The Novels That Opened Their Minds

The Brian Lehrer Show | Dec 11, 2015

⇒You have until December 18th to nominate your library to win a $20,000 prize in the NYC Neighborhood Library Awards. Use this form or fill one out in person at your library.⇐

Meanwhile, check out the suggestions below for our series* guests' picks of books that prove the finding that fiction, more than non-fiction, opens readers to uncertainty and other people's lives.  As President Obama told our guest Marilynne Robinson in their New York Review of Books conversation, reading novels taught him about being a citizen:

“It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with somebody else even though they’re very different from you.” (New York Review of Books, 11/19/15).

 

The fiction that opened their minds:

Maria Konnikova (author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes and The Confidence Game):

Mary by Vladimir Nabokov: “I remember crying for so long.”

Konnikova read his first novel in Russian when she was 13 and it has stayed with her, especially the scene where the old Russian emigre in Berlin loses the passport he’d waited years to acquire.

Simon Critchley (NYU philosophy professor, author of his first novel Memory Theater):  

James Joyce’s Ulysses : “If fiction is just making things up, that’s not the point.  It’s imagination touching real things in the world.”

Critchley brought his 1960 Bodley Head green copy of the book to the studio, but cited from memory Stephen Dedalus' line, "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot."

Angela Flournoy (author of New York Times 2015 Notable Book The Turner House): 

Chinua Achebe’s  Things Fall Apart: “The layers of moral complexity...it’s a book I’ve returned to because there’s just so much to explore.”

Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist, author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Lila):

the poems of Emily Dickinson: for “the way she can poise a question on the knife-edge of a sort of meaningful indeterminacy,”

Although the creative writing professor confessed she really prefers reading primary texts to connect with historical figures through their own words. 

Marlon James (Man Booker Prize-winner for A Brief History of Seven Killings): 

The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers: "I can’t tell you the last time I’ve ever rooted so hard for characters to succeed and the ways in which America and the world fails them at the end of that novel (and this is a meta-fiction guy!)"

Curtis Sittenfeld (author of the novels Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, and the forthcoming Eligible: A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice): 

Make Your Home Among Strangers, by Jennine Capó Crucet: "It’s just this amazing beautiful hilarious novel that in this palpable, visceral way made me think about what it must be like to be a first-generation college student and the challenges that people face in that situation."

*The Series:

Nominate Your Local Library (11/18/15)

Fiction Prescription: The Real Benefits of Made-Up Stories (11/23/15)

More Fiction That Opens Minds (12/1/15)

Fiction Opens Minds: Marlon James and Curtis Sittenfeld (12/7/15)

The First Books that Opened Your Minds (12/14/15)

 Tweet your picks using the hashtag #FictionOpensMinds and add them to the list:

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