Life Savers

The power of books to change lives is the subject of this column by Andy Weinberger, co-owner with his wife, Lilla, of Readers' Books in Sonoma, California. This piece originally appeared in "One for the Book," an occasional newsletter from Readers' Books.

By Andy Weinberger

A few years back, Lilla and I attended one of those bookselling conferences where people regularly sit around and bemoan the fate of books and publishers and, of course, their own miserable brick-and-mortar worlds. At this particular get-together we were treated to a breakfast talk by Victor Villasenor, author of Rain of Gold. Mr. Villasenor grew up on the streets of San Diego, a poor Chicano, with no future beyond jail or an early violent death. As a teenager he was starting to get into trouble with the cops, he admitted, and his life would have ended badly, had it not been for an encounter with, of all people, a bookseller.

Villasenor was wandering through a bookstore and, on a whim, asked the owner for a recommendation. What do you like to read? asked the bookseller. I don't know, he replied, because, although he knew how, to tell the truth, he couldn't remember a single book he'd ever read. In the end the bookseller gave him a Hemingway title to try.

Young Villasenor took it home and read it, then returned the following week for another suggestion. This went on for several years and, slowly, over time, an amazing transformation occurred. Villasenor found meaning in his own life and began to write himself.

When his first book, Macho! was published, he received five complimentary copies from the publisher. The first thing he did was go straight over to the bookstore. He walked up to his old friend, the owner, and slapped a copy of his book down on the counter. Here, he said, this is for you.

That man, concluded Villasenor, saved my life. He literally saved my life.

I got to thinking about that story again recently, wondering what books I'd read that had -- if not saved -- at least changed my life, and as it happens, there were dozens. I credit books like The Book of Tea, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Siddhartha and the writing of Alan Watts with my early interest in Asia. It is because of those books that I majored in Asian history in college and ended up in Japan for an unforgettable year with Lilla and the kids.

Novels like The Stranger and The Plague and plays like Waiting for Godot informed my general sense of being an outsider, while The Sun Also Rises stands out for me somehow as a window into that lost dreamy artist's life that one could lead as an expatriate. Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Isaac Babel rekindled an interest in Judaism.

These are just a small handful of older books, and I won't go into all the new books that are still orbiting around in my brain. The larger point is that we need to remember the tremendous power of books to change our lives in ways we can't even imagine.

People who don't read (and I've heard there are a few) are not nearly so available to change and grow. It is a form of mental arthritis they suffer from; they know exactly what they think and that's that. How sad. How tragic.

How much more glorious it is to wake up each day to a brand new world, to doubt, to question, to reexamine all those platitudes we were so sure of when we were, say, 25 years old. I don't know about you, but I remember being 25. How sure I was that: a) God didn't exist; b) capitalism was doomed; and c) without a college education you had zero future.

"Anyone who reaches the age of 21 and is not yet a communist is an idiot," my father used to say. "And anyone who is still a communist by the time he's 30 is also an idiot."

You live. You learn. And the best journeys in life are fueled by books.