Ruth Ozeki: ‘All my books are trying to revamp Charlotte’s Web’ | Ruth Ozeki

My earliest memory of reading
I was reading – or pretending to read – before my brain could remember, so maybe about three or four? I “read” Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, but these were pictures.

My favorite book growing up
Charlotte and EB White’s website. For years, I remembered it as the story of a little girl named Fern who rescued her pig, Wilbur, but it’s not like that. It’s the story of a secretary named Charlotte, who happens to be a spider, who spreads word on the web to save Wilbur from being killed. It is about the power of language to save lives. When I look through my posts, I see now that they are all trying to rebuild Charlotte’s Web. It is a perfect book.

A book that changed me as a teenager
Young people change constantly, hour by hour, book by book. I used to read happily as a teenager because we didn’t have cell phones, and every book I read was different. The Catcher in the Rye was certainly one of them. I must have read it when I was 12 or 13 and I learned two skills my son needed to survive: critical thinking and how to see a phone.

The author who changed my mind
Every author I read changes my mind. Isn’t it a matter of reading? But good. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I read it in 1975 in Nepal, when I was 20 years old, during a one-month trip in the Himalayas from Pokhara to the Tibetan border. This happened 50 years ago, and at that time there were very few sailors. We had no GPS. I was walking with a friend, we were walking the winding paths through the mountains, through the bright pink forests. Sometimes we passed Sherpa on their way to town. Their donkeys wore bells on their ropes, and we could hear them braying long after they passed. I didn’t know the term “real magic” yet. I just knew it was magic.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Most of the books I read as a child were about clever little girls (or spiders) who were writers: Harriet in Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; Emily of New Moon; Anne Frank; Meg in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – wanted to be a scientist, though. And then there were books about rejects, by contrast, misbehaving little girls, like Eloise, Madeline, and Pippi Longstocking, who were obviously destined to become writers even if they didn’t know it. I would also say that any story told in the first person with a negative female narrator, like Jane Eyre, is about being a writer, since their story is always “Dear reader, I survived to tell the story.”

A book or author that I returned to
I don’t have an easy answer to this question, so I prefer to talk about Kurt Vonnegut, whose books I read and loved when I was young, but whom I have never seen again. Why? I learned the most important thing about comedy from Vonnegut. About the difference between scorn and cynicism. About disrespect. That it’s good to be funny about big things. I’m sure I could still find this quality in his books, but why not? I could only keep his words alive in my mind.

The I also read the authors
Poems and poets: Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop. I like to distribute their books and then buy new ones. I bought Geography III after reading Bishop’s poem called One Art in the New Yorker in 1976. That poem is just lost. Every time I survive another disaster, I re-read it, and when I re-read it, I am reminded of how to survive.

I can’t read this book anymore
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig. I love Zen. I love motorcycles. I loved this book as a teenager, and I am still inspired by Pirsig’s ideas about art and creativity. But when I tried to read the book again as an adult, I found that the narrator’s arrogance was annoying. Naturally I did not notice it at first, when it was covered by my youthful pomposity.

A book I found later in life
The 13th collection of Tales of Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett, first published in 1929 and reissued in 2006. I was never interested in short stories until I started teaching form in a fiction writing class and realized I had a lot to learn. There are 201 stories in the 13 volume set. I’m still reading it.

The book I am reading now
Sublimation by Isabel J Kim. It is the first appearance in the alter-worlds of Seoul and New York. I take the well-known story of foreigners, in which the characters, during the border crossing, split into two. As a person of color, I can relate. I’m also reading The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century, which is excellent.

My comfort read
Lydia Davis Collected Stories. I am comforted by the brevity of his stories and the precision of his sentences.