I had a lovely conversation with professor Joseph Luzzi of Bard College last week. He is a literature and Italian professor, an author and a father. He is erudite and charming and if I hadn’t decided to get fancy, you would be reading an interview with him at this moment. We had a lively discussion about the three most important books one should read, which happens to be the gist of his upcoming lecture at Tanglewood. Those books are Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22.”
But nooooo. I decided that instead of transcribing the interview, a chore I detest, I would transfer the files from my Dictaphone. It’s not even a true Dictaphone but a cheapo digital recorder that apparently does not get along with my computer. I watched a video on YouTube and assiduously followed the directions, but the next thing I knew, the files were gone. They are apparently now living as a ghost in my machine, happily laughing at me and my ill-fated attempt to save myself from a task I find stultifyingly dull.
Happily, my 15-year-old daughter taught me to record on my iPhone and a friend’s husband informed me of a transcription app. Just to be safe, I recorded another interview this week on the iPhone, the computer and the digital recorder, which no longer seems to let me actually play anything I record, but I was too superstitious not to add it into the jumble of machines on my desk.
Meanwhile, I could not get Professor Luzzi out of my mind. He will be speaking at Tanglewood Sunday, June 23, as part of the One Day University contingent along with Anna Celenza, the Thomas E. Caestecker Professor of Music at Georgetown University, who will discuss “Three Musical Masterpieces”; and Jeffrey Engel, the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Engel will lecture on “American Immigration: What’s Fact and What’s Fiction?”.
Aside from being extremely annoyed at losing the interview with Luzzi, I have been haunted by thoughts of books I have not read, should have read, and have read or listened to throughout my life. I have been asking friends which books most influenced them, and I keep thinking about books I think my daughter should read.
When I was in seventh grade, I started reading all the books my mother told me not to read. She kept them in a small bookcase in her bedroom, tucked behind a door. I used to sit on the floor in front of the bookcase before she came home from work and read “The Godfather,” “Jaws,” “The Exorcist,” “The Painted Bird” and the odd historical fiction.
I had always read years above my grade level. I even tackled “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” in sixth grade, but it so depressed me I gave up well before I finished it. I read the dictionary, the encyclopedia and science fiction. In fact, I belonged to a science fiction book club as a kid and still love the genre. I still maintain that one of the best presents I ever received was in second grade, when I was given the entire Wizard of Oz collection. I still have all 14 of them.
Of the thousands of books I have read, I would say those that most influenced me came into my life when I was much younger. “The Painted Bird” left me bereft and a bit confused as a tween and unbearably sad the next two times I read it, but I could not tear myself away from the writing, which was fantastical and truthful at the same time. I read “The Diary of Anne Frank” six times as a girl and young woman, devastated anew each time I picked it up. “Jude the Obscure” moved me not just to tears but to sobs.
I still believe that the perfect activity outside involves a bench, dabbled sunlight and Jane Austen. Who doesn’t love soft sunlight on their skin and pretty words in their head? And I listen to or read “Cold Comfort Farm” every few years just to laugh and to appreciate Stella Gibbons’ clever language.
But did those books influence me? “To Kill a Mockingbird” was the first book to give me a glimpse of life in the American South for both black and white people, insights reinforced years later by “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
I have a degree in English literature, so I spent my early years as a young adult reading the important works of dead white men. They were important and they did influence me, especially Plato and Shakespeare, but I found myself shoved into a new reality when I found Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin. They made me realize how trapped women had been in the past, and still often are by circumstance. Add to that “Ethan Frome” and “A Room of One’s Own” and I knew I probably should have studied a subset of literature and not just a broad spectrum chosen by the Jesuits at the college I attended.
Still, I appreciate the basis I have in literature, though one is always thinking there are books that should still be read. Like some kind of crazy hoarder, I have been collecting them for years, waiting for my retirement. Much like Burgess Meredith’s character in the famous “The Twilight Zone” episode “Time Enough at Last,” I hope to spend those years reading, reading, and reading some more.
