Opinion: Your Say: Readers offer what books or writing influenced them – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Books opened doors to whole new worlds

When I was growing up our family had no TV and movies were a rarity. Entertainment came from the public library, where my mother took us every two weeks.

The first book that really made an impression was The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. I was 11 years old. A year later I read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a book to be reread over the years. These two books were like a door into a whole new world of human experience beyond our own little corner.

In ninth grade, I discovered The Good Earth and thereafter consumed most of Pearl S. Bucks stories about Chinese life in the 1800s and 1900s. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck became favorites for their beautiful writing and intriguing dilemmas, then I was on to the convoluted tomes of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as I delved into the Russian experience. Romance novels were never my thing except for the tragic story of Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, a timeless tale set in our own North County of 150 years ago.

In recent years, some historical novels such as The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett have been memorable, and Im awed by the many excellent stories that have come out of World War II, each capturing a different facet. I particularly loved Mark Sullivans Beneath a Scarlet Sky, revealing how devastating the war was to the Italians, and Heather Morris The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

An authentic movie can condense an era or event and serve it up to entertain for a couple of hours. But a good book draws you in so you are not just an observer but fully engaged in the narrative through your mind.

Incredible what these little black squiggles on paper can accomplish. Its a miracle.

Louise Birket, San Marcos

The news didnt look good. It was mid-March 2020 and the stock market had had its worst day since the 1980s with a downturn of over 7 percent due to the spread of COVID-19, now declared a pandemic.

Im going to get something for soup, I called out to my husband as I grabbed my Subaru keys and headed for my local grocery store during its 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. senior shopping hours, a list of ingredients for Minestrone Milanese stuffed into my jacket pocket and an unfamiliar mask covering my nose and mouth.

The minestrone recipe was from The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking: A Year of Our Soups, a large paperback with a color photo of its smiling author, Brother Rick Curry, S.J., on its cover. I had picked up the book years before at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., after a morning spent admiring its breathtaking rose window and the open-air workshop where sculptors were restoring fierce-looking gargoyles.

The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking is a collection of recipes prepared by Brother Curry during his life as a Jesuit religious. Curry, who died in 2015, transformed a birth defect into a vocation brimming over with projects for wounded veterans, everything from a theatrical performance workshop to a commercial bakery. Born without a right forearm, he joined the Jesuit order, the order of the current Pope Francis, when he was 19.

Throughout the pandemic months, I often turned to Brother Currys book for its combination of spiritual enlightenment and brilliant but uncomplicated soup recipes. I wrote dozens of comments alongside the lists of ingredients: use Siesels (a local meat market) smoked shanks to Very tasty! Make again!

Brother Currys book follows the outline of the church year:

Advent. Christmas. Lent. Easter. The recipes in each section reflect tastes that complement those feasts. A beef flank and root vegetable Hungarian goulash is perfect for an Advent winter. A mix of fresh greens in a frothy potage aux fines herbes is a joyous welcome to the Easter season.

Along with the recipes, Brother Currys good-natured narrative weaves in the philosophies of his religious life: The Jesuits believe that one best learns by repeating something over and over and over again. You can add a wonderful element to any of these [soup] stocks by throwing a handful of roughly torn basil into the finished broth.

Brother Curry often collected recipes on his travels. While in Madrid at the invitation of Queen Sofa of Spain, who called on him to attend a conference for arts and people with disabilities, he returned to the states with a recipe for potato and kale soup.

The characteristics of any good stock are flavor, body and clarity. Of the three, flavor is paramount, Irma S. Rombauer wrote in The Joy of Cooking. One could say the same about any good soup cookbook, including The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking. Its charming blend of flavor, body and clarity was just the right remedy for a COVID-19 cure.

Regina Morin, Ocean Beach

I am an author with stories published in America, Mexico and France. What compelled me into this pursuit when I had no intention of doing so? The Italian writer Alberto Moravia. His writing was fluid, his style unaffected, his personages so human.

The book I have now read the most and which influenced me is Ernest Hemingways A Moveable Feast, his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s when he was a struggling, young, poor writer living in an apartment with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and young son. After that I read writers from other countries, like Moravia: Gabriel Garca Mrquez from Mexico with his flowing style, the tightness of Georges Simenon and his Belgian detective series about Jules Maigret, Frances Marguerite Duras short The Lover, the long Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, and even the disdain for punctuation of the Texan Cormac McCarthy. But it was Hemingway who finally hooked me and influenced my life. He was tough, but vulnerable, strong, but weak in areas of relationships, and at the end, tragic in spite of his macho image. He considered himself a storyteller, not a writer per se. He once said that a writer should write for people, not critics or other writers. He dismissed the New York intellectual establishment, probably due to the fact that his books were often criticized when reviewed by them.

Even though he was sensitive to criticism, he dismissed the intellectual establishment probably due to the fact that his books, although loved by many readers, rarely were taken seriously by those critics. But Hemingway also said that if you need to have a dictionary or thesaurus near you every time you sit down to write, or read a book, pick another occupation. There is a special beauty in the simplicity of the language of his stories. I savored them over the years, and let the story itself do its magic.

In the beginning I did sometimes copy a writers style that I admired tremendously. But with time, I gave my own writing the freedom it deserves. Even if, like Cormac McCarthy, I do disdain punctuation all together. I remember one thing about Hemingway, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature, by writing stories about human beings in a very clear and simple language.

And I single out A Moveable Feast, which was published posthumously but remains one of his most beloved works, for inspiring me to write with unbridled creativity and exuberant mood, my own novels and short stories.

Ariel Morales, El Cajon

This summer I started reading Nobuko Miyamotos Not Yo Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution. Im not a big reader. However, this book hit home and made me cry. It was a rare moment when I felt, She understands.

Miyamoto, a Japanese American like me, also fell in love with a Black man in the 1970s. She consulted with Rev. Mas Kodani, a Buddhist, for guidance when she was pregnant. He told her Dont go against your feelings. I cried. I also followed my heart, only without guidance. The book brought out how alone I felt during that time period. There was no one who said, Follow your heart.

After almost 50 years, it was nice to read a fellow Japanese American traveler on the journey of life who understood love with no borders on a personal level, and going through the Asian Movement, and having a love of the arts. Thank you to Nobuko Miyamoto.

Shirley Omori, Normal Heights

As a youngster, I was taught to put others first, including their beliefs and their feelings. Anything else was being selfish. I grew up introverted and remained that way into my 30s or later. Ive always enjoyed reading, and I discovered books written by Ayn Rand. I first read The Fountainhead, then Atlas Shrugged, and then The Virtue of Selfishness.

My thought at seeing the title was, Virtue in being selfish? Thats not what my parents taught me. I loved the book, and over the years have read it several times. However, when reading it as a young adult, the theory still puzzled me.

Then I had the occasion to attend a sermon by a rabbi at a Friday night service. His topic? The virtue of selfishness. I perked up. He used the following as an example of unselfish selfishness.

Suppose your child and your neighbors child were swimming in a stream and they were both having trouble getting back to shore. They were both in danger of drowning. Would you feel obligated to save the neighbors child first and let your own child drown so you wouldnt be considered selfish, or would you save your own child and then do everything you could to save the neighbors child? Is saving your own child first considered selfish? No, said the rabbi. Thats where the virtue in selfishness comes in. Im now an older adult, but the moral of that book has remained with me.

Iris Price, Ramona

Folks in my Boomer generation, and others since, have studied history from the perspective of the great presidents, generals and heroes of years past. So my choice for most influential book is Boston Universitys Howard Zinns 2003 posthumous 20th anniversary edition of A Peoples History of the United States. It is a multi-million-copy bestseller that was nominated for the American Book Award. It authoritatively focused on the rest of the story that many history books have overlooked.

News icon Paul Harvey vividly captured our collective imagination via his news segments entitled The Rest of the Story. Each griping vignette was presented as little-known or forgotten facts, with some key element of the story usually the name of some well-known person held back until the end. Borrowing from that construct: A major contemporary figure has described Peoples History as evil and wicked, while undermining the virtues of Americas heroes and the nobility of the American character. The speaker was then President Donald Trump.

I embraced the power of Zinns narration of the rest of the story in his telling version of U.S. history. Per his definitive viewpoint: We must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The [written] history of any country conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.

Peoples History presents a powerful alternative to the traditional historical narrative. That latter approach views history from the perspective of the great men (but little about great women), and the rote memory events we chanced upon in our educational years. Zinn, indeed, spanned the nations history from inception through 2000. But he reviewed our nation via a bottom-up approach. He did not shy away from presidents, generals and major events. He addressed those stories and countless others from the perspective of Americas women, factory workers, working poor, African Americans and immigrant laborers. Zinn therein focused, for example, on the other civil war, spanning generations of class warfare between labor and management.

One must acknowledge the riposte from the right to protagonist Howard Zinns leftist history that many of us read (or were assigned) in high school or college. The antagonist is Emory University instructor Mary Grabars 2019 Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America.

Grabars perspective quarterbacks a controversy that has not diminished, but instead has increased the popularity of Zinns seminal work. Reading this Zinn-Grabar dueling banjo couplet will illuminate a discrete rivalry that eclipses mere reliance on media simplifications about either tome.

Bill Slomanson, Hillcrest

When I was 22 or 23, I saw the word ubiquitous in the newspaper. It was part of an ad for the telephone company and its ubiquitous telephone. I had to look that thing up. Chalk up one more timber in the frame of my learning to the newspaper. A lifetime of reading the daily paper seems as good a route to education, entertainment and contentment you could ask.

Contentment? That part comes from settling in with the morning newspaper and a cup of coffee to see who won and whats the buzz. I admit it. The sports page is where it all starts. It really started in the 1940s at the dinner table. My brother and I would listen to the different opinions flowing from my Irish mom and my businessman dad. The paper, plus columnists like David Lawrence, the Alsops, Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell provided the spark.

A newspaper delivered to the home then, and ever since, of course presented a chance to be aware of the issues of the day. Just like a book, continually reading different stories in different styles helped one do the same. This is not to say that reading a newspaper is better than summer reading of a book. You can only snuggle up in bed with a handy book to see if the butler did it. But dont go to some cocktail party offering opinions on some authors work because youll be a bore. Better to stay with the current stuff from the paper and be careful with certain inflammable subjects, like Donald Trump. Just say you admire a guy who doesnt drink or smoke, but wish he would stay out of Washington, D.C.

Newspapers offer a more complete reading experience. Bookies may be able to name thousands of great authors, but dont forget William Buckley, Jr., Art Buchwald, Jimmy Breslin, Herb Caen, Mike Royko, Helen Gurley Brown, Ring Lardner, Drew Pearson and H.L. Mencken.

True, its only a handful of famous writers who make the big bucks. In a field that pays little (ransom notes excepted), there are thousands of dedicated journalists working in a newspaper industry that seems to be fading fast. Good luck to them, and thanks much.

Tom Dresselhuys, Carmel Valley

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Opinion: Your Say: Readers offer what books or writing influenced them - The San Diego Union-Tribune