February 2012
7 posts
Deadline.
We are still accepting submissions for the few slots left in the book. If you’d like to be considered, please send them in by March 9th.
Contributors will receive a copy of the book as well as eternal fame and glory. Send your submissions to: thebookstheygaveme @ gmail.com.
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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,...
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Strunge.
I got this book for my 18th birthday. To celebrate I’d invited a few friends over. The two I considered my best friends gave me two cd’s by artists I didn’t care about at all. The other three gave me this book. That’s when I realised the friends I’d decided to let go, knew me better than the ones I’d decided to keep.
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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...
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Spillane.
When I was 12, my Uncle Charlie introduced me to Mickey Spillane. I loved the first person tough guy narration. The character’s fearlessness and appeal to women were qualities that I lacked. The Long Wait was not a Mike Hammer book, but I soon discovered Hammer and read all the titles. At the stationery store in my suburban strip mall, Spillane paperbacks featured half-naked women...
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...
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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
9 posts
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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...
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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,...
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Evanovich.
Traditionally, they are released every June, right before my birthday. One novel per year, a remarkable pace for any writer. Summoning some tact, I’ll say they’re not the sort of thing I usually read. At all. But once she’d persuaded me to read the first one, I grudgingly admitted they were rather fun, and I quickly caught up to the latest release. From then on, she’d...
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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...
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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.
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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....
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McKillip.
Even as a young child I loved to read. I used to sit down and disappear into the world of the latest book I was reading for hours and hours. I gave many books that I loved away to friends, lovers and family, if I though they’d like it. When my younger brother got old enough to start reading I started passing on some of my books to him. When he reached middle school, he stopped reading...
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Murakami.
He was my English teacher and I, his favorite student. He said I should read it because of the strength it had. I didn’t know what he was talking about until I turned the page and realized I had finished the book. He was right.
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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
37 posts
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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...
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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…
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Rawicz.
Her Grandma lent this to her and then she gave it to me. In musical tastes we’re soul mates, listening to Cole Porter or The Who at the same time as each other and not ever realizing it. I stayed the night at her house and she lent me this book the next day, telling me she stayed up all night in the summer reading it. I was pleased because despite my voracious reading habits nobody had...
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Russell.
The book reminded me of us, and that’s why I cried. Sitting at my desk behind the “employees only” door of the local library where I processed new books, tears seized my whole chest.
I liked to read the new children’s books—their tiny spines, sweet pictures, tender stories. They always made me smile, but this one made me cry. It was the story of a little white...
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Tengbom.
My grandmother, knowing that at the age I was, I’d soon be heading into difficult years, sent me this book. It’s a book of devotionals: short essays paired with a Bible verse meant to offer guidance with a specific problem or issue in life.
So, as those storms came and went, I’d go to the shelf and pull this one down. And I tried. I really did. Tried to study, tried to...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Murkoff.
He was my sweetheart all through high school. Not much of a reader, but a hopeless romantic, always leaving notes and presents in my locker. We had very different plans for life after high school; he was enlisting and I was going to college. He had your typical fantasy: a house with a white picket fence, and he would come home to dinner on the table and children there to greet him. I wanted to...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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Kundera.
She was beautiful for starters, but also bright. I played sports and outside of the assigned reading in school I had never read a book in my entire life. She put it on my desk at the beginning of summer and asked me to read it. I loved her, but didn’t think a book could mean so much. I didn’t read it. It stayed in the same spot on my desk for the entire summer until one day the book was gone and...
Wonder?
Have you ever wondered who writes these amazing, touching, thought-provoking stories you read here?
You do. So send them in! Click the “contribute” link above for details.
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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...
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Hesse.
I was 16 years old and he was my first love. He had long brown limbs, played tennis, didn’t eat red meat, and was always on the honor roll. I was both attracted and intimidated by his brilliance, even though we were so very different. He was: Physics, Chemistry, Advanced Math. I was: Spanish, Anthropology and English Literature. We use to hang out innocently after school, doing homework in the...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Brashares.
She was a junior and I was a freshman, and we were both on our way overseas. I didn’t have anything to read, so she lent me her copy. We found we also shared a love for silly teenage dramas and indie music, and a new friendship was born. This was spring and life was exciting and new. Our friendship lasted through the next three books and two movies. Through five summers and as many...
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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...
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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...
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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...