Stories from BOA Readers: #BOATurns40

To me, the books that I care for most of all, whose titles rise to the top of my mind when I am asked for a list of my favorites, share a feeling rather than a writing style or similarly-minded characters. I read them wanting to soak in their words until there are none left, willing my eyes to skim the pages as fast as they possibly can, but at the same time I want to slow to a snail's pace, taking in words that by themselves seem mundane but when strung together become something beautiful. I find myself searching...

I’ve always been drawn to books that revolve around strong characters rather than plot. My favorite authors are the ones who are able to create people out of thin air, and characterize them in ways that make me feel like I know them personally. I liked the characters that stuck out, the ones that were far from perfect. I wanted characters that I could relate to, especially when navigating my teenage years. I needed to read about people who didn’t have everything figured out, people who doubted their abilities as much as I did. That being said, I think a...

It would have to be William Faulker's books. I remember reading The Sound and the Fury in high school and being blown away with how he was able to capture each character's voice--especially Benjy's perspective as someone with special needs. I ended up working at a summer camp with children with special needs and realized how accurate he was able to capture the storms within. The idea of a dysfunctional family was also a newfound idea for me. I just assumed my family was the most dysfunctional, and it was not until I read Faulker, did I realize that we...

I don't know. I have asked people everywhere this same question and interrupted a kind gentleman in London during his meal once to ask why he was reading the book he was reading. We talked about Ian McEwan, even though at the time the most important book for me was Baudelaire's prose poems. I don't think I'm looking for anything specific when I read. I do want to be pulled in and stirred and imagery has to be created a little unusually, perhaps. I don't need much. I need a character or a premise glued with a feeling, a sentence...

When I was a kid in high school, I picked up a copy of Time of Need by William Barrett at Greenwood Books -- it's a critical book about narrative forms in the 20th century, and focuses on Camus, Hemingway, Faulkner, atonality, and modernist sculpture. Barrett's great, but when I was sixteen, I found the book to be apocalyptic, fully (to a fault) reading into the idea of the 20th century as being a "time of need," seeing modernism as this catastrophic problem that needed correcting. I wasn't really understanding the text, and had only read about Nietzsche on Wikipedia...