Stories from BOA Readers: #BOATurns40

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...

"I couldn't put it down." "It was a page turner." I feel the opposite. My ideal reading experience is when a book creates for me a confluence of engross, expand, anticipation and a fourth layer of alternate thought, which may have nothing to do with the book but forces me to stop and let the explosion of ideas gestate. I may read only a page a day sometimes but my day is filled with mind pages stemming from the single experience. Words that will never be written and yet couldn't have existed without the book I am reading. Most of...

I was in the throes of exhaustion and maybe depression in graduate school. My Master's thesis advisor (of blessed memory) kept slashing paragraphs and whole pages of each draft I brought him. GET RID OF THIS! he'd yell at me. THERE'S JUST TOO MUCH DAMN VOICE. A friend suggested I read Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy; it was one of the largest tomes I've ever hauled around, and it was my escape from the life of academic writing. I couldn't put it down. I found myself on the T, from Harvard Square out to UMass Boston, missing my stop because...

John Updike's "Pigeon Feathers" saved my life. As a teenager in the 1980s, I found myself burdened by the hard religious teachings of my youth and the failure of the adults in my life to apply their professed beliefs to the world around me. At the age of seventeen this tension reached its peak as the AIDS crisis loomed and the sub-culture of my parents' world failed to meet the need for compassion toward people who were HIV positive. I was always an avid reader and books had opened my eyes to a bigger world. But now my heart was...

It is not always the profound words we read that offer the opportunity for change; sometimes it is the simple ideas that provoke us, appeal to us, and challenge us to appreciate what life has provided. The inspiration we find as we attempt to interpret the meaning behind an author’s words can be incredibly unpredictable. One such experience happened to me a few months ago.It started with my girlfriend’s passion for Li-Young Lee's writing, which she has loved since she first began reading poetry. The inspiration she has found in his writing has not only influenced her as a writer,...