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By T.L. Crum, on July 5th, 2010 [Each Monday for the next few months, one of our contributors will match a great book with a time in their lives; keep up with this series, or any of our others, through our Special Features page.]
 I loved Empire Falls when I was revising my first novel. That is, I love it right now. When I started drafting the novel this past December, I made it a point to immerse myself in the best fiction ever written. I revisited Nabokov, Steinbeck, threw in a little Cheever and V.S. Naipaul, and then school started again. I’m currently halfway through my three-year MFA program, and last semester, I signed up for a Premodern Narrative class – and by that I mean works like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. I eventually switched out of the class in favor of an entire semester of Leaves of Grass, but not before Bede knocked some sense into me: I’d been going about my “research” backwards. …
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By Mike Britt, on June 28th, 2010 [Each Monday for the next few months, one of our contributors will match a great book with a time in their lives; keep up with this series, or any of our others, through our Special Features page.]
 I loved The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I read it the first night of my college orientation. There was actually a mixer for the incoming freshmen; I could hear the music through the open window. I was seventeen and hiding in a small dorm room reading a crinkled yellowed copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “immortal tale of suspense and terror.” …
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By Sara LeHoullier, on June 21st, 2010 [A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]
 I just picked up a new copy of The Sun Also Rises. I lent my last copy—the one I myself “borrowed” from a friend in college—to a boy I liked in the early summer of 2008. He moved away and I never saw him, or the book, again. I still mourn the loss of that particular chewed-up, ratty copy, the one in which I marked my place with a black-and-white picture from a long-ago New Years party; I look so stunningly delighted in the photo, clutching a bottle of cheap champagne, closed-eyes grinning, receiving a New Years smooch on the cheek.
I loved The Sun Also Rises most when I was volunteering for the Peace Corps in Madagascar. For twenty-seven months, I spent my Sundays sprawled on my foam mattress, reading random books gleaned from a pile of crap at the Peace Corps flop-house, discarded romances and science fiction thrillers, a biography of Basquiat, the sexual escapades of Chelsea Lately. Roosters crowed outside and my toilet was a hole in the ground, but in the midst of my weird, protracted acculturation, these books were tiny pieces of the familiar.
Sometimes, in the cool of the evening, I’d shut off the hanging bulb in the middle of the room and tuck myself into the mosquito net to read by candlelight –The Sun Also Rises was the only book I kept on my bedside table, providing a little company for the bug corpses. It was like going home, except home was Paris, or Pamplona, or Bayonne, or Madrid. In the absence of any other entertainment, it was like watching a film in my head; I could see it all, and I could imagine spending time with each and every one of the characters in all the gorgeous scenery, and being very drunk. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on June 14th, 2010 [A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out the Special Features page.]
I loved Bernard Malamud’s The Natural when I hated reading books.
When I was young, before I was in school, my mother saw me “reading”—book open in front of me, finger tracing the words I pretended to read aloud. She thought it was cute, but something troubled her: my hand, while tracing the words across the page, was moving from right to left.
I’m dyslexic. Throughout my elementary years, I spent large chunks of the school day in a trailer behind the school, slowly learning how to make sense out of the jumbled mess of words I saw on the pages of books. The instructors played games with me that sharpened my concentration and perception, and improved my memory. They also spent a great deal of time reading to me, planting a love for stories that they hoped would eventually lead to a love of books.
For me, reading takes a lot of time and even more concentration. I have to put myself in a zone to read, have to shut myself off from any outside distractions. The words and their context have to be the only thing in my mind. And even when they are, even when my focus is pristine, I sometimes have to reread paragraphs or pages or chapters that don’t coalesce into something meaningful. As a middle school student, I wasn’t willing to put in that much effort.
But my love for stories was in full bloom before I ever even read a book in its entirety. What my instructors wanted me to find in books, I found in movies. The lessons of plot and character and dialog I was supposed to learn through red ferns and life on the Mississippi, became clear for me on the screen—through Jedi knights, and Ripley, and dinosaur experts who can’t stand children. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 7th, 2010 [This is the first post in our new series, "I Loved This Book When..." Each Monday for the next few months, one of our contributors will match a great book with a time in their lives; keep up with this series, or any of our others, through our Special Features page.]
I loved Still Life with Woodpecker when I was a freshman in college. Partially, you have to assume, I loved it because of Tom Robbins’s unabashedly gleeful adoration of drugs, sex, smoking, drinking, and everything else I’d been told was a sin.
I smoked cigarettes back then. Camels. (If you can’t guess from the cover, this book has a lot to say about Camels.) At eighteen, I’d already gotten sick of people telling me smoking was bad for me, because I knew that. And after all, it wasn’t only bad for me and they seemed to be missing something.
Enter Tom Robbins. Here’s how he describes smoking:
Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.
I photocopied that passage and taped it to my dorm-room door.
I had a whole library of Tom Robbins quotes on my door that year. And it wasn’t just the fact that he loves vices.
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I loved Empire Falls when I was revising my first novel. That is, I love it right now. When I started drafting the novel this past December, I made it a point to immerse myself in the best fiction ever written. I revisited Nabokov, Steinbeck, threw in a little Cheever and V.S. Naipaul, and then school started again. I’m currently halfway through my three-year MFA program, and last semester, I signed up for a Premodern Narrative class – and by that I mean works like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. I eventually switched out of the class in favor of an entire semester of Leaves of Grass, but not before Bede knocked some sense into me: I’d been going about my “research” backwards. … 
