ThreeGuys1Book has 1605 followers | By Dennis Haritou  I’d come to Cal hoping to become the kind of poet and scholar who would look down on American movies with big strong heroes in them, but something else happened: I fell in love with directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks. I’d grown up in Orange County, and my father had a professional relationship with John Wayne, a great star for both filmmakers. I’d come to Cal thinking that this actor, particularly, represented all that I had hated about my life up to that point Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Dan Barden By Jonathan Evison  Amidst the pleasure, I remember feeling a twinge of resentment toward the teacher who’d turned me on to this story—as though she’d somehow usurped a piece of my individuality before I’d gotten the chance to discover it for myself. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Tyler McMahon By Jason Chambers  In the early 1960s, my parents had what I suppose was a typical-for-the-time collection on the shelves in our post-war suburban living room. A row of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, for which they had a subscription. James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. Leon Uris’s Exodus, of course. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (partially hidden). From Here to Eternity by James Jones. The much loved How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewelyn. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Joan Leegant By Jonathan Evison  An author can write like this? It’s possible not only to write about a neurotic smart ass teenager, but you can use his actual language to do it? Maybe I can write something like that someday—hell, I already talk like that. When I closed The Catcher in the Rye my own stories and novels were years ahead of me, but I was on my way. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Larry Watson By Jason Chambers  For years, I’d tell people how obsessed I was with Catcher and they’d always recommend books that were “just like it”—usually A Separate Peace, which bored me silly. It was only when I read A Clockwork Orange and discovered the language that Anthony Burgess had crafted that I actually felt I’d found a book that appealed to me in the same way that Catcher in the Rye did. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Anna David By Jason Rice  Oh my god, oh my god, as the final pages turned and Hercule Poirot turned with his stout Belgian frame to deliver the shocking conclusion. How could I have trusted the narrator, considered him a reliable eyewitness, believed he was on the side of good, when suddenly Poirot was accusing him (and, by first-person association, ME!!) of double homicide. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Christopher Bollen By Jason Chambers  There’s nothing I love more than a good physical deformity. Thalidomide babies (otherwise known as flipper babies), good old fashioned amputees, the Elephant Man (whose official diagnosis was neurofibromatosis type 1), good old fashioned extra limbs, and so on and so forth. I’m a little bummed that Western medicine has significantly decreased the number of birth defects, and I’m extremely bummed that our state of political correctness has prevented the expansion of traveling freak shows. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Lenore Zion By Jason Chambers  I was reading this stuff throughout my childhood and into adolescence, and so by the time I got to high school, I had a serious attitude problem, especially when it came to lit classes. They’re making us read Hawthorne and I’m wondering where the hell are the proton beam deflectors! Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Eric Olsen By Jason Chambers  Moby-Dick was a book that loomed large. I’d never read a book that long, and while I was just fine with reading Hawthorne and Poe, most of the other writers from the same period were work for me. I knew enough, however, to understand that when the National Merit Scholar told me Moby-Dick was “the Great American Novel,” the qualifier was a joke and not a joke. All novels are flawed to some degree. Continue reading Why I Wrote a New Moby Dick by John Minichillo By Jason Rice  Along with infuriating almost every other character in the book, Hank lampoons academia, makes a mockery of political correctness, goes on the local news and threatens to kill a goose, tries to run his son-in-law out of town, advises a young writer to always understate necrophilia, and manages to complete the painfully difficult task of making the reader love him. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Matthew Norman By Jason Chambers  My earliest memories of reading come in flashes of unassociated images and feelings: my father reading to me about a Cat in a Hat; my mother feeding me with Green Eggs and Ham; a book about a Giving Tree and one about a Very Hungry Caterpillar. Without even noticing, the Wild Rumpus had begun Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Eric D. Goodman By Jonathan Evison  When I met Jenn we agreed to read the ten major books that had most influenced our individual lives. I wasn’t much of a reader then, twenty-five years ago. In fact, when we exchanged our books she’d already read each of mine, while I had read none of hers. She, with her fresh horizons, broke my every resistance, and changed me in ways I needed to be changed Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Shann Ray By Jason Chambers  The best of what literature can do for us is to allow us to face ourselves, but in a way that’s bearable. Story can strike us at the buried and otherwise impenetrable core of those things which make us afraid, make us ashamed, make us swoon and question, make us imagine, and understand, the world in new ways.Lifetime readers are generally made by those moments that the best of books can provide, that awakening, deep and visceral, striking our emotions and intellect and imaginations, the interaction of our inner selves with the written word. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Alan Heathcock By Jason Chambers  As soon as I could read, I was obsessive. At night, after my parents put me to bed, I crept across the floor to the hallway light so I could spend a little while longer with Encyclopedia Brown or the Three Investigators or Tintin. If I got caught —and I usually did —I was sent back to bed with only the mildest scolding, because how mad can you get at a kid who’s transgressing for more time with books? Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Steve Himmer By Jason Chambers  This is embarrassingly unliterary, but comic books started me reading. I remember my first: The Defenders #15. The cover is the desktop background on my laptop. This was around 1972, when my parents were involved in the civil rights movement. I was too busy studying superheroes to take much notice. Until someone sprayed “Niger Lovers” (yes, they misspelled it) on the side of our house. My parents were suing our Pittsburgh suburb to desegregate their police force, which also explains why our phone was tapped. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Chris Gavaler By Jason Chambers  The writer we most admired was Mark Twain. Dad read all of Twain’s books when he was a kid, and so my brothers and I did too. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the Twain gateway drug. Reading it leads to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and beyond that to weirder places, such as the sacrilegious Diaries of Adam and Eve and The Mysterious Stranger, about Satan’s exploits in medieval Austria. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Jenny Shank By Jason Chambers  My mom used to pay me a penny a page to read books over the summer. I was never the kind of kid who needed economic incentive to learn, but I have to admit it was a better summer job than bussing tables, mowing lawns, or working in the coal factory. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Aaron Goldfarb By Jonathan Evison  I inhaled Hemingway that subsequent summer, finishing For Whom The Bell Tolls while on a family vacation to Yellowstone, knocking around with Nick Adams and Hemingway’s word-perfect short stories the following fall, and on and on through his oeuvre. During the next few years, I learned the difference between good Hemingway and bad Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Craig Lancaster By Jonathan Evison  In my life as a reader, the first significant thing I remember is sitting on my dad’s lap listening to him reading The Hobbit to me. I don’t know how old I was; I must have been preliterate or just learning to read. It was a gorgeous book, a hefty hardback bound in dimpled earth-green leather that slid out of an earth-green leather box; both the book and the box were decorated with primitive borders and gilt runic inscriptions in one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented languages. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Benjamin Hale By Jason Rice  I lived with my parents in Jackson Heights, Queens, and every morning, Monday through Friday, I put on a shirt and tie and rode the 7 train out to the Mid-Manhattan Library. Not the one from Ghostbusters, with the lions out front, but the other one, the smaller, grimier library across the street, where you could actually pull books off the shelves. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Matt Burgess By Dennis Haritou  As a teenager I’d affected a vaguely literary air—writing bad poetry and growing my hair longer than now seems folically feasible—but I’d never done the deep reading to justify it. That summer, I made a start. I read the Brontes (various); Hardy (the suicidally depressing one); Jane Austen; F. Scott Fitzgerald (the short stories, I think). Continue reading When We Fell In Love – A. D. Miller By Dennis Haritou  I like books by men who haven’t always had soft hands. (Examples: Ed Abbey, Rick Bass, Wendell Berry, Raymond Carver, Dostoyevsky, Jim Harrison, Charles Bukowski, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau. What matters is that the author has done some kind of raw physical labor, either in a negative context (Carver or Bukowski’s menial jobs, Dostoyevsky’s forced labor) or ‘constructive’ (Berry, Thoureau).) Continue reading When We Fell In Love – David Miller By Dennis Haritou  I hated every page of it. It was confusing. It was nonlinear. It broke the basic story rules that had been drilled into me. Beginning. Middle. End. This deviated. It told tales and tales and tales, leaving me wandering around in a story wasteland for months. The characters shared the same names, and even some of the same personality traits. I couldn’t keep everybody straight. I thought it was bizarre, even thought it was strangely lovely. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Mercedes M. Yardley By Jason Rice  Growing up my father’s preferred answer to the question, “What does ‘insert alien word here’ mean?” was, “Go and look it up.” Because he was an English professor uninterested in dialing down his words when his kids could tune up their vocabularies, it was a question I asked a lot. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Michelle Orange By Dennis Haritou  The first ‘real’ book I ever read all the way through was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Although I have little memory of the novel’s plot, I still claim it as one of my favorites. What I do remember is the name Sal Paradise, the weight of the pages, the feel of the back cover on the pads of my fingers. But only one short scene still lingers in my mind. “It was always mañana,” Sal narrates. “For the next week that was all I heard—mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.” Continue reading When We Fell In Love – David Joseph By Dennis Haritou  I had a friend who always rode his bike with his pet rat perched on his shoulder. He let me try it too, and we had a great summer biking, losing the rat under the patio and coaxing it back out with some peanut butter, and getting into trouble for nailing our plywood fort to the side of his apartment. We were at that perfect age when the world is still entirely good, before puberty sets in and children mock one another for playing with rats or having the opposite sex as ‘just a friend.’ Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Natalie McNabb By Jason Rice  I suppose I was lucky. My father owned hundreds of books, many from his own childhood in a log cabin, raised by a former schoolteacher. Lucky insofar as my experience was the ideal breeding ground for a writer—a classic over-sensitive misfit, no good at sports, smartest kid in school—living in an isolated world of national forest, dirt roads, trickling creeks, and unemployed men with guns. Continue reading Chris Offutt – Welcome & WWFIL By Dennis Haritou  I discovered Montaigne by chance twenty years ago, when I was looking for something to read on a train from Budapest. A selection from the Essays was the only English-language book available in the station bookshop, so I bought it out of desperation. I was afraid it would be dull, but instead I found myself meeting a person I felt I already knew well – a person just like me. Since then, I’ve never stopped reading Montaigne. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Sarah Bakewell By Jason Rice  It was the 1950s, Trenton, New Jersey. Gray. Dismal. Depressing. Trenton isn’t New York or Philadelphia, but rather a poor relation, and like many other grungy northeastern municipalities that have seen their best days pass into history, it was a city long on its way south. Aside from The Bible and those gossip rags, there wasn’t anything else in sight to read. Instead, we had the Friday Night Fights and The Honeymooners on the old black and white Zenith. The word culture was never uttered. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Mark Safranko By Dennis Haritou  We should feel free to branch out, fool around on what we at first believed was our first true love. Because the reason we read is to keep falling in love. We don’t want to read books that disappoint us. We don’t want to read books that make us hate reading. We want books that show us new worlds, introduce us to new characters, and make us fall in love all over again. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Robert Swartwood By Jason Rice  There I was – walking to the bus stop reciting out loud the high points of the book, and as time does in those years, suddenly I’m at the podium telling an audience of ninth graders about this book. I was thrilled when the main character in the story had to deal with his dead son, and how he just barely missed catching him before the kid got trampled by the truck. I went on and spun the story slower, gave details and had the class eating out of my hand, and I didn’t even know it Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Jason Rice By Dennis Haritou  But here’s the thing: one day my English teacher spotted the paperback on my desk. She asked me if I was reading 1984 for another class. I said no. She asked me if I liked it. I said it was pretty good but some parts were hard to understand. The next day she brought in her personal copy of Brave New World and lent it to me. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Bob Thurber By Dennis Haritou  When our family immigrated to the United States in 1976, I got off the plane and nearly went straight to a local elementary school in Elmhurst, Queens without consideration to jet lag. I did not know how to read, write or speak in English, but everyone else at school did. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Min Jin Lee By Dennis Haritou  But you as you push into the high school years, you start to find many of these vaguely dissatisfying. You can’t say why exactly. But you begin looking for writers that seem to push toward solving that dissatisfaction, books that grapple with deeper mysteries. You pick up Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick. Your parents subscribe to Harper’s magazine, and there you encounter strange and exciting stories by George Saunders and Stephen Millhauser. You begin, gingerly, to pick up more literary writers. Paul Auster. Angela Carter. Italo Calvino. Continue reading When We Fell in Love – Nick Arvin By Jason Chambers  When I truly fell in love with a writer I was in a beat up convertible 1970 VW Bug, primer gray, my sister’s boyfriend’s prize possession. It was the summer of 1978 and the writer was not a novelist, or a short story writer, or a poet. Not technically. Though his words resonated with more life and romance and tragedy and pain and moodiness than anything I’d ever read. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Eric Rickstad By Dennis Haritou  From what I could tell, Another Roadside Attraction broke all the rules. Robbins was part jester, part acrobat, part goofball-philosopher-genius. He wrote about my soggy corner of the world like nobody else. I started writing down my favorite sentences of his, hoping the magic would rub off. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Jim Lynch By Jason Rice  This is about that summer when I was 22. By then, I was already devoted to books and hoping to write my own someday. I worked as a tour guide for the summer in a French chateau, and if that doesn’t sound like a premise for a hot romance novel, I don’t know what does. Unfortunately, there was no romance that summer. There wasn’t even any sex. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Deborah Willis By Jonathan Evison  The book I was trying to power my way through—Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again—was bumming me out, both because of the madly desperate fever dream quality of the prose, written by a man in the throes of fatal illness, and because, in a literal sense, I could barely focus on it. Whenever I would read more than a page or two, my vision would get fuzzy, I would feel unbalanced, I would have to close my eyes or squint before I could try to read another page. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Adam Langer By Jonathan Evison  He introduced me to storytelling. In my infancy, it was the oral tradition. In the darkness of my room before bedtime, he spun whole worlds for me out of thin air. He was masterful. His characters won my sympathy right off the bat. He understood tension. Pacing. Climax. For the most part, these stories comprised an ongoing serial concerning three orphaned tiger cubs and their adventures in the jungle. I’m guessing my old man liked Kipling. Continue reading When We Fell in Love – Jonathan Evison By Jason Rice  Growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood, what I remember about the shelves often were built into the walls of Chicago apartments is that they were usually full of cheap, decorative items (plastic flowers; imitation Lladros), rarely books. Most of my friends’ parents were first generation American, and had grown up speaking Italian or Spanish; few had finished high school. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Gina Frangello By Jason Rice  I didn’t grow up in a particularly literary environment, and until I asked my parents to put one in my bedroom aged ten, there were no bookshelves in my house. I read because I grew up in England, and there were only 4 TV channels. I was an only child. When faced with a Saturday afternoon either watching television coverage of darts matches, going to football matches, or playing in the grey rain that seemed to bathe the down most of the time, I became a reader by default. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Tony O’Neill By Jason Rice  Reading was pure entertainment for me. It was adventure, discovery, private horror, and then the re-reading of private horror. These books were answering questions about the world that I didn’t even know were okay to ask. And maybe they weren’t. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Lindsay Hunter By Jason Chambers  I have a theory that after thinking in childhood that we will never be alone, in adolescence we suddenly see that we are alone (big time), and then along comes First Love, and we jump, thinking maybe we don’t have to go it alone after all. This is the primal reason why we become readers — to have that deep companionship of a good book. But at seventeen, nothing — not loving parents, or sympathetic girlfriends, or any of the usual remedies — worked, at all. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Tatjana Soli By Jason Chambers  I was amazed when, as an undergraduate, I read Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s short story collection Family Ties. The book showed me how fiction can dig into the quiet, disturbing crevasses of human experience and illuminate the parts of life that are impossible to describe in straightforward language. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Stacey Levine By Jason Rice  The tales I wrote stole all the color, event, and gadgetry from Tom Swift, the intrigue from the Hardy Boys, and the teamwork and faux-science from the Doc Savage series, the narratives that grew out of these in turn amalgamations of movies, age-inappropriate films of action and adventure like The Guns of Navarone and The Magnificent Seven, sexy stuff like A Clockwork Orange and Logan’s Run, plus anything I could watch on Channel 11’s The 4 O’clock Movie before mom made it home (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Damnation Alley, to name a few). Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Adam Ross By Jason Rice  When I was ten-years-old, an alarming statistic hit the airwaves. Apparently, the average American child was watching over four hours of television a day. That translated to 28 hours a week, 112 hours a month and over 1,000 hours a year! By the time children entered college — assuming their TV-rotted brains even lasted through high-school – they had experienced more television than class time. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Simon Rich By Jason Chambers  I have the unfortunate sort of face that inspires people, usually drunks, to hand over their biographical details to me. But even this conceals self-praise. Let me say rather: I am too cowardly to discourage people from speaking to me, or that my capacious memory for the trivia of other people’s lives reflects a consitutional empty-headedness on my part. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Sam Munson By Jason Chambers  My mother’s family had been sharecroppers in the Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri when she was growing up, and much of what I was reading in the book mirrored stories my mother had told me about frequently moving around, picking cotton, and not having any spare money. The book stuck with me all these years, I suppose, because it was the first time I recognized something of myself and my family’s life in writing, and for a budding writer (I didn’t know I was a budding writer, of course), these are pretty good lessons. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – John McNally By Jason Rice  When I was just beginning to read, pre-search engines, the most fertile source of truth in our house was The World Book Encyclopedia. We owned a late-seventies edition. It was so huge the set occupied its own shelf beneath my parents’ child psychology texts, The Whole Earth Catalog, and Erica Jong. The curdled, almost stony texture of the covers, the embossing, and the copious gold leaf lent the set an almost biblical authority. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Jeffrey Rotter By Dennis Haritou  My reading became frightfully promiscuous from then on and remains only slightly less so today. I was moved to write (or try to) by The World According to Garp and Under the Volcano. These two books should not be read by an earnest young writer in the same summer. I remember the searing experience of discovering Blood Meridian and wondering how I would ever learn to write with McCarthy’s thundering cadences. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Derek Green By Jason Rice  I read everything by Philip Roth, even if his obsession with young women is getting a bit shabby, and I wish he’d give us a glimmer of humor, a flicker of hope now and then but he’s already given me so much I shouldn’t complain, The Anatomy Lesson and The Professor of Desire, The Human Stain and The Dying Animal, all great, all beautiful, so I’ll keep reading him till I’m old (older) and possibly as incontinent as one of his recent characters. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Jonathan Santlofer By Jonathan Evison  This is all to say that family lore uniquely prepared me for the novels of William Faulkner, with Grand View filling in for many of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County settings. There was, for instance, a gray-wood shack next to the chicken yard, where I pictured Joanna Burden of Light in August living as a pariah. There was a smokehouse, sweetly smelling of sultry ham, in the back yard, where I pictured Ringo and Bayard of The Unvanquished playing war. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – D.R. Haney By Jonathan Evison  I did everything short of selling a kidney to get out of the “major author” prerequisite necessary to graduate from Georgetown with a bachelor’s in English literature, but after suffering through Shakespeare, I had no choice but to submit to a dourer DWEM. Lucky thing, because Milton turned out to be the best class I took in college, and Paradise Lost superior, in my view, to anything composed by the more-celebrated Stratford-upon-Avon Bard. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Greg Olear By Jason Rice  For me, discovering Faulkner had the pacing of a summer romance. I found him one June and couldn’t think of much else until September. But if our introduction had the timing of a fling, it had the texture of a break-up: our weeks together were marked by chronic feelings of loss and loneliness. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Leslie Jamison By Jason Chambers  I was a strange little girl. Nuns handled my education at a place called Gate of Heaven School in Back Mountain,Pennsylvania, a locale firmly fixed in the middle of nowhere. I attended daily morning mass and afternoon classes in all things Catholic. Every Friday we had weekly confession. My reading centered around sacred texts supplemented by trips with my mother to the Hoyt Public Library. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Lorraine Adams By Jason Chambers  I waited for hours while my friend Rob was being diagnosed by non-English speaking doctors for the strange rash that had just turned him into Two Face. Puss-ridden sores and a rosy crust had totally painted the left side of his face over the previous 48 hours, but the right side was untouched. He was told he needed brain surgery and would have to be sent back to Ireland for that. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – John Dermot Woods By Jason Rice  I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The book was huge, over 900 pages, and the cover looked like a T-shirt from the seventies: bubble letters shooting toward you on psychedelic beams of light, as if being projected from some nether region of space. And that’s what the stories inside felt like to me: alien dispatches that were just now reaching Earth. They were dark and freaky and often had savage little twists at the end. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Eric Puchner By Jason Rice  I was an ex-jock slash bouncer slash carpenter getting my guts up to actually admit to friends, family and drinking buds that I wanted to be a writer. Yeah I know that sounds bad. Where I come from in north east Ohio saying shit like that would pretty much be the beginning of a lifetime of ‘here comes the queer’ looks followed by some smart ass comment like, “Hey, it’s Ernest fucking Hemingfag.” You might as well announce you wanted to take up ballet or puppeteering. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Elwood Reid By Jason Rice  Books were spectators at my house, lining the walls of every room, an audience peering down on my childhood: books as thick as my thigh and books as thin as my finger, books on gardening and books on Hitler, books about the brain and books about pain, books featuring hippos and books without any hippos at all. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Tom Rachman By Jonathan Evison  We had just moved to our house in rural Pennsylvania, which would make me about nine or ten years old, when I stole my brother’s copy of Where the Red Fern Grows off his bookshelf—I have no idea where he got it, or if he’d read it, but I do know that I’ve never forgotten it. I can even remember the tactile sense of holding it and staring at the foxed and fouled cover; the image was so haunting I was compelled to pick it up and give it a read. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Keith Dixon By Jason Rice  I was a sophomore in high school when I first discovered Kurt Vonnegut. I read BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS on the advice of a librarian, and I developed an immediate crush on both the novel and the woman. I had never come across anything quite like that book, and I read it twice in a row, which is something that I never do. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Riley Michael Parker By Dennis Haritou  Two years out of college (publishing job dispensed with) I was doing an MFA at Columbia and our teacher asked us in workshop one day who some of our influences were. I gushed over Laurie of course; my devotion was very fresh in my mind as Colwin had, unexpectedly and in middle age, died 18 months previously. Julie and I had attended her jammed, uptown memorial at Symphony Space . Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Caitlin Macy By Dennis Haritou  My first reading of White Noise took place outdoors, in a reclining deck chair with my feet up against the log railing outside of a friend’s parent’s log home built onto a mountainside in Summit County, state of Colorado. I mention this for two reasons. First, to clarify that I was then, as I had been all of my life, plugged neatly into a world of American wealth and wasteful consumption, which made the big red DeLillo target on my back all the bigger and redder. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Kyle Beachy By Jason Chambers  A common babysitting method was to drop me at a bookstore, library, or even a flea market (in the bookstall) where I would while away the hours without much concern. In the 70’s and 80’s you could apparently do that kind of thing and not worry about child abductions and the like. From grades 4 to my senior year in high school I spent most of my time in school trying to conceal a book under my desk. I would bring several so I had spares when they were confiscated. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Matt Bondurant By Jason Rice  Unable to answer my questions—or at least not to my satisfaction—the pastor subsequently avoided me, and I took up the hobby of scowling at him. As a distraction, I read John Updike’s Rabbit, Run in church, camouflaged it inside a Bible. I had found the book in my mother’s bookshelf next to a biography of Lauren Bacall, and I was intrigued by the title, which seemed like a kid’s book akin to Peter Rabbit, even though I knew it was for adults. Continue reading When We Fell In Love: Victoria Patterson By Jonathan Evison  At the time, my reading consisted of sports books (“Screwball” by Tug McGraw), war books (“The Longest Day”) and books read on the sly because they might contain sex or adult content (“Fanny Hill”, Lenny Bruce’s “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People” — both of which also profoundly changed me, albeit in non-literary ways). Continue reading When We Fell In Love – James P. Othmer By Jason Rice  As a kid I tended to be contemplative, and later, in my teens, brooding – usual triggers for creating a reader. Yet my inclination toward introspection was generally satisfied by listening to The Wall and playing guitar in my basement. But by my late teens I was beginning to sense that rocking out wasn’t going to fulfill every intellectual and emotional need. Continue reading When We Fell In Love: David Zweig By Dennis Haritou  I hitchhiked and Eurail-passed the length and breadth of the continent, from East Berlin to the west coast of Ireland, from the tip of Sicily to just inside the Arctic Circle. With all that traveling, of course, I often had time on my hands, and always needed something to read, and therefore engaged in avid and active book swaps with anyone who happened to have something in English I hadn’t already burned through. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – John Vorhaus By Jason Chambers  I was reading American crime fiction long before I started shaving, but it was a book by Richard Stark (the pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake) that really turned my head: The Hunter /AKA Point Blank(1964). I still have it, a dog-eared little paperback with a plain silver cover sporting a bullet hole and a one-liner: a novel of violence. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Roger Smith By Jason Rice  I was raised in a household where reading mattered. There were a lot of things we didn’t have when I was a kid, including a television or even consistently running water—this was rural British Columbia, an island on the coast—but we did have books, in increasingly spectacular numbers. At first just a wall of bookshelves in the living room, with encyclopedias and dictionaries spilling out into the hallway; later, the books accumulated in number til they demanded their own room. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Emily St. John Mandel By Jason Chambers  From the time I could walk I accompanied my father on his visits to the Brooklyn Public Library branch a mile from our home. The old man loved libraries, had worked in one at the University of Warsaw during his bohemian days when, in the months before the Nazis onslaught –he escaped on the last ship out of the free port of Danzig—he wrote poetry and tried to get on at one of the Polish capital’s Yiddish papers. Though he was fluent in half a dozen languages, literary English was not one of them. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Hesh Kestin By Jonathan Evison  I was one of those high school students who thought reading was bullshit. And books like “Red Badge of Courage”, “Ethan Frome”, and “Pride and Prejudice” weren’t helping my opinion that literature was pretentious and stuck up. I didn’t want any part of the canon, if it was comprised of stilted and boring narratives. Or as Bukowski put it in his introduction to John Fante’s “Ask the Dust”: “…nothing I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me.” Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Joshua Mohr | |
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