The Book That Changed My Life

June 5, 2006
As a teenager in a Parisian expatriate's bookstore, James Atlas found Gwendolyn Brooks's Selected Poems
and realized that "poetry could emerge out of the geography of your own experience." Jacquelyn Mitchard named a baby after the struggling heroine of Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
; Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
"jarred" Nelson Demille into "thinking outside the box"; Michael Stern was transported to unknown worlds by the Sears catalogue; while Sen. Joe Lieberman, an observant Jew, was molded by the Bible. In this uneven collection of often predictable musings about their favorite books by a catchall of writers (including PW
's editor, Sara Nelson), one of the few standouts is by Frank McCourt, who tastes a line from Shakespeare's Henry VIII
when he's a 10-year-old typhoid patient and remembers "it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words." Unfortunately, by stuffing 71 writers into a slim volume, bookseller Coady and editor Johannessen all but ensure prosaic snippets of random thoughts rather than developed essays. The format also allows for repetition (J.D. Salinger; Harper Lee) and self-promotion (Carol Higgins Clark's inspiration was her famous mother; Anita Diamant showboats about her own novel The Red Tent
in a piece about Virginia Woolf).