Famous books and authors
I think young people today might not realize how readable that novel is. "I would say Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which had an enormous effect on me. When asked for her all-time favorite book, she said:
In a 2013 interview with The Boston Globe, the prolific author Joyce Carol Oates revealed Dostoevsky as one of her favorite authors. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for The Norman Mailer Center "Instead, I only hugged it to my chest." 23. "There was no reason not to burn this book too," she writes. It was true that The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California was now my bible, but The Dream of a Common Language was my religion."Īt one point during her arduous hike, she considers burning the book to save weight in her pack, as she did with other books she read along the trail. That book was a consolation, an old friend, and when I held it in my hands on my first night on the trail, I didn't regret carrying it one iota-even though carrying it meant that I could do no more than hunch beneath its weight. "In the previous few years, certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I'd chanted to myself through my sorrow and confusion. Explaining in Wild the choice to bring along the extra weight in her pack, she writes: She had already read it enough times to almost memorize it in its entirety. One was a book of Adrienne Rich's poetry, The Dream of a Common Language. When the author of the bestselling memoir Wild set off on her journey up the Pacific Coast Trail, she only had room to take two books. Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for American Lung Association