May 2012
4 posts
11 tags
The Tao of Pooh
Sitting in my senior history class, my teacher would go off on his typical stories to keep the class entertained during the two-hour lecture. Usually it was about some type of hilarious incident that happened to him when he was our age, but sometimes the story was so strange that it was hardly believable. But this time, he talked about a book he found that used Winnie the Pooh to explain the...
3 tags
Ask.
The book is in production, it’s spring, and we have some time on our hands. Ask me anything.
8 tags
McMurtry.
I’d seen this girl on the bus several times and thought she was pretty cute, but I was afraid to ask her out. She was always so engrossed in the books she brought on the bus, it seemed impossible to try to talk to her and so I put her out of my mind.
Over time, I started seeing her less and less on the bus. She was taking a different route, I supposed. Eventually, a few weeks had...
5 tags
Love, Mom.
Growing up I always had, in my mind, a plan for my life. Once I got past wanting to be a veterinarian, a singer, and a Disney Princess, I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to move to New York. I wanted to interview the stars. I wanted to talk to Justin Timberlake, be best friends with Christina Aguilera, watch Vanessa Carlton play the piano, and ask JC Chasez how he came up with the ideas...
April 2012
7 posts
5 tags
Adams.
I’ll be reading one of my short stories this Sunday, April 29, at the launch party for Sensitive Skin Magazine’s Issue #8. Please stop in to the Bowery Poetry Club at 8:00—and be sure to introduce yourself if you do. I’d love to meet you!
5 tags
Vonnegut.
It started out as an “I have a book that I think you will love, if you would like to borrow it.” He was my favorite teacher so I of course could not turn it down. It was Slaughterhouse 5, and never before had I been introduced to Kurt Vonnegut, but this was an age of discovery. It was a time when I was, as I still am, learning who I could or would be. I loved every detail, not only...
5 tags
Eliot.
When we were students in London in the 70s, my husband and I had a close friend called Harold. He was at LSE with my husband. After we returned to Canada, he came to visit us. By then we had a toddler. I was puzzled when Harold gave me a tattered Victorian copy of Middlemarch by George Elliot. I hadn’t read Eliot up to that point. Eventually, I read the book and thought it was wonderful....
6 tags
Little Birds by Anais Nin
Mr Blue was a book-seller, once upon a time. He worked part-time at several different chain stores across the city, his favourite one being the furthest away from his home - an independently-owned second-hand book shop hidden across the harbour by the name of Desire Books.
I first visited Desire on a unseasonably sunny winter day that just so happened to also be Mr Blue’s birthday....
4 tags
The Baby-Sitters Club
He had a scar on his right cheek and in the fourth grade, that made him dashing. I had floppy bangs and straight A’s and that made me a dork. For our class Secret Santa gift exchange he drew my name, but gave it away by asking, “You like to read, right?”
Yes. I did. But I was too chicken to tell him I didn’t only like to read and that I also liked him. If he would...
No fooling.
The book is done! Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
The submission process has been simplified—just click submit above. Once your story has been reviewed it will be queued for posting.
Thank you for all your amazing submissions!
March 2012
2 posts
More time?
Huge thanks to Frank Warren of PostSecret for spreading the word… with so many new readers, I’m going to extend the book deadline a bit longer. If you want to send in a story for consideration for the book, please hurry!
I’m happy to say submissions are streaming in, and I’m so excited about the array of stories that we’ll be able to put in the book. So, for anyone...
Waiting.
For new entries? Me too! Hurry and send in your stories for consideration for the book, so we can get back to posting here!
To sum up: The Books They Gave Me is coming to you in book form in early 2013 from Free Press. Right now I’m reviewing submissions for inclusion in the book. There’s still time to submit stories, so send them in to thebookstheygaveme@gmail.com. Contributors whose...
February 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Tolkien.
My dad and I have never had a very close relationship, as fathers and daughters go. He was a pilot for twenty years, and so most of my childhood memories of him are of him leaving for long trips to places whose names I could barely pronounce. He would bring me sand roses from Saudi Arabia, strange currency from Moscow, wooden carvings of exotic women from India that still smell like sandalwood,...
2 tags
Brooten.
Malpractice: A Guide to Avoidance and Treatment was written and mailed to me by Kenneth E. Brooten Jr., one-time special counsel for the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations. He claims also to have written House Resolution 222 (1977), which called for the investigation into the assassinations of Kennedy and King in the first place. I spoke to Brooten in August...
Updates.
Welcome to all new followers, and thank you the The Millions for including The Books They Gave Me on their list of must-follow Tumblrs!
I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about the book, and I thought I’d answer them here to save some clicking. The book will be released in early 2013 by Free Press, a really wonderful imprint of Simon & Schuster with a great pedigree. They have...
5 tags
Yellow.
The books they gave me were yellow. They were classics: Goethe Lessing Schiller Brecht Sophokles, to be read for school, according to the Lehrplan. No pleading with the teacher, no escape from those pages. Reading the books often proved to be an exercise in endurance: five more pages to the next chapter, four more pages, three more pages, two more pages, one more page, next chapter, 15 more...
January 2012
6 posts
4 tags
Plath.
The day I left for college you slipped it into the backseat of my car. I’d wanted it for months. And now the well-thumbed book sits on the part of my shelf I save for the books I love most, with your inscription—red pen; your beautiful, slim handwriting; your assurances that I am meant to write, that I should use the book not as means of negative comparison but as means of reminding...
3 tags
You.
I’m so very excited to announce that The Books They Gave Me, the book, will be published by Free Press in early 2013! The book will collect some of the very best stories from the blog, along with many, many more. If you’ve been waiting until the right time to contribute, that time is now. We are now accepting submissions for the book as well as the blog. If you have any questions,...
3 tags
Fleming.
Since we were both Upstaters and about the only sane people in a sitcom-worthy workplace, my coworker and I quickly became friends, despite the generational and class differences between us (he taught at the public school as an act of social justice while I took my tutoring gig out of financial desperation). Anyway, it was the first semester of my senior year. The night before I had been at...
2 tags
Redacted II.
he wrote a book, an anthology of short stories. (the title of which i obviously cannot divulge for his privacy) i never knew it existed until i found it by accident one day. he still doesn’t know i’ve read it. his stories felt sentimental, warm. but lonely. guarded. unsettling. it was just like the way he’d made me feel these past seven, almost eight, years- defeated.
4 tags
Bradbury.
Inscribed within is the line, “on the rim of the world is Time to Be…if you do not grapple it, seize it, shape it with your soul, sound it with your voice then time becomes the companion to light and ceases to exist as the enemy of dreams.” Their greatest lessons are captured in this fable, that of Icarus and not being afraid to fall, that of wasted time and tragedies of lives without trying....
4 tags
Borges.
We ran into each other in a very controversial discussion on Facebook about a Nobel Lecture; he wrote me not so long after to tell me he loved one of my expressions. We mailed each other for a long time, telling each other about what we have been reading. He was a literature teacher and I was giving up my studies in marketing to study linguistics. He was just the kind of men I know could get me...
New.
My biggest, warmest thanks to all of you readers who’ve enjoyed the stories here—and especially to those brave enough to have shared your own. If this blog has caused you to think back on an old lover or friend with warmth and gratitude for what their presence in your life has taught you, then I’m happy. And if this blog has caused you to read a book you might not have considered...
December 2011
29 posts
4 tags
Quinn.
Years earlier I was in his short film based on this book. I didn’t know the book and didn’t really know him and I still don’t know why he asked me, a writer, to play the only character in the film, when we went to a school filled with actresses. I don’t take direction well and had to lay on a cat-hair-strewn floor a lot, which wasn’t fun. Later we spent a couple...
1 tag
Holidays.
We’re wrapping up the year and heading out to spend time with the friends and family who make everything worthwhile. Updates to the blog will slow down over the next couple of weeks, but please keep sending your stories in.
May the New Year bring you luck, happiness, and lots of new books to read…
4 tags
Hesse.
My boyfriend from the ages of 16 to 21 was passionate about his personal interests. When we started dating, he spent his time obsessing over mountain bikes, playing the guitar, and me. In that order. Really. In order to get more face time with the guy, I picked up his interests, which meant that I obtained a $600 bike and cut my nails short to learn chords and finger-picking. I also scared the...
3 tags
Khayyam.
I was thirteen, he ten years older when he gave me the book. A slim volume printed on thick parchment paper, a poem written by a man with a name like a poem: ‘Omar Khayam’. Inside were verses in quatrains, and black and white line drawings that suggested rather than showed those lineaments of gratified desire more often sought than found by the very young. I wanted him to kiss me but he would...
4 tags
Wilde.
He sang to me, and said, “Read this. It’s about being bad, about sex and drugs and doing what you really want to do.”
I was horrified, not by the book, but by the boy’s fascination with being bad for bad’s sake. His rebellion was boring, and I soon grew tired of his reactionary sensibilities.
The book, however, bears rereading.
4 tags
Capote.
Nessa and I bonded during our junior year of high school over books (we couldn’t keep our noses out of them) and shared dislike of our boring rest-stop of a town (a dozen gas stations and fast food joints split in two by a rushing freeway). Every day on the bus we’d talk about the books we were reading, and the boys we liked, and how badly we wanted to escape Nevada and head out to New York...
2 tags
Dickens.
This was a going-to-college present marking one of the most significant transitions of my life that included leaving my family and my country and immersing myself in a completely foreign country, language, and culture.
He is everything a man should be: confident, intelligent, entrepreneurial, courageous, adventurous, wise, handsome… the list can go on forever. He is one of the few men...
5 tags
Dickens.
I was fresh from the chorus of a production of Oliver! and feeling strong. I had my eyes on a sure future—my life would be lived on the stage. My father found this (how? living in a foreign country?) and gave it to me for Christmas. It was a vote of confidence from one who doesn’t often vote my way.
3 tags
Wallace.
He gave me Infinite Jest to read one summer because he told me after he read it, he felt like he would never need to read anything else ever again. We’d been going out a year. I started it off a little wary of reading a book that would supposedly make me never want to read again. I should have known I would never have the ego to think I didn’t need to read. I got through about...
4 tags
Hemingway.
We met in Athens. He was a Greek student studying American lit, and I was an American student writing Greek theater.
He couldn’t believe that I hadn’t read Hemingway, and he teased me about it the entire time I was there. I teased him about being an entitled Anarchist. We did all of this teasing in front of my boyfriend of four years.
The teasing turned desperate and we took to...
3 tags
Smith.
He was my best friend. He was sensitive and honest. I was delusional and precarious. There were many things wrong with the relationship, which of course, made us right for each other. Over the years, he gave me many, many books. Some were just okay and others were truly beautiful. Each book, I thought, held some encrypted key, some form of incite, to our relationship.
After a slow and painful...
3 tags
Coelho.
A few years ago, I read Paulo Coelho’s By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. I convinced my then boyfriend to read it because I myself was convinced that the story bore a ghostly resemblance to our own love story — a story that unbeknownst to either of us at the time, was approaching a grave ending. I made notes in the margins, highlighting passages I knew he would love because...
3 tags
Ochsner.
It was a ghostly book he gave me, and it haunted me even after the smell of his hair had left my pillow and the letter he sent asking for his book back had been thoroughly obliterated by new mail. I hope he understood, even when writing that letter, that I wouldn’t reply—this cursed relationship we had conformed to its own sort of justice, and the realization of our betrayal...
4 tags
Burroughs.
We were two obnoxious high school students who had been coaxed and convinced that we had a sort of gifted intelligence that most people did not possess. We threw ourselves into an elite intellectual circle in our small community and constantly attempted to one up one another as we tried to prove that the label we were branded with since elementary school was not an ill-informed mistake.
We took...
4 tags
King.
I was drawn to his passion—the way he took each breath in deliberately, the way his eyes held me close as if I were a loved one. He recited entire poems from memory, scribbled lines for me on sheets folded, and spoke in a borrowed manner that made him seem like a secret. I wanted to unfold him.
I wasn’t sure why he liked me. At twenty-one, I was reserved, perpetually nervous, and uncomfortable...
5 tags
Neruda.
How about a book I wished he gave me?
I think I fell in love with him when he mentioned Neruda on our first date. I was amazed that he recited some of them from memory. We were inseparable from then on. Sometimes, he’d sit next to me at work, and one day he shared with me a PDF file of Neruda’s poems. He read to me “Your Feet” and declared it as mine, his...
1 tag
Given?
It is International Gift Giving Season, time to show those you love (and those you merely tolerate) how much you care for them by buying them things. In turn, they buy you things. Barbaric, perhaps, but not if you’re giving books!
Tell us about gifts of books you’ve given and how the gift was received.
3 tags
Auden.
In high school, I was a member of the University Interscholastic League Spelling team. (Sounds nerdy, right? The great thing was, we won more district meets, regional meets, and state meets than the football team ever did.) My coach, Mr. McMillan was an amazing teacher and person in general. He retired after my first year of being on the team, yet continued to coach us - even without being on...
4 tags
Rovira, Trias de Bes.
Written like a fairytale and does not exactly tell you anything new. Yet, it somehow makes you feel better after a bad day.
It was given to me on the day I graduated from high school, inscription saying “Always follow your dreams, sky is the limit”. I used to wonder whether she’d still be saying that, if she knew it would mean me seeing her three times a year, on average. But I think she...
5 tags
Russell.
The first and last books he ever gave me were Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and its sequel, Children of God.
When he gave me The Sparrow, I was 22 and we had just started dating. He had been a philosophy major, and I had somewhat reluctantly gone corporate after college. I loved the idea that he thought about big, important ideas while I slaved away at a desk job. He captured my heart...
4 tags
Bukowski.
When I first saw this site, I realized that I can’t remember receiving a book by a lover, although I have given them many books and brought just as many that I know they loved and thus I wanted to read. But I can remember the only guy who ever gave me books.
I introduced Bukowski to him, first the poems, and I mentioned that I didn’t have a book to lend him ‘cause all the books that I’ve read...
3 tags
Beatty & Dixon & Lopez & Martin.
We met online. He isn’t my first boyfriend, but he was the first person I truly fell in love with. Some of our very first dates were spent in used book stores. We are both literature nerds, and he also shared with me his love of comic books and graphic novels. He introduced me to Batgirl, now one of my favorite super heroines because Barbara Gordon is a librarian and I want to become a...
3 tags
Kerouac.
I met him when I was 17 and he was 24. He told me to take this book with me when I left his house one afternoon. I never ended up returning it. Two years later he smiled at it while laying on my bed in my dorm and later that night shook it inches from my face, yelling. Today, it sits on my desk in my studio and I look back on it as a painful but relevant reminder to continue moving forward and...
3 tags
Dean.
The seventh-grade me was starry-eyed with high fantasy dragons and Lord of the Rings. On my birthday she gave me a gift bag that included this as well as the return of a couple of books I’d loaned her months ago. I didn’t expect much from the garish cover, but as soon as I started reading I was sucked in. To the seventh-grade me, this book was the best college story written. I...
3 tags
Hesse.
The storage room of our house was always a mysterious place to me; cabinets and bookshelves overflowing with old clothes outgrown and forgotten about, baby toys that I didn’t understand why my parents held on to, and rows and rows of tattered books. They were packed in so tightly that to remove one risked being buried by my family’s collective history, but when I was about 16, hungry for...
6 tags
McDonald & Pratchett.
I gave him
A second-hand copy of Witches abroad
with its wicked humour and cheeky charm,
A week before we got together,
The day he went out with my friend.
He left it unread for weeks:
Pratchett isn’t that good, I’ve heard.
Read it much later
and took back his words
Even though, by then,
it was far too late for us.
Too late even
for me to take back my gift
and certainly much...