The Difference a Good Book Can Make

Lately I've been craving a book with depth and substance. I envision myself biting into it like a sandwich and savoring every last morsel, licking the imagery and metaphor from my fingers and relishing the taste it leaves in my mouth. Nothing soothes the soul quite like a book that asks you to work a little harder, to think a little deeper--then rewards you with characters that captivate or a concept that changes your view of the world.

As I look back at my summer, I did a lot of stereotypical "beach reading." Romance novels, humor books, detective stories and, of course, Harry Potter, helped my summer pass pleasantly by. But as I stare into fall, I wonder what great piece of literature is going to fall into my hands and alter my perspective of the world forever. For a good book will entertain you, but a great book--one of the best you've ever read--will change your life in some little way just because you opened it and took the plunge.

I've always had among my favorite books three particular novels that "changed my life," either because they made me interpret reality differently or because they inspired me as a writer. One of those books, in a solid third place behind Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," is Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winner, "All the Kings Men" (AtKM). For various emotional reasons relating to two men who broke my heart (and happened to love the book) I haven't revisited AtKM for at least four years. But last night, I took it from its place of honor in my built-in bookcase and started flipping through the pages I had dog-eared. And damn if it didn't make my mind spin and whirl like it did the first time I read it.

Books like this deserve to be shared, so I give you some excerpts of passages that jumped out at me, either for the images they evoked or the universal truth of the statements. If you like these, you should read the book. Don't wait for the movie later this year. There's no way it can do Warren's prose justice. For most of these, context isn't really important, so just sit back and enjoy.

"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know."

...

"Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is the way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman's name and address hasn't got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with bands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that."

...

"For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.
That is what all of us historical researchers believe.
And we love truth."

...

"But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day."