strongly with its central motif—the promise of better fortunes down the trail. If I recall correctly, my very first book report for Mrs. Callenberger was on Centennial , one of James Michener’s signature epics about the rise of a fictional frontier town. I’d seen part of the miniseries as a television re-run, and again if memory serves, bought the paperback secondhand at a flea market.

What I do remember clearly is her reaction when I heaved all thousand pages or so of this doorstop out of my backpack—surprised eyebrows, and a smile. As it turned out, my newfound public school peers were mostly reading at grade level, or in some cases smoking weed in the bathroom or the ball shed on the playground, and not reading anything at all.

For the duration of the year she pretty much left me to whatever book I had going at the time, once I finished a spelling test or busy work. Thirty years have somehow passed so I won’t claim total recall, but I know I was reading a lot of the L’Amour books then, both the formula Westerns and the longer, more consciously historical efforts, and other epic or fictionalized histories from Michener or Herman Wouk or Alan Eckert.

I remember reading The Big Sky , my first real Montana novel, but what I had yet to discover was writing with the transcendent, ineffable quality of literature, with the power not only to entertain, or to educate or instruct, but the power to reach out and grab the human heart right by the lapels with something like beauty, or like truth. Something like art. At the time, Larry McMurtry was probably best known as the author of Terms of Endearment , the film version of which had raked in a slew of Oscars a year earlier. The original dust jacket of Lonesome Dove mentions only this other title, in three different places, and this may well be what caught Mrs. Callenberger’s eye. I don’t know if she was consciously nudging me toward an epiphany, or if the stars simply went into alignment. Whatever the inspiration, she telephoned one evening two months after I’d mustered out of her eighth-grade English class. She asked to speak to my mother.

I know she’d already bought me the book, and I know she was up front on the phone about its content. As the original jacket notes, “ Lonesome Dove embraces all the West—legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers—in a novel that recreates the central American experience…”

Anyone familiar with the book knows it rollicks cheerfully along through swatches of hilarious dialogue and picaresque situations, but also takes hard right, matter-of-fact turns into bloodbath Comanche violence and extemporaneous frontier justice. I’m fairly sure, however, that blood-and-guts were never the sticking point, and that Mrs. Callenberger knew it full well when she called.

McMurtry had written both frankly and amusingly about sex since his earliest novels, and this one had no shortage of references to sporting girls and pokes and peckers, not to mention gang-rape, and priceless moments of dialogue such as, “A man who wouldn’t cheat for a poke, don’t want one bad enough…” To say I’d never encountered anything like it would be an understatement.

But encounter it I thankfully did, a fact that still strikes me as a bit of a miracle relative to the be-careful-little-ears environment I’d come up in. I’m not sure what Mrs. Callenberger said, but evidently she said it well. For all I know my parents were simply so shell-shocked by their own straits at that precise moment, waking up with three kids to feed and no place to live but a house in the boondocks with bare stud walls, that any distraction at all was simply not to be denied. The bubble had popped, and what existed outside was cold hard reality.

I read the novel at least twice my freshman year of high school—thirty miles away in Placerville, which translated to about two fits-and-starts hours by bus, so I didn’t lack for time. I can pinpoint Lonesome Dove as the singular book that changed my life, because it made me want to be a writer too. It was my On the Road , in a way, Gus and Call my Dean and Sal.

After that my world as a reader opened up too, for real and for keeps, first through McMurtry’s earlier novels and essay collections and then through the books and writers he mentioned or commented upon, voices such as J. Frank Dobie and Ian Frazier and Leslie Silko, and hopscotching from these to Tom McGuane and Tim Sandlin and Ken Kesey. And on, and on.

My parents finally sold the unfinished house halfway through my junior year, with virtually no progress made during the blistering hot summers and dimly lit, endless winters we lived there. We moved into a tract house much closer to town, not so unlike the one we’d left behind in New Jersey.

After high school I toted my battered old school bus first-edition around for years, from California to Arizona to Oregon, back to California and finally to Montana, its jacket disappearing somewhere along the way and the backbone coming loose, the cloth cover separating completely from the spine. Eventually, I gifted it to another woman who made a mark on my life, a woman I loved who loves books too, and who really did understand what it meant to me.

I gave it to her on her birthday. So far as I know it’s still on her shelf, the both of them far away from me now. But I’m glad she has it—I regard it to be the most meaningful gift I could give, the same way it was the most meaningful gift I myself have ever received, the one that struck me in the heart like nothing before or since.

And what could I give to Marcia Callenberger, that one crucial teacher who gave a fourteen-year-old kid in not-very-great circumstances something to dream toward and work toward? Writing my first novel was a way of arriving back where I started, and knowing the place for the first time. And so I dedicated it to her.

Malcolm Brooks’s Painted Horses   is out now, from Grove Atlantic.

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Narrative Essay on The Book That Changed My Life

Books have the power to transport us to different worlds, challenge our perspectives, and inspire personal transformation. In this narrative, I will share the profound impact of a particular book that changed my life, exploring the moments of enlightenment, self-discovery, and growth that have shaped my journey.

Discovering the Book

It was a nondescript day like any other when I stumbled upon the book that would alter the course of my life. Tucked away on a dusty shelf in the corner of a bookstore, its title caught my eye, beckoning me to delve into its pages. Little did I know that within those worn covers lay the keys to unlocking a world of insight and revelation.

Immersion in the Pages

As I immersed myself in the pages of the book, I found myself captivated by its wisdom, its words resonating deep within my soul. Each chapter unveiled new truths, challenging my preconceived notions and inviting me to question the very fabric of my reality. It was as if the author had reached through the pages and touched the innermost recesses of my being, igniting a spark of curiosity and introspection that would forever alter my perspective.

Moments of Enlightenment 

As I journeyed through the book, I experienced moments of profound enlightenment that left me breathless with wonder. I discovered new ways of thinking, new paths to explore, and new depths of understanding that I never knew existed. With each revelation, I felt myself shedding the layers of ignorance and complacency that had weighed me down, emerging as a more enlightened and aware version of myself.

Self-Discovery and Reflection

The book served as a mirror, reflecting back to me aspects of myself that I had long ignored or denied. It challenged me to confront my fears, my insecurities, and my deepest desires, forcing me to reckon with the truth of who I was and who I wanted to become. Through moments of introspection and self-reflection, I embarked on a journey of self-discovery that would forever alter the trajectory of my life.

Growth and Transformation 

As I turned the final page of the book, I realized that I was not the same person who had first picked it up. I had grown, evolved, and transformed in ways that I never thought possible. The lessons I had learned, the insights I had gained, and the truths I had uncovered had fundamentally shifted my perspective on life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.

Integration into Daily Life 

Armed with the knowledge and wisdom gleaned from the book, I set out to integrate its teachings into my daily life. I sought to embody its principles of compassion, mindfulness, and gratitude, striving to live each day with intention and purpose. Though the journey was not without its challenges, I found solace in the knowledge that I was walking a path of authenticity and integrity.

The book that changed my life served as a catalyst for personal growth, transformation, and self-discovery. Its words became a guiding light, illuminating the path ahead and inspiring me to become the best version of myself. As I continue on my journey, I am forever grateful for the profound impact of this book, and the lessons it has taught me about life, love, and the boundless potential of the human spirit.

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Kapka Kassabova: The book that changed my life

Quiet Flows the Una  by Faruk Šehic

Kapka Kassabova talks to Misha Glenny about Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe at the Oxfam Moot, Saturday 25th May, 1pm

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The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them Paperback – October 18, 2007

• Print length 224 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date October 18, 2007
• Dimensions 5.31 x 0.56 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 1592403174
• ISBN-13 978-1592403172
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Publishing Group; Reprint edition (October 18, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1592403174
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1592403172
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.56 x 8 inches
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Raw Thought

by Aaron Swartz

The Book That Changed My Life

Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn’t really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls.

As I thought about this more, its implications struck me as larger and larger. But I still had no bigger picture to fit them in. The media was simply doing a bad job, leading people to be confused. We just had to pressure them to do better and democracy would be restored.

Then, one night, I watched the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (I think it had come up in my Netflix queue). First off, it’s simply an amazingly-good film. I’ve watched it several times now and each time I’m utterly entranced. It’s undoubtedly the best documentary I’ve seen, weaving together all sorts of clever tricks to enlighten and entertain.

Second, it makes shocking points. I didn’t understand all of what it was saying at the time, but I understood enough to realize that something was severely amiss. The core of the film is a case study of Indonesia’s brutal invasion of the country of East Timor. The US personally gave the green light to the invasion and provided the weapons, which allowed Indonesia to massacre the population in an occupation that, per capita, ranks with the Holocaust. And the US media ignores it and when they do cover it, inevitably distorts it.

Shocked and puzzled by the film, I was eager to learn more. Noam Chomsky has dozens of books but I was fortunate to choose to read Understanding Power , a thick paperback I picked up at the library. Edited by Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel, two public defenders in New York, the book is a collection of transcripts of group discussions with Chomsky.

Chomsky lays out the facts in a conversational style, telling stories and explaining things in response to questions from the groups, covering an incredibly wide range of topics. And on every single one, what he tells you is completely shocking, at odds with everything you know, turning the way you see things upside-down. Mitchell and Schoeffel know you’re unlikely to believe these things, so they’ve carefully footnoted and documented every claim, providing blockquote excerpts from the original sources to establish them.

Each story, individually, can be dismissed as some weird oddity, like what I’d learned about the media focusing more on posters than on policy. But seeing them all together, you can’t help but begin to tease out the larger picture, to ask yourself what’s behind all these disparate things, and what that means for the way we see the world.

Reading the book, I felt as if my mind was rocked by explosions. At times the ideas were too much that I literally had to lie down. (I’m not the only one to feel this way — Norman Finkelstein noted that when he went through a similar experience, “It was a totally crushing experience for me. … My world literally caved in. And there were quite a number of weeks where … I just was in bed, totally devastated.”) I remember vividly clutching at the door to my room, trying to hold on to something while the world spun around.

For weeks afterwards, everything I saw was in a different light. Every time I saw a newspaper or magazine or person on TV, I questioned what I thought knew about them, wondered how they fit into this new picture. Questions that had puzzled me for years suddenly began making sense in this new world. I reconsidered everyone I knew, everything I thought I’d learned. And I found I didn’t have much company.

It’s taken me two years to write about this experience, not without reason. One terrifying side effect of learning the world isn’t the way you think is that it leaves you all alone. And when you try to describe your new worldview to people, it either comes out sounding unsurprising (“yeah, sure, everyone knows the media’s got problems”) or like pure lunacy and people slowly back away.

Ever since then, I’ve realized that I need to spend my life working to fix the shocking brokenness I’d discovered. And the best way to do that, I concluded, was to try to share what I’d discovered with others. I couldn’t just tell them it straight out, I knew, so I had to provide the hard evidence. So I started working on a book to do just that. (I’m looking for people to help, if you’re interested.)

It’s been two years now and my mind has settled down some. I’ve learned a bunch more but, despite my best efforts, haven’t found any problems with this frightening new world view. After all this time, I’m finally ready to talk about what happened with some distance and I hope I’m now able to begin work on my book in earnest.

It was a major change, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

• Understanding Power on Amazon
• The Understanding Power web site
• Manufacturing Consent DVD on Amazon
• Manufacturing Consent torrent
• companion book

You should follow me on twitter here .

May 15, 2006

Of course you can publish this…

My reaction to Noam Chomsky was very different. Consider Chomsky’s claim in What Uncle Sam Really Wants that “free trade is fine for economics departments and newpaper editorials, but nobody in the corporate world or the government takes the doctrines seriously.”

I’ve been in the government. I will be in the government again. How dare Chomsky lie about what I believe.

posted by Brad DeLong on May 16, 2006 #

Wow, I’m shocked and honored that Brad DeLong reads my blog.

My reaction to Noam Chomsky was very different.

Famously, so. Your allergic reaction to Chomsky is a classic, although I can’t help but wonder if things would have been different had you picked a more scholarly or at least footnoted work instead of What Uncle Sam Really Wants which isn’t really written by Chomsky (it’s sort of a hodge-podge of transcribed comments mixed together by others) and isn’t very good.

Consider Chomsky’s claim in What Uncle Sam Really Wants that “free trade is fine for economics departments and newpaper editorials, but nobody in the corporate world or the government takes the doctrines seriously.” I’ve been in the government. I will be in the government again. How dare Chomsky lie about what I believe.

Well, you’re also in an economics department. ;-) But the point I understand Chomsky to be making here is the same as the one Dean Baker makes in his latest (and quite good) book The Conservative Nanny State — namely, that corporations and governments push for constraints on the free market all the time, while pretending otherwise. The wording may be a little hyperbolic, but perhaps you can cut him some slack considering they’re off-the-cuff remarks.

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 16, 2006 #

Tragedies like the Indonesia massacre have happened many times throughout history.

The world doesn’t care.

Take the Rwanda genocide in 1994. All nations withdrew their people leaving the Hutus murder close to a million Tutsis. Rwanda is of no interest. Nobody covered the genocide except after the killing was done. A simple front-page article could have saved thousands of lives.

The Holocaust, Cambodia, Sudan, Vietnam, Indonesia … here’s a list of the last-century genocides: http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html

The crime of genocide, punished by international UN laws voted in 1948, is the gravest and the greatest crime against humanity. Every nation has to intervene and stop t.

posted by Cristian George Strat on May 16, 2006 #

Not to pick nits, but “a simple front-page article” would not have saved thousands of lives. As evidence, witness Darfur. Darfur is constantly in the news and has been the subject of Presidential speeches and Congressional resolutions. There is a semi-popular movement to raise money for Darfur by selling the Livestrong-type bracelets. Awareness is present, but so far no UN troops are and the killing continues.

The greatest crime is that we are more aware of modern genocides and yet still do nothing. Millions of people protested the war in Iraq. Why have they suddenly fallen silent on Darfur?

posted by Anonymous on May 16, 2006 #

My understanding is that Chomsky is anti-Jewish and anti Israel

posted by JAMES MAGILL on May 16, 2006 #

What makes you think people would read the book?

An application of the theory indicates that it would remain obscure and essentially of no effect :-(.

But maybe that’s my burn-out talking.

posted by Seth Finkelstein on May 16, 2006 #

When I was a teenager, a friend gave me a copy of his latest book, After the Cataclysm , my first encounter with Chomsky. I was mostly puzzled, struggling to make sense of its convoluted exposition, but feeling much the same sense of disorientation at what appeared to be a parallel reality that required jettisoning a lot of what I thought I knew. Of course, I’m now glad it failed to make a lasting impression. I’ve said a lot of really stupid things in my lifetime, but I’m happy to say “accounts of genocide by the Khmer Rouge are systematically exaggerated and only serve the interests of the American power structure” ain’t one of them.

While I think I understand your reaction, it still raises some obvious red flags. It’s one thing to have read a book that changed your life, fine, a lot of us have. But when you say your “mind was rocked by explosions” and that you “literally had to lie down,” that tells me you’re responding to these ideas on far more than an intellectual level. While a few books of nonfiction have greatly impressed me and even brought me to tears, I’ve never come close to what you’re describing. This is how I’d expect an especially sensitive person to talk while in the throes of the raptures of poetry, or in the midst of a visionary religious experience. I mean, did you really clutch the door to your room, “trying to hold onto something while the world spun around”? To be fair, you seem to be aware this may come off as a bit odd. But to be honest, I think you’re having a great time with all this despite complaints of isolation; after all, you know something important that most other people seem incapable of recognizing. Not exactly like taking a shot of olive oil to lose weight, but close.

posted by Mike Sierra on May 17, 2006 #

Yeah, well, I also doubt you’ve said, as preparation for an invasion, “Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

I can’t find your alleged exact quote, but I know the issue. To try to short-circuit a classic flame-war: Nobody in politics is always right, especially in attempting to figure out what’s going on amidst a mass of disinformation propaganda, with a horde of fanatical flamers dogging them for every misstep.

Chomsky is extremely unusual since he has a very analytical mind, and then attempts to apply it to the real world. That’s about the best one can do in life.

posted by Seth Finkelstein on May 17, 2006 #

But when you say your “mind was rocked by explosions” and that you “literally had to lie down,” that tells me you’re responding to these ideas on far more than an intellectual level.

I’m not sure on what other level you’re thinking, but I’ve had similar (though less intense) reactions to other books, even on topics like math that would seem to be purely intellectual.

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 17, 2006 #

I know exactly what you mean. I haven’t read Understanding Power yet (though its on my list), but I’ve had similar experiences reading other great books, including On Intelligence (on your recommendation), Fountainhead/Atlas Shrugged, Engines of Creation, The Age of Spiritual Machines, etc.

Go where your mind tells you to.

posted by Ofer Nave on May 17, 2006 #

I’ll repeat the question I asked earlier: when you say you “remember vividly clutching at the door to [your] room, trying to hold on to something while the world spun around” when contemplating Chomsky’s ideas, are you really being accurate? I’m inclined to think not, and that you’re being a bit dramatic to emphasize your point. But if so, it suggests a high degree of disorientation, a condition in which I doubt much measured, critical reasoning is possible. It sounds like your floodgates are down, frankly. I understand the sort of expansive intellectual experience one gets from reading about mathematics, and the occasional feeling of having to put a book down to allow more time to absorb its insights, but this sounds more like an upheaval. In particular, what Norman Finkelstein describes sounds alarmingly like a nervous collapse: in bed for weeks, he says, his “world literally [sic] caved in.” Mind you, this is not an author who revels in gruesome accounts of war and genocide that might especially trigger such a reaction; Chomsky’s prose is highly analytical and dry as a bone. The upshot is I find both these accounts remarkable.

BTW, re your email note: I thought the “quote” I offered was clearly a composite intended to represent what I might parrot after reading that book, but at any rate, it’s as accurate a single-sentence summary as can be. If you haven’t read it already, I insincerely recommend it.

posted by Mike Sierra on May 18, 2006 #

the archives (of aaronsw.com) appear to be broken. stuff from before 4/04 comes up just fine; after that, nothing.

yours in the struggle.

posted by vlorbik on May 18, 2006 #

I read Manufacturing Consent, and saw the documentary, several years ago, and while my experience was not so emotionally charged, I can attest that it is an eye-opening and paradigm-breaking experience.

I think, though, that you’ve neglected to mention Chomsky’s basic thesis: that the U.S. media, far from being scrappy and independent, very closely parrots the preferred world-view of the politically and economically powerful. The core of the movie is not just an analysis of the tragedy in East Timor, nor the U.S.’s support. East Timor is paired (with Cambodia, if I remember correctly) as an illustration of the basic thesis: while East Timor was being decimated and the U.S. media took a pro-Polynesian line (in line with the official U.S. government line), an almost identical tragedy was receiving very different press coverage in the U.S. (Cambodia, or wherever, was recognized and denounced as a tragedy).

The book offers perhaps a dozen such paired examples: client states of the U.S. commit an atrocity, and get praised; client states of a U.S. “enemy” commit an almost identical atrocity and are denounced as monsters. In every case, the media follows the “party line” of the U.S. political and economic elite.

It’s a compelling argument, yet very difficult to validate, at least for this reader. It certainly places both liberal and conservative criticisms of the bias of the media in a new light: they’re both wrong.

posted by Yob on May 22, 2006 #

But I think discarding a large set of beliefs (a “world-view”) entails letting in a whole lot of others, which everyone needs in order to make it through the day.

Well, maybe we can proceed by you pointing out which of those beliefs is wrong. It’s hard to respond to “some of your beliefs may be wrong”; an obvious fact.

For one thing, there’s the powerful but largely unfalsifiable idea that things are not as they seem, that there are shadowy figures who are adept at pulling the wool over our eyes.

That’s unfalsifiable? Chomsky doesn’t simply claim such things, instead he writes deeply factual books filled with careful studies of which this might be a conclusion. He points to the people of power whose job is to do this and quotes their own writings where they describe it in this way. In short, he provides evidence , which can be evaluated on its merits.

But when something bad happens in the world, a common response is to play up this American angle to the hilt, while ignoring other possibly more malevolent forces.

You seem to fail to lack a fundamental principle of morality, namely, you’re primarily responsible for your own actions. Yes, this principle is uncomfortable but I think it’s also uncontestable. If I kill a man and then say I killed him, would you complain that I “play up this [personal] angle to the hilt, while ignoring other possibly more malevolent forces [like the fact that I was on drugs at the time]”?

This is not the place for a long discussion on Cambodia, but your apparent standard that if someone is ever wrong about something it “extinguish[es their] credibility” and makes further enthusiasm for them “irrational” seems an awfully high bar. Can you name a single public figure who has never been wrong about anything?

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 22, 2006 #

(Incidentally, your standard extinguishes the credibility of that Cambodia document, which previously claimed, incorrectly, that the New York Times reviewed 30 books calling the US role in Indochina a war crime.)

wake the world b4 it’s 2 late. staunch unionst seeks humanity b4 it’s snuft out.seek truth. tks aaron 4leading a great sight.your mate in unity

posted by danny mitchell on May 23, 2006 #

This is quite insufficient. While we are responsible for our actions, intellectuals are additionally and especially responsible for sorting out the objective truth, that would help guide our actions. But I am just echoing Bruce Sharp’s point:

Certainly there is merit to the idea that we should be more concerned with our own morality, rather than that of our enemies. But the wider implications of this seem to be lost on many of Chomsky’s supporters: If we admire Chomsky — if his viewpoint is “our” viewpoint — then we should be deeply concerned with ensuring that it is fair and accurate.

I’m actually not able to make much sense of your example. First, it involves only two parties (you and the guy you kill) rather a third (China or Russia), which was the point I was getting at. I also find it difficult to consider that your being on drugs is more malevolent than murdering him while sober. So that code doesn’t even compile. How about you punch a guy in the face, and later he dies? How much effort should you put into agonizing over your moral status if between those two events, someone else came along and hit him on the head with a sledge hammer? Perhaps you are morally culpable on some level, but you need all the information first.

I believe any fair reading of Sharp’s essay leads to a far more damning conclusion than that Chomsky was simply mistaken about some simple point of fact at any one time. (Mistakes go in many directions, bias in one.) Likewise, your quip about the 30 book reviews leads me to conclude that you have no substantial criticism of that essay. I mean, if this is the best you can do…

A word on “facts” is in order here. Following my last comment, I became aware that you had earlier offered a cash prize for any factual errors in Chomsky’s published works. I re-read Sharp’s essay, assuming it would be easy to find a few. Actually, it wasn’t. While the misrepresentations of Shawcross and Sydney Schanberg come the closest to qualifying, and the Znet material is of course off-limits, Chomsky’s real errors are those of profound bias. Consider that there are no factual errors whatsoever in the maddeningly encapsulated paragraph marked with footnote #111, despite the monstrousness of its enclosed assertions.

And clearly no, this is not a place for a long discussion on Chomsky’s views on Cambodia, since that argument has already taken place at length. I will note, however, one point of Sharp’s that resonates for me personally. Even I was aware, albeit obliquely, of negative media coverage of the American bombing campaign in Cambodia, despite being eight years old at the time. It was one of the reasons my parents were furious with Nixon, and thrilled to see him resign soon afterwards. (After all, it was not just Watergate that labeled him a criminal.) They seemed to form this view on a steady diet of the NY Times and the evening news.

By contrast, even as I became older and politically sensitive I had only the dimmest idea of what happened in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge took over. Even after the Vietnamese invasion, when the genocide was fully revealed to the world, I was only aware there was some sort of controversy about the matter. Maybe it was the teen hormones starting to kick in and addle my brain, but it just wasn’t front and center. Indeed, it was precisely to figure out what had happened in the region that I took up Chomsky’s book in the first place, as I mentioned in my first comment. I was especially drawn to the book because he was a well-known commenter on the region. Had I known what really happened, I wouldn’t have made it more than a few pages in before throwing down the book in disgust.

Of course one account does not make for a careful study, but it doesn’t seem likely these responses would be possible if there were a highly effective and monolithic system of propaganda in place minimizing America’s culpability in the region, while at the same time demonizing the Khmer Rouge. The continued assertion otherwise is one of the many reasons I find Chomsky so unreasonable, my original point.

posted by Mike Sierra on May 23, 2006 #

If Chomsky was indeed not telling the truth, that would be a serious charge, but you’d have to provide some evidence for it. Which is why I created the challenge .

That 30 books error isn’t the only error in the piece, but it’s the only one I got him to correct.

Chomsky’s real errors are those of profound bias. Consider that there are no factual errors whatsoever in the maddeningly encapsulated paragraph marked with footnote #111, despite the monstrousness of its enclosed assertions.

I don’t see how its assertions are monsterous. It’s a suggestion of a reasonable possibility. Perhaps, you may argue, a possibility completely at odds with the facts we know now, but nonetheless a possibility.

I read Chomsky because he provides facts that no one else does. If his facts are correct, why should I stop reading?

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 23, 2006 #

What’s laughable here is that in your challenge, you require us to supply material errors, those that are “relevant to the point [Chomsky is] making, not a typo or a misspelling, the kind we all make.” What kind of error is this one you’re describing? That it was actually 33 rather than 30 books, or that they were reviewed in the New York Review of Books rather than the New York Times ? How does either revelation alter the substance of Sharp’s point?

No, actually it’s a possibility completely at odds with facts that were well established in 1979, when After the Cataclysm went to press. Hence the device in which he offers a positive review of a nonexistent book: it’s a series of statements that clearly can’t stand as a direct assertion. And of course it’s nominally true “the Khmer Rouge programs [may have] elicited a positive response from some sectors of the Cambodian peasantry,” so long as as at least one peasant benefitted in any way. But this is nothing but dissembling double-talk. After all, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 elicited a positive response from some Russians.

(BTW, we have now just established the intellectual integrity of the Bush administration, since the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a reasonable possibility in 2003, or a suggestion thereof. Charges of systematic bias are unfounded.)

Need I repeat for you the difference between being nominally correct on a specific set of factual matters and being intellectually honest? And by no means am I asking you to stop reading him. I am asking you to read him more critically. And yes, I have provided evidence that Chomsky has been far less than truthful.

How does either revelation alter the substance of Sharp’s point?

I’m not sure why we’re spending so much time on an aside, but it does seriously affect his point. He was claiming that the mainstream media lavished attention on the subject — the NYT reviewed 30 books! Well, actually, it was the New York Review of Books , a completely different outlet which published Chomsky in those days. So it’s hardly mainstream attention at all and his point is just wrong.

If you agree that Chomsky is factually correct, then I don’t see what we have to discuss.

While no doubt lower circulation than the Times , the NYRB was still a highly influential publication, and quite revered in the circles I grew up in, perhaps on par with The New Yorker , albeit less entertaining. But no matter. The salient point is that there were well over two dozen books on the market that might support the idea that America’s bombing of Cambodia was a war crime. Not, say, the one or two you might expect for an issue pushed out to the margins in an atmosphere of pervasive propaganda. So I still dispute its relevance.

If you agree that Chomsky is factually correct, then I don’t see what we have to discuss. Since, characteristically, you responded to one part of my prior comment, you can’t not have read the other part.

What I find strange is that you’re so into Noam Chomsky and yet you support capitalism (Or at least this has been my impression). Chomsky is an anarchist and he doesn’t simply advocate policy reform but radical change to society.

posted by anon on May 23, 2006 #

I’m not sure if Chomsky is really an anarchist, since I’ve heard him (self?) described as an “anarchist socialist,” which strikes me as an oxymoron. But there’s no particular conflict between anarchism and capitalism, from what I understand, the latter term understood as less power ceded to government.

Aaron: I’ve posted some second thoughts on our exchange here . It’s not exactly charitable towards your position, but somewhat less towards mine. For what it’s worth…

posted by Mike Sierra on May 30, 2006 #

Aaron, I note in your replies both here and, more explicitly, at Mike Sierra’s aforementioned blog post your belief that (as you put it over in Mike’s comments) you “acknowledge that bias exists, but it’s a […] far less important [subject] than simple falsehood.” I wonder if you could elaborate on the thinking that brought you to the decision that technical inaccuracy is a bigger problem than bias (either here, or in a new post). Just a thought, and thank you for engaging in dialogue.

posted by Mike Sugarbaker on May 31, 2006 #

That’s an interesting question. There are pragmatic reasons for not worrying about bias (it’s tough to define, it’s harder to prove, it’s not directly relevant, etc.) but you asked why I think it’s less of a problem. The reason is that it’s easier to combat.

Let’s say I tell you that Joe found me sitting in a restaurant, sat down at my table, called me an idiot, ate some of the food I’d ordered, and then left without paying for anything. It sounds pretty bad. But if I am biased but still honest, Joe can redeem himself simply by pointing out that he stumbled upon the restaurant by accident, I waved him over, he was joking about the idiot remark (and said it in a friendly way), I invited him to have some food, and he had to dash off to a meeting and offered to pay but I told him not to worry about it. In one simple sentence, the tale is totally turned around. Not do you side with Joe on the issue, but you also begin to trust me less.

By contrast, let’s say I was outright lying. Joe could respond that the whole thing wasn’t true, he never saw me in a restaurant, etc., but that’s far less convincing. Now you know one of us is lying but you’re not sure who and it’s tempting to just throw your hands up and not worry about it too much, or to simply take my word for it because I’m your friend.

The implications for politics should be clear.

As for me, when people are merely biased I find it frustrating but not disastrous. I read a lot of stuff and I’ll often get the other side of the story soon enough. But when people lie or consistently tell falsehoods — well, I find that extremely problematic and I’ll try to avoid reading their stuff in the future, lest my brain get filled up with “facts” that simply aren’t true.

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 31, 2006 #

I’ve felt the same way, although not from Chomsky’s books, though, no doubt, he provides a contrarian viewpoint and strikes many good points.

For me, it was back in the 80s, reading a book by Jonathan Kwitney (a former WSJ reporter) titled Endless Enemies , a real eye opening book that detailed American interventionalist follies around the world, and it made a big impression upon me, shattering the illusion that American foreign policy was based on lofty principles of freedom and justice. Instead, carnal money grubbing desires are at the root of political manuevers, and the U.S., while in relative terms, may be “cleaner” than other historical nations, has engaged in nefarious plots in service of monied interests.

Recently, another book I read shook me in a similar fashion - The Secret War Against the Jews by John Loftus. Not that I agreed with all the speculation offered by the author, based on his network of “old spies”, but much of the book chimed true with other works from ex-CIA/NSA insiders. Stuff that fits into “follow the money” paradigm of viewing world history.

posted by naum on June 1, 2006 #

I disagree that bias is easier to rectify. Verifying facts involves focusing on a narrow set of assertions — whether Joe called you an idiot, left without paying, etc. — while identifying bias means you have to have a much wider scope of information available to you, which is inherently harder. Consider that if a reporter wrote up the story you initially presented, it would pass a fact-checker, but not an alert editor. Also consider that if you wrote a book called “Joe is a Bad Man” containing that set of facts, and you offered $50 to anyone able to identify a factual error in it, you’d be able to keep your money.

posted by Mike Sierra on June 2, 2006 #

In that very post I said “bias [i]s tough to define, it’s harder to prove”, just like you argue. But that has nothing to do with rectifying.

posted by Aaron Swartz on June 2, 2006 #

Truly maddening. You said that bias is “easier to combat,” despite its more vague definition. By “combat,” I assume you mean to “recognize” bias, which allows us to correct for it, i.e., “rectify.”

Well, you assumed wrong. What I meant by combat should be clear from the example I gave: providing a response that fills in the gaps of the biased narrative, thus allowing the audience to get a less biased understanding of what’s going on. No explicit recognition or rectification is necessary.

I actually believe we’re both talking about the same thing: the effect on the audience rather than on the source of the information. When you “respond” to the narrative by filling in the gaps, you implicitly “recognize” the information is incomplete, and you are doing something to “rectify” that shortcoming. Are we using the same language now? (Sheesh, and from a writer , no less!)

In your comment on my blog, you wondered to which of my points you failed to respond, and offered to rectify the situation. Perhaps here would be a good place to start. After “I disagree that bias is easier to rectify,” there are three other sentences. Are there any problems with any of them?

posted by Mike Sierra on June 3, 2006 #

there are three other sentences. Are there any problems with any of them?

No, which is why I said I agree with them.

posted by Aaron Swartz on June 3, 2006 #

… which is why I said I agree with them. Okay, I give up: exactly where did you say you agreed with them? From comment #29 on, I see nothing. In particular, where did you agree that your Chomsky challenge is an unreliable test for intellectual honesty, focusing as it does on the veracity of a selected set of facts, and leaving out questions of sample bias? Just checking….

Mike Sierra now asks if the Chomsky challenge “is a []reliable test for intellectual honesty” considering it doesn’t include the issue of bias. I never said it was; I’m not even sure what intellectual honesty precisely means in this context. The Chomsky Challenge page explains what motivates the contest and its specific rules. Neither the word “intellectual” nor “honest” appears.

If Mike wants to define some rules for intellectual honesty and some tests for bias, perhaps we could discuss them and then apply them to various people. But, unlike the issue of factual errors (for which there are numerous formal procedures for identifying and correcting and so on), I can’t say I’ve seen any rules for proving “intellectual dishonesty”. Let me know if you have.

Aaron, over in my blog’s comments you said: If you have evidence of Chomsky’s dishonesty, please take the Chomsky challenge! All I’m demonstrating is that’s a non sequitur, since much evidence of dishonesty may fall outside the scope of your test.

I don’t see how you got from “dishonesty” to “intellectual dishonesty” to “bias”, but whatever.

Yes, whatever. I was hoping to obtain a copy of Manufacturing Consent today, but none was available at my local library or book store, and Google hasn’t scanned it. Can you (or anyone) tell me if the following passage appears on pp. 281-282?

In that article we were clear and explicit, as also subsequently, that refugee reports left no doubt that the record of Khmer Rouge atrocities was “substantial and often gruesome,” and that “in the case of Cambodia, there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees.”

The passage quoted in my prior comment (#c38), which I believe would have passed your challenge, has been corrected in the 2002 edition. (The revised prose in that section is less than forthright, but that’s a story for another day.) I’m going on vacation for a week, and wanted to settle as much as I could before I left. Woe unto anyone else reading this, but here goes…

Regarding your email from 6/3, yes, I share your frustration in our ability to communicate. One example: commenting on my blog on your state of knowledge about the Khmer Rouge, you said you weren’t “following the news when it was a big story and … haven’t ever looked into it since.” By “big story,” were you referring to Pol Pot’s death in ‘98, the recent effort to bring surviving leaders to justice, or were you unaware the Khmer Rouge were toppled years before you were born? The mere fact that you just sent me email referring to me repeatedly in the third person by my proper name, as if it were a public comment, was itself mildly disorienting.

In your #c29 comment, you only said you agreed that bias was difficult to define and to prove, an uncontroversial point. You said nothing that would lead me to believe you agreed with my statement noting the Chomsky challenge’s limitations in detecting bias, on which much dishonesty may be based. If you meant otherwise, you were unclear. I really had no idea what you were talking about.

Yes, bias may be accidental or intentional (as factual error can), and I’m sorry if I interchanged the words “bias” and “dishonesty” in a confusing way. Still, the “Joe Is a Bad Man” counter-example I provided, the one to which you supposedly gave your assent, clearly represents dishonesty, since you would have been present at the encounter with Joe and thus well aware of reasons he called you an idiot and left without paying.

You still seem fixated on making hair-splitting distinctions among words like “identify,” “combat,” “recognize,” and “rectify” as they relate to bias, and I thought I had been as clear as possible that we’re talking about the same thing. There’s simply no way you can combat bias without implicitly recognizing/identifying a lack of relevant information in whatever set is being presented. That may just mean reading two articles rather than one.

As for “rectify,” the only misreading I could think of is to get a biased source to correct itself, a meaning I ruled out in my #c32 comment: to rectify is to correct the imbalanced set of information reaching the audience, to “correct for” the bias rather than correct it at the source. (I don’t know if that’s a source of misunderstanding.)

Regarding your #c35 comment, I’m not suggesting in any way you should try to craft a Chomsky Challenge that might detect bias. Indeed, I think the difficulty in crafting such a test generally supports the notion that bias is a more difficult problem with which to grapple.

In your email you claimed I did not offer an argument backing up my observation that bias is harder to rectify. The argument I offered is a simple one: that validating facts requires far less information on hand than checking for bias, which requires familiarity with a wider range of relevant information. (To which I may add you need wisdom in weighing the sources.) While I appreciate the difficulties you mentioned that are involved in gathering facts, I get the strong impression the filters we put in place are more of a problem.

posted by Mike Sierra on June 6, 2006 #

posted by Yacob Mekonene on September 13, 2006 #

Thank you for the recommendation. I’ve read some Chomsky and I’ve put “Understanding Power” in the queue. Perhaps interestingly, the same thing - a sense of isolation and helplesness when it comes to communicating my newly found wisdom - happened to me after reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Pynchon. It’s a book I’ve repeatedly heard lauded as a classic of literature, but turns out very few people have actually read it through and even less let themselves understand it.

posted by Goran Zec on September 24, 2006 #

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Friday essay: Alice Pung — how reading changed my life

Author (non-fiction, fiction, young adult), The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Alice Pung does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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Having survived starvation and been spared execution, my father arrived in this new country, vassal-eyed and sunken-cheeked. I was born less than a month later and he named me Alice because he thought Australia was a Wonderland. Maybe he had vague literary aspirations for me, like most parents have vague infinite dreams for their babies, so small, so bewildered, so egoless. I arrived safe after so many babies had died under the regime created by a man who named himself deliberately after ruthless ambition — Political Potential, or Pol Pot for short.

“There was a tree,” my father told me when I was a teenager, “and this tree was where Pol Pot’s army, the Khmer Rouge, killed babies and toddlers. They would grab the infant by their ankles and swing them against the trunk and smash them again and again until they were dead.”

When I was an adult, I found out that there was not just the one tree. There were many such trees from which no cradle hung.

But as a child, growing up in Australia, the oldest of four, I knew the words to comfort crying babies. They’d been taught to me by my schoolteachers, with rhyme but without reason: when the bough breaks the cradle will fall and down will come baby, cradle and all. A gentle song to rock my sisters to sleep. If my mother understood the words I was singing, she’d yell at me.

My mother was always hollering at me about one thing or another. After the age of eight, I was never left in peace. She repeatedly told me that babies had really soft skulls, that there was even a hole in their heads that hadn’t yet closed. When I looked at my baby sister, I could see something pulsing on the top of her scalp, beneath the skin. Never drop a baby, they warned me, or your life will be over. They spoke in warnings and commands, like Old Testament sages. They’d seen babies dropped dead. Their language was literal, not literary, but it did the trick.

We could not complain that we were dying of boredom because they’d seen death close-up, and it was definitely not caused by a lack of Lego. We could not say that we were starving because at one malarial point in his life, my father thought that if he breathed inwards he could feel his backbone through his stomach. We could never be hungry or bored in our concrete house in Braybrook, behind a carpet factory that spewed out noxious methane smells that sent us to school reeking like whoopee-cushions.

But in this scatological suburb, I was indeed often bored shitless. Imagine this — you go outside and hoons in cobbled-together Holdens wind down their windows and tell you to Go Back Home, Chinks. So you walk home and inside, it’s supposed to be like home. But it’s not a home you know.

It’s a home your parents know, where the older siblings look after the younger ones and your mum works in an airless dark shed at the back making jewellery, and you think it’s called outworking because although she’s at home she’s always out working. Just like her mum in Phnom Penh and her mum’s mum in Phnom Penh and every other poor mum in the history of your family lineage.

“What are you doing here? Stop bothering me,” your mum would tell you. Or when she was desperate, she’d be cajoling: “Take your siblings out. Go for a walk. If you give me just one more hour, I’ll be done.” Her face would be blackened, her fingers cut. She’d have her helmet on, with the visor. She looked like a coal miner.

Back in Cambodia, the eldest siblings looked after the bevy of little ones, all the children roaming around the Central Market, en masse. Here, in these Melbourne suburbs they’d call it a marauding Asian gang, I bet. I preferred to stay at home. I had plenty to keep me occupied there. Our school library let me borrow books, but I can’t even remember the names of the librarians now. They didn’t like some of the kids because sometimes we stole books.

My best friend Lydia read a book about Helen Keller that so moved her, so expanded her 10-year-old sense of the world that she nicked it and stroked the one-line sample of Braille print on the last page until all the raised dots were flat. I nicked books too, books on needlecraft and making soft toys. Sometimes one of my aunts would come by and give us a garbage bag filled with fleecy fabric offcuts from her job sewing tracksuits in her own back shed.

Being a practical kid who bugged her parents at every opportunity possible for new toys, I wanted to have reference manuals on how to make them. I didn’t nick story books or novels because to me, those were like films I often only wanted to experience once.

One day, my baby sister rolled herself off the bed when I was supposed to be watching her. She was three months old. I had just turned nine. My mother ran into the house and railed at me like a dybbuk, “You’re dead! You’re dead!” She scooped my sister out of my hands. “What were you doing? You were meant to watch her!”

“She was asleep,” I sobbed, “I was reading a book.”

While my mother was working to support us in the dark back shed, I had been in the sunlit bedroom, staring for hours and hours on end at little rectangles, only stopping occasionally to make myself some Nescafé coffee with sweetened condensed milk. If this wasn’t the high life, then what was? Those books were not making me any smarter, she might have thought. Or even said, because it was something she was always telling me, because she couldn’t read or write herself. The government had closed down her Chinese school when she was in grade one, as the very first step of ethnic cleansing in Cambodia.

My mother called up my father and roared over the phone for him to come home immediately because I’d let my sister roll off the bed and she might be brain-damaged. “If she’s brain-damaged, you’re going to be dead,” my father said to me, before they both left for the hospital with my sister.

I hated my parents at that moment, but I hated myself more. I also hated the Baby-Sitters Club, all of those 12-year-old girls for whom looking after small children was just an endless series of sleepovers and car-washes and ice-cream parties and they even always got praised and paid for it. The only people I did not hate were my siblings. They were blameless.

This fucking reading , I thought, because this is how I thought back then, punctuated by profanity, because this is how I wrote back then in diaries I made at school of folded paper stapled together with colourful cardboard covers that I’d then take home and fill in with pages and pages of familial injustice. Sometimes the pen dug in so aggressively underlining a word of rage that I’d make a cut through the paper five pages deep. And this is how the kids talked at school, and also some of their parents who picked them up from school. But then I also realised, reading’s the only fucking good thing I have going for me .

It showed me parents who were not only reasonable, but indulgent. They were meant to be friends with their kids. They were meant to foster their creativity and enterprise. They hosted parties and baked cupcakes and laughed when their children messed up the house, and sat them down and explained things to them carefully with great verbal displays of affection. But only if the kids were like Kristy or Stacey or Dawn in the Baby-Sitters Club.

Read more: Friday essay: need a sitter? Revisiting girlhood, feminism and diversity in The Baby-Sitters Club

If they were anything like me, then they didn’t talk very much. We were refugees in school textbooks, there for edification, to induce guilt and gratitude. The presence of third-world people like us in a book immediately stripped that book of any reading-for-pleasure aspirations. We were hard work. We were Objects not Subjects. Or if subjects, subjects of charity and not agents of charity. Always takers, never givers. No wonder people resented us.

Hell, even I resented us! “Girls are more responsible,” my mother always told me. When my aunties dumped their children, my little cousins, with me, they’d always say, “Alice is so good. We trust her.” What’s one or two or three more when you already have so many in the house? they reasoned.

I imagined if some prying interloper had called the cops on my parents when I was young, seeing our makeshift crèche with no adult supervision around. “If you tell the government what I do,” my mother always warned me when I was a child, “they’ll take me away and lock me up and your brother and sisters will be distributed to your aunts and uncles or be put in foster homes.”

What she did — her 14-hour days in the back shed, working with potassium cyanide and other noxious chemicals to produce the jewellery for stores that would then pay her only a couple of dollars per ring or pendant — she thought was a crime. She got paid cash in hand, so she never paid any taxes. She just didn’t understand that she wasn’t the criminal; she was the one being exploited.

My mother began work at 13 in a plastic-bag factory, after her school was closed down. When all the men were at war, the factories were filled with women and children. One afternoon, she told me, she accidentally sliced open a chunk of her leg with the plastic-bag-cutting machine. She had to stay home for the next two weeks. She spent those two weeks worrying whether she’d be replaced by another little girl. In her whole working life, spanning over half a century, my mother has never signed an employment contract because she can’t write or read.

“People can rip me off so easily,” she would often lament, “that’s why I have to have my wits about me at all times.” She’d always count out the exact change when she went grocery shopping even though it mortified me as a kid, and drove those behind her in line nuts. “If they overcharge me and you’re not here, how can I explain anything to them?” she’d ask, “I don’t speak English.”

She’d memorise landmarks when driving, because she couldn’t read street signs. During elections, she would put a “1” next to the candidate who looked the most attractive in their photo. And she’d ask me to read the label on her prescription medicines.

“Tell me carefully,” she’d instruct, “too much or too little and you could kill me.” The power over life and death, I thought, not really a responsibility I wanted at eight. But power over life and death is supposed to be what great works of art are about. Sometimes, there’s not a huge chasm between being literate and being literary. They are not opposite ends of a continuum.

Sure, I enjoyed the classics, especially that line in Great Expectations when Pip determines that he will return a gentleman and deliver “gallons of condescension”. But the depictions of working children, children treated as economic units of labour, as instruments for ulterior adult ends – this was nothing new to me.

Looking after children is hard work. No one cares when things go right, it is the natural course of the universe. But everyone swarms in when things go wrong. A whole swat team, sometimes consisting of your own extended family members, ready to whack at you like a revolting bug if harm should befall your minor charges. The sad reality is that when you slap a monetary value onto these services, people sit up.

They pay attention. They first splutter about how outrageous it is. Then slowly they accept it. You hope that one day no children will be left at home, minding other children while their parents work, because all working parents will be able to access good, affordable childcare.

Often when people rail, think of the children! they are not really thinking of the children. Otherwise, they would listen to the children, not condemn the parents for situations beyond their control — illiteracy, minimum wages, poverty.

Jeanette Winterson wrote about art’s ability to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. It involves just seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. To understand that an eight-year-old can and will take responsibility and care of themselves when left to their own devices requires imaginative empathy, not judgement.

Reading showed me what the world could be. My life told me what the world was. It was not Jane Eyre or Lizzie Bennet or even Nancy Drew that opened my life to the possibility of a better existence. It was Ann M. Martin and her Baby-Sitters Club. That children should get paid was a crazy idea, that they should get paid for babysitting even more audacious.

That a handful of pre-teen girls could start a small business from Claudia’s home — beautiful artistic Asian Claudia Kishi with her own fixed phone line — and that they could muster all the neighbourhood children under their care and largesse was revolutionary to me.

In my life, the miraculous does not involve magic. There is nothing that makes the state of childhood particularly magical. There is a lot that is frightening, brutal and cruel about every stage of life. After all, I know that a single tree can harbour a cradle or a grave. But to be able to do what my hardworking, wonderful mother never could — time-travel, mind-read, even never to mistake dish detergent for shampoo because the pictures of fruit on the bottle are similar — this is a gift I will never take for granted.

This is an extract from The Gifts of Reading: Essays on the Joys of Reading, Giving and Receiving Books curated by Jennie Orchard, with all royalties to be donated to Room to Read (RRP $32.99, Hachette Australia), available now.

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The Books That Influenced My Life

There are many parts of The Fountainhead that resonate with me, but my favourite part emphasises the importance of the independent mind and making, creating, and achieving things that not only make us happy, but also contribute to improving society.

Prarthana Banikya is a graduate in Sociology from Miranda House with a certificate in poetry. She spent her formative years in the valleys of Northeastern India from where she draws inspiration for most of her writing. Her work has been featured in several journals including Aaduna, Asia Writes, Aerogram, Danse Macabre, Poetry Super Highway, Namnai, and Pratilipi. In 2016, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for poetry and in 2018, was the recipient of the Orange Flower Award for poetry. She blogs at  prarthanabanikya.blogspot.in.

You can read her articles here . 

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Fall 2019 Features

The Story That Changed My Life

The prompt was simple; the exercise was anything but. Faculty, staff, students, and alumni tell us about the story that changed the course of their lives.

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T ell us about the story that changed your life.” The prompt was simple; the exercise was anything but. Not only were we asking folks to identify a singular work that forever changed the course of their lives, but we were asking people to share such intimate details with, well, 50,000 people.

Because we are fervent believers that stories do change lives, we knew it was a question worth asking—and our contributors did not disappoint. Some responded almost immediately; others took some time to reflect. Some could pinpoint that actual moment their lives changed, while others got a bit creative with the question. Which delighted us, too.

So enjoy. And please take a moment to give the question some thought and let us know if you have your own story to tell.

Julia Alvarez ’71

Writer in Residence Emerita The Arabian Nights

Before I ever came into English, I lived in a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. I wasn’t a reader, I didn’t care for books. But I loved stories, which in our oral culture were told by living people. But I do recall one storybook, a gift from my tía , which captured my imagination, The Arabian Nights . It was the story of a girl, Scheherazade, who saves herself by telling stories to a cruel sultan, night after night, for one thousand and one nights. Not only does Scheherazade save her own life, she also manages to save the lives of all the women in her kingdom by transforming the mind and heart of the sultan with her stories. It was an important bit of luminous information that I carried to my new country in the bloodstream of my imagination: that stories have power, that they can transform us and save us.

Lesly Santos ’20

“La Llorona, the Weeping Woman”

The tale of “La Llorona” varies by country, but in Mexican folklore, “La Llorona” is the tale of a beautiful woman who lives in an impoverished village. A wealthy merchant from the city is immediately captivated by her beauty and marries her. After she has two children, the merchant leaves her for another woman, since motherhood has stripped part of her physical beauty. In contempt and despair, she drowns her two children in the river. Almost immediately, she regrets her decision and spends all of eternity wailing in despair for her children. She targets young children in hopes of finding her own.

When I was younger, my parents would tell my sister and me, “ No vayas, te va llevar la Llorona. ” We children would tell tales of the weeping woman and potential sightings. It was really a popular ghost myth for any age group. This ghost-woman was a form of intimidation to scare children from doing bad or from wandering off by themselves. I did not think much of the tale until I read Medea , a Greek tragedy by Euripides. A sort of realization hit me: Why does one think of these women as monsters? It might be far-fetched, but it seems the predominantly misogynistic culture of my country could not fathom the idea of a woman standing up for herself or making a mistake, because of social/marital pressure. Are women only tools for complementing their husbands with their beauty? Are we only useful for motherhood? Why are we so scared of women who do wrong?

As a woman, I couldn’t help but empathize with her suffering instead of being afraid of her. Perhaps our greatest blessing could be our most fatal flaw.

Mahabat Baimyrzaeva

Associate Professor, Middlebury Institute of International Studies The story of my grandmother, growing up in Kyrgyzstan

“Patient perseverance is gold.” “A kind word makes even snake come out of her nest.” These are just some of the proverbs my grandma used to say when I was growing up. Although she never went to school and could not read, she spoke in vivid metaphors and radiated wisdom. I am still unpacking some of her words over many years of being a student of leadership.

For someone who experienced much hardship in her life growing up as an orphan in rural Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s, she saw the best in everyone. No wonder she was a glue and magnet for the entire community. Her small house, where she raised her own 10 kids and many more grandkids like me, was like a bustling café where neighbors and friends were always welcome. Never mind she also worked at a tobacco farm in addition to managing a household with too many mouths to feed, making homemade bread and almost everything handmade and from scratch. It is as if physical hardships did not weigh her down. Just the opposite—her attention sought out the wonderful in life and in people, elevating everyone. In her presence people lit up, nourished by her genuine attention.

Now I find myself teaching in my leadership class the deep lessons from her life—that the best leaders build up and bring forth others’ strengths and create an enabling environment for their continued growth. She also encouraged me to reach and grow as far as my dreams and imagination could take me. Now I too try to pass her example and lessons forward by bringing forth the beautiful and unique in our students. I also strive to help them move forward with confidence. I think my grandma would have liked that.

Sabine Poux ’20

The story of how my parents met

I’m a planner. As a child, I always needed to know exactly how we’d fill each day; as a tween, I’d ask “left or right?” before disembarking the ski lift; now, I spend more time tweaking my color-coded planner than working on the assignments in it. So when a plan falls through, I think of the story of my parents.

My mom was crestfallen when she got the call in 1993 that her six-month trip to Somalia was canceled. Not only had she already endured the required half-dozen painful vaccinations, but also the trip was going to be a pivotal landmark in her career, her switch from editing radio behind the scenes to presenting the news on air.

The icing on the cake was she lost her excuse to miss her 10-year high school reunion a few weeks later, which she hadn’t been particularly dying to attend. But at the reunion, she reconnected with an old classmate: my dad.

It gives me solace to think of my parents’ story as I navigate the emotional roller coaster of job applications. It’s one thing to know that when one door closes, another opens. It’s another to be the product of that.

Matthew Taylor

Assistant Professor of Music Not any one story, but the storyteller

There are too many stories to count, really. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart inspired me to write an opera, while F. Scott Fitzgerald taught me to be a more attentive reader with The Great Gatsby . As a little kid, I learned about heroism from Issun-Boshi, the One-Inch High Samurai, and I loved the adventures of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

Yes, there are too many to count. So I think I will cheat and instead name the storyteller who changed my life: Jackie Torrence. Ms. Torrence taught me that beauty is not just found in the happy moments, but also in the sad and scary moments. She taught me what a miracle making art can be. Listen to her tell the story “Sleeping Sickness,” and you will hear a woman who empathizes with her characters. In “Shoes,” you hear her empathize with her audience.

I think of her often when I compose. I remember how she made me feel as an eight-year-old when she frightened me with her rendition of “Tilly” (“Tilly, I’m on the top step . . . Tilly, I’m right next to you . . . BOO!”), and I think of ways to reach my audience.

I owe a great deal to her.

Shawn Ryan ’88

Screenwriter and Television Producer The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

As a teenager constantly on the run from activity to activity, I used long car rides to devour books of all manner—mysteries, teen angst romances, Mark Twain classics, sports biographies—to pass the traveling hours on back roads and highways. When The Three Musketeers was recommended to me as a “good story,” I was dubious but gave it a shot, despite its intimidating page count and small print. Growing up in the Midwest and about to venture into the world as a young adult myself, I became riveted by the swashbuckling tale of d’Artagnan and his journey into friendship, adventure, intrigue, love, politics, and sword-fighting heroism. Here was a young man on a quest to prove himself, to make his name, and to do it with honor and dignity.

When I first read the book, I didn’t know yet that I would want to be a professional writer one day, but the story sang to me with its life-and-death stakes, its high drama, and its ability to transport me, as if in a time machine, to a different world, a different era, and a different culture. By the third time I had read Dumas’s masterpiece, I knew then that I wanted to be a professional writer, and I reread it as if I was a safecracker trying to unlock the combination that made it so brilliantly work. This time I appreciated the plotting and especially the specificity of the characters, and always the thrills that I felt as d’Artagnan dodged death and embraced duty. It’s a story for the ages and has set a bar that I try (unsuccessfully) to match with each show and script I work on now.

Dena Simmons ’05

Assistant Director, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence The book I am writing —White Rules for Black People

I was 10 years old when my very religious cousin told me that “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Confused, I stood in front of my cousin, wondering how any of God’s creations could be an abomination.

As a child, I did not like the fairytales and fables conservative family members told me; these stories felt manipulative, oppressive, and limiting. At school, I was expected to find myself in narratives of enslaved Africans, of the three civil rights leaders about whom we learned each year, and of Black struggle. I did not see myself in the many clear faces with blond hair and blue eyes in children’s books and television shows. I searched for stories about Black biracial children with immigrant mothers and absent fathers, about children of color living in cities in apartments inventing games because outside it was sometimes too dangerous to play. I searched for stories about Black love, excellence, and joy. I searched for these stories until I could not search anymore.

Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I’ve taken heed and am now writing White Rules for Black People (St. Martin’s Press, 2021). The process has already changed me. I have had to face uncomfortable truths to love myself more fiercely and to understand my relationship with whiteness as I envision a better nation—one where we can all face our ugly and confront our country’s sin of racism to do and be better, to heal.

Brett Millier

Reginald C. Cook Professor of American Literature “The River” by Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor’s most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” ends with the main character, the grandmother, being shot three times in the chest by the Misfit, the most unlikely agent of salvation imaginable. But the grandmother, at least, is an adult. In “The River,” the protagonist is a five-year-old boy. We meet him in his dissipated and loveless home, as he is taken by his babysitter to see a preacher conducting a mass baptism in a nearby river. Told that he will find life in the river, the boy returns alone the next day and launches himself hopefully into the current, and “since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him.” Presumably, he drowns.

For years, I found this ending unacceptable. Even knowing O’Connor’s penchant for representing the action of God’s grace through violence (her idea was that modern humans are so estranged from God that any contact with the divine will shock us), I struggled to see the boy as anything but deluded, and his end tragic. But learning to see the boy’s yearning for love and belonging as symbolic of our own, yields the timeless truth: “the things which are seen are temporal, and the things which are not seen are eternal.”

Nicole Curvin

Dean of Admissions Ghost in the Machine by the Police

I could be an annoying little sister at times, and I often drove my brother mad by “borrowing” his stuff. As I was heading into middle school, I located some records in his room one afternoon and one album cover stood out— Ghost in the Machine by the Police, a British band formed in the late ’70s, so I grabbed everything of theirs he had. I was immediately hooked, and to this day I still remember every word of their songs.

Ghost in the Machine was the first album that I remember dropping the needle on during this listening session when I started to realize that there didn’t have to be a formula for music. The beats were mixed with reggae, punk, pop, and the song lyrics said things about our world. From love to industrialization and the overreach of technology, I found in a four-minute song a great deal to think about. My musical world had been mostly curated by commercial radio and, without the freedom of choice with today’s streaming services, it was limited and hard to navigate as you spun the dial and hoped for a new song.

I was young, female, and black and living in a tree-lined neighborhood in the West Ward of Newark, New Jersey, in the ’70s and ’80s, a time when the city was gradually becoming less mixed with people from many different backgrounds and faiths. I saw the change as many of my friends who weren’t black were moving to the neighboring suburbs. If you walked in the park or around my neighborhood, you largely heard R & B hits like the Whispers singing “And the Beat Goes On” or Teddy Pendergrass crooning “Love TKO.” And I knew there was more out there.

My parents were civil rights activists and educators who brought an extended family of academics and young upstarts into our home on a regular basis. Our stereo played the gamut of styles from classical to experimental jazz to musicals. Some of my Newark friends raised their eyebrows when I mentioned the Doobie Brothers or Queen, but it didn’t occur to me that I should limit my tastes or be boxed into a fixed perception of what a young person from Newark should groove to. So my brother’s record collection sparked a personal movement, and music continues to change my life every day and gives me the confidence to listen to what I want and to define my path beyond assumptions. And my family showed me the way.

Tim Parsons

Horticulturist Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

My copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek long ago fell apart, its cover separated from the spine, pages held together more by memory and number than glue. Pay attention, Dillard wrote to my undergraduate self, don’t just look at the world around you, but see it, see and smell and feel and hear and taste all the beauty and all the brutality of the outside world that you love so much.

I used her book as a touchstone for a creative writing class, which I loved, even though I threw the highlighter against the wall in frustration, because every word she wrote was so damned important. And, like a fledgling painter using Monet for inspiration, I wisely chose to stick with horticulture, learning that plants are much more forgiving than paint, or the written word.

Kathryn Morse

Professor of History Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

At the risk of cliché, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series (1932–43) won my heart and sparked my historical imagination in transformative ways (starting in 1974). As a scholar of the American West, I focus on human connections to land and natural resources. As I’ve read, researched, and taught, I have engaged with two ongoing tensions. The first is the gap between Wilder’s mythic American story and a far more complex, violent, and interesting history of conquest, dispossession, failure, and environmental change (what scholars now term settler colonialism ). The second is the question of when and how we as scholars and educators share this fuller story with our students. As Caroline Fraser explains in her Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder , Wilder’s fictional stories wove together memories, inventions, and erasures in a narrative shaped as much by the crisis of the Great Depression as by the Ingalls and Wilder families’ struggles and failures. Yet those fictions started my journey to deeper truths and better stories. A recent semester of History 216 began with the 1862 Dakota Sioux Uprising—five years before Wilder’s birth—which, as Fraser shows, spurred and shaped her family’s westward migration in profound ways.

David Barker ’06

Director, Fort Greene Park, NYC Parks My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

My mom’s reading of Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain to me in elementary school changed my life. The story about Sam Gribley, who escapes a crowded New York City apartment to the Catskill Mountains for a year of wilderness survival, helped steer me on a course of outdoor adventure and continued awe of rugged, self-sufficient individualists, from Teddy Roosevelt to MacGyver.

I ended up in New York City after Middlebury, having grown up in Oregon. For 12 years I’ve tried to make that escape to the Catskills for weekend fishing, and more locally through work for the New York City Parks Department. I fled the agency’s cushy Manhattan headquarters a few years ago to the rugged world of park maintenance, where I manage the 30-acre Fort Greene Park at the edge of downtown Brooklyn. The people and wildlife Sam befriended in the Catskills remind me of the diverse mix of characters and creatures I come across at the park.

Sam had Frightful the Peregrine falcon. I greet a pair of red-tailed hawks each day that swoop for pigeons outside of my office. In place of Bando, the professor who teaches and mentors Sam, I rely on Ted, a retired neighbor who coaches me in all manner of repairs to our mowers and utility vehicles. I joke that Fort Greene Park is my own fiefdom. Or, put another way, the park has become my side of the mountain.

Ruth Forman

Faculty, Bread Loaf School of English Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange

I came across Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo in a first-year course at UC Berkeley. Up until that time, I had not seen myself as a young African American woman in literature in that way, and Ntozake broke my world right open.

After I realized we were there in all of our beauty and magic, I could not get enough. I read as much as I could. It was a feast for my spirit. Once you see yourself in literature celebrated for the beauty you are and can be, there’s no going back. I looked for other stories exploring and celebrating the lives of Black women and came across Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and others. I already loved writing. Naturally, I went on to write myself and other African American girls and young women in our celebration and stories. I found exceptional poetry mentors who helped me hone the celebration in my work. This culminated in a poetry collection at the end of undergrad, We Are the Young Magicians , which won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. The celebration in my work continues, and it started with Ntozake Shange.

Professor of Russian Vini zvani pu, Bosnian and Croatian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh

My story involves reading the Serbo-Croatian (as the language was then known) translation of Winnie-the-Pooh, Vini zvani pu , when I was a junior in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (as it was then). I had hoped to learn Serbian and to study medieval Serbian frescoes, but the only program in Yugoslavia was a) in Zagreb, Croatia and b) to study Russian, so I had to make do with taking some art history and studying the frescoes on my own. Outside of class time, three or four of our group (six Americans in total), somehow decided to improve our Croatian by reading Winnie-the-Pooh (I had already read it in Russian, as well as in English, of course). I remember reading it in an apple orchard in Slovenia, but also on the train from Graz to Zagreb with two students and a stranger in the train compartment. The stranger was sleeping, or so I thought, by the window, with her coat hanging and draped over her head (a familiar sight on European trains), while I was occasionally explaining something about Slavic grammar to my classmates, who also knew Russian. At some point the mystery woman came out from under her coat and pronounced that I must be a teacher. She turned out to be the formidable head of the Art History Department at Zagreb University, a woman whose reputation I had heard of, Vera Horvat-Pintarić. It took me another two years to actually come around to the idea of teaching, but perhaps this planted the seed?

James Chase Sanchez

Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric The Leftovers , created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta

This overlooked television show brings us to a small town and a particular family after a “rapture” takes place—where 2 percent of the population literally vanishes into thin air. With no specific connections between these people who vanish and no religion being able to answer for it, we are left with a world of characters who are hopeless and who are trying to make meaning out of their hopelessness. It sounds bleak—and it is—but it’s oddly life-affirming as well, as we get to follow characters searching for meaning through relationships, cults, place, and family. I never would imagine that a show that would fit neatly into the category of magical realism would feel more realistic than any show I have ever seen, but that is exactly what The Leftovers does. It forces its audience to be aware of their existence and eventual mortality and forces them to deal with it. It is brazen, refreshing, and oddly uplifting.

Lyndon Dominique

Associate Director, Bread Loaf School of English The Woman of Colour by Anonymous

While working on my graduate dissertation, an anonymous novel originally published in England in 1808 changed my life. I had read about The Woman of Colour in Jennifer DeVere Brody’s monograph Impossible Purities (1998). But Brody didn’t provide any indication of where one might get a hold of this intriguingly titled text. A subsequent and fortuitous research trip to the British Library, however, brought me face-to-face with what I believed, at the time, was the only extant copy of this amazing two-volume epistolary narrative. It tells the story of a motherless biracial woman whose English slaveholding father dies in Jamaica and leaves a curious mandate in his will: his mulatto daughter must leave her homeland with a £60,000 dowry, travel to England, and marry her white first cousin. Perusing Olivia Fairfield’s letters gave me a unique and nuanced glimpse of a life lived by a wealthy woman of color in the year after Britain abolished its colonial slave trade. Moreover, I started to see women of color as crucial characters within the British novel and even as possible creators of important 18th- and 19th-century fictions that British critics had too long ignored.

Catherine O’Neill Grace ’72

Editor A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I was nine when the U.S. government, in its wisdom, sent me into exile, reassigning my father from his State Department post in New Delhi, my home since I was four, to Washington, D.C. That winter, my mother and I visited her hometown—Williamsport, Pennsylvania—and went for tea with her high school English teacher, Miss Miriam Wendell. Miss Wendell gave me the run of her library, and I took down a heavy, musty book: A Little Princess , by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was probably the 1905 edition; Miss Wendell collected children’s books, and this one was venerable. I skimmed the story about a rich little girl named Sara Crewe who is sent back to England from her home in India, falls on hard times, and is banished to a cold attic and drudgery as a servant. How this resonated with me, shivering in the Pennsylvania cold, separated from everyone I knew and from the sun and heat and smells of home. I read a paragraph in which Sara clambers into a skylight to look out at the sunset over London (“It’s a Splendid one . . .”) and sees an Indian servant, a lascar , cradling a pet monkey across the way. The monkey escapes; Sara catches it, and a gleaming tale of redemption and restored riches follows. But it wasn’t the happy ending that enchanted me. It was the moment when Sara recognizes that the lascar misses the Indian sun. Reading that, I was no longer alone.

James Riding

Books that changed my life: tales from ovid by ted hughes.

‘I don’t get poetry.’ It’s a miserable cliché, but generation after generation takes it to heart. In fact, as a teenager studying for my GCSEs, I believed it myself.

Still sporting K-Swiss trainers and a swooping Justin Bieber fringe long after it was a good look (if ever it was), I was stuck in my old ways. I was a novels person, I thought — poems were too brief to affect me deeply or really sear themselves onto my psyche. Yes, they could be memorable: even now, I can recite Vernon Scannell’s ‘Nettles’, with its artfully simple cadences, by heart. And they could be funny: you had to love Daljit Nagra for rhyming ‘chutney’ with ‘Putney’ in ‘Singh Song!’ But I would have taken the complex cast and sweeping drama of Great Expectations over Carol Ann Duffy’s onion any day.

You may have heard that Ofqual, the exams watchdog, has axed poetry as an integral component of the English GCSE syllabus next year to compensate for lost school time. The truth is somewhat more prosaic — teachers can choose to drop one of three modules, the others being the nineteenth-century novel and post-1914 British fiction and drama.

Even so, the news resonated with me because, given the choice at the start of my GCSEs, I would have opted out of poetry without a second thought. (Who would want to spend week after week over-analysing a load of samey sonnets, anyway?) I wasn’t given the choice, however, and so I persisted — and, by the end of Year 11, a book from a surprising origin had given me a newfound appreciation for verse that helped me through my exams and has stayed with me ever since.

While brainstorming topics for my Extended Project, I kept thinking about a Roman writer named Ovid, whose name I had begun to encounter more and more, from Shakespeare’s plays to the lyrics of a Bob Dylan album. His influence seemed to be everywhere, and he was held in reverential terms by scholars. Maybe I could research his impact on Western literature — how hard could that be? (In case the Promethean scale of my pretentious teenage overreach isn’t clear enough, I didn’t even know how to pronounce ‘Ovid’ at this point. You say it with a short o, not, as I assumed, ‘ohh-vid’).

Unfortunately, two more pressing problems stood in my way. Firstly, I didn’t know any Latin. Secondly, Ovid was a poet . What changed everything for me was my dad’s crinkled paperback of Tales from Ovid — Ted Hughes’s celebrated English translation of Ovid’s grand opus, the Metamorphoses .

How do I begin to describe the Metamorphoses ?

It was finished around the time of the birth of Christ and, other than the Bible, it’s hard to think of a book more influential on Western writing. Ovid was a great poet and also an exceptional editor, retelling familiar Roman myths of gods, nymphs, giants and the usual megafauna of classical poetry with his own particular focus on human psychology and the power of feeling. He playfully scoots over exposition, deeming it ‘no part of the story’, and zooms in on moments of extreme passion, desire and transformation: characters literally turn into birds, mountains and stars.

Almost uniquely for a Roman poet, Ovid is as interested in telling stories from a female as well as male point of view. And although he didn’t come up with his stories, such was their strength that Ovid’s were the versions read and plundered by generations of subsequent authors. If you’ve read or heard of tales like Pygmalion, Actaeon, Venus and Adonis, Echo and Narcissus, or Pyramus and Thisbe, chances are they can be traced back to the Metamorphoses .

The action and the drama of all this instantly appealed to my younger self, but the fact that it was all in verse was deeply ominous. Shakespeare’s characters spoke to each other in verse, sure — but one enormous, long poem? Wouldn’t it make the stories repetitive and lightweight? Nor was I reassured by Hughes’s slightly pompous introduction (he solemnly informs that, by Ovid’s time, ‘The mythic plane, so to speak, had been defrocked’).

What I didn’t expect was for the ensuing poetry to be a masterclass in the concentration and distillation of language into something undeniably punchy, frank and earthy. Tales From Ovid made me realise how powerful it could be to tell an all-encompassing story with a gimlet eye.

Reading it for the first time, I was amazed that the book opens with a creation story, directly encouraging those Biblical parallels. And what an opening it is. The universe is dark, until ‘God, or some such artist as resourceful, / Began to sort it out’. We then witness humanity’s fall, how ‘Man tore open the earth, and rummaged in her bowels’, unleashing hatred and war and a world where ‘The inward ear, attuned to the Creator, / Is underfoot like a dog’s turd.’ (Very few translators capture Ovid’s weirdness as well as his wisdom).

Mankind has become a lost cause, so Jupiter brings a flood to wash everyone away. Pagan gods collide with the story of Noah in a thunderous statement of the book’s mythic intent: ‘Drowned mankind, imploring limbs outspread, / Floats like a plague of dead frogs.’

From there, the book essentially proceeds as a compilation of climaxes: crossroads of change and moments of transition. Like all great storytellers, Ovid and Hughes linger on these biting points until they are almost unbearably affecting. Take Echo, whose doomed love for Narcissus causes the sadness in her voice to be heard forevermore:

She was in love…like a cat in winter at a fire She could not edge close enough To what singed her, and would burn her. She almost burst With longing to call out to him and somehow Let him know what she felt.

The sizzling sibilance of ‘She almost burst’, the way the line-lengths coil up before springing out, spilling over with desire and desperation – it’s fantastic stuff.

The transformations are as brutal as often as they are beautiful. Here’s Jove transforming the murderous King Lycaeon into a wolf: ‘As he tried / To force out screams / He retched howls. / His screams / were vomited howls.’ A common theme, in fact, is the horrifying power of the gods — and their king is the most ruthless of all. Ovid paints a deeply unflattering portrait of Jupiter, warts-and-all: he’s slippery, shapeshifting, seductive and a cold-blooded killer, who you can imagine Romans fearing as much as worshipping.

My indifferent teenage self was buffeted into submission by the overwhelming force of Hughes’s language and blindsided by the flexibility of his blank verse, expanding and contracting like a living organism. I loved the literalness of the stories, the way giants slumber under continents and how Phaethon, son of the sun, comes face to face with the beasts living in the Zodiac constellations. I couldn’t help but goggle at the skilful adaptation and translation, which transformed poetry from two millennia ago into something that felt so present, passionate and disturbing. And the idea that feelings are so strong you could be physically transformed by them made perfect sense to my adolescent self.

In fact, I would soon undergo my own transformation of sorts, ditching the K-Swiss trainers for Vans and wearing Superdry hoodies, which — OK, would date just as poorly, but were at least a bit less of an affectation. I held on to the terrible fringe for a little while longer, but my most important metamorphosis was a literary one: I began reading other long poems in translation, like Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh , alongside my usual fix of Dickens and Oscar Wilde, and I never again doubted the transformative power of poetry.

It is always a humbling experience to encounter a book so good it changes your mind. But I’m particularly glad Tales From Ovid helped me ‘get’ poetry when it did. To me, the GCSE years seem like a greenhouse where your appreciation for poetry can bloom — or wither, sometimes never to recover. If you know a teenager who is apathetic about poetry, try showing them one of the Tales from Ovid : proud Phaethon incinerating the earth with his juvenile hubris, perhaps, or Pygmalion, consumed with false love for his own artwork.

They prove beyond any doubt that poetry is a form bound up with transformation — one that people in a transitional period of life can benefit from most of all.

_ James Riding is a writer and reviewer. He has contributed pieces to The London Magazine , Literary Review and Review 31 .

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