Change Your Life, Read a Book

I wrote my first book when I was seven. It wasn't an original genius creation, the protagonist was a cat, but it was a full story with a beginning, middle and an end. During that same year I became obsessed with Shel Silverstein and Rahl Dahl (I wished I was Matilda).

From that point on, I began devouring books like a fiend because I always need my fix. But with every work I read my fix gets worse -- and I don't care.

So join me and enter into the literary dialogue and read some of the works that have changed me:

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. After I finished reading this, my skin felt new and I no longer felt choked. I wanted to scream and spit and let out a "barbaric yawp" just like Ed Sanders (son of the Beats) did.

Read it once, read it again, then read it aloud to yourself, then to someone else and then find a recording of it -- so you can fully drop yourself into the anaphoric and lyrical verse describing the cataclysm of sick ideologies.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. Forget the Nobel Peace Prize he won in 1982 and forget the fact that he's the lapdog of Fidel Castro, this book is the perfect execution of magical realism and the magnification of world myths. At times this book is vertiginous, but it is well worth it. I want to grow old with this book so it can continue to change me.

"The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss delves into the history of survival and the power of words through several points of view. Krauss' prose is precise, eloquent, funny and compelling. She challenges audiences, writers and society to look at ethnicity in a new way.

Those are my (current) top three works, but I also recommend:
"Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, "Falconer" by John Cheever, "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri, "M. Butterfly" by David Henry Hwang, "Gem of the Ocean" by August Wilson and "The Things We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver.

If you would like to discuss any of these works or others, I would love to talk to you.