Coady - The Book That Changed My Life

The Book That Changed My Life — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Book That Changed My Life" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...37

Table of Contents

Praise forThe Book That Changed My Life:

[The Book That Changed My Life] takes a refreshingly populist approach in this collection of 71 lively favorite-book essays.... A welcoming and inspiring book about books that will engage teens curious about books and writers, or in need of an unthreatening invitation to experience the pleasures of books.Booklist

What I love about The Book That Changed My Life is the way it captures a passion that has been muted by earthly concerns about money and competition and sell-through; like a lot of us, these authors clearly love books and its biz.Sara Nelson, Publishers Weekly

[A] wonderful cross section of contributors and a wildly diverse group of books. From the Bible (Senator Joseph Lieberman) to To Kill a Mockingbird (author Wally Lamb), the contents of this book will encourage quick perusal, a checking of titles, or the generation of a must-read list.STARRED Library Journal

Bet you cant read just one. The Hartford Courant

The 71 authors offer... happy hoorays and heartfelt blessings....

The Boston Globe

After years of hosting authors and writers of every caliber, level of fame, and expertise, Roxanne Coady has finally joined their ranks.

New Haven Register

Editor Joy Johannessen and bookseller Roxanne Coady have gathered together a star-studded roster of authors... [whose] passion for their books is downright contagious, making you want to rush to the shelves to pay homage to your own personal bests.

Cookie Magazine

[A] stunning collection of original essays. Pages

A Connecticut bookseller and a New York publishing vet corral an
impressive assemblage of noted writers to contribute brief essays on
the one book they will forever remember. Many of the pairings of
writer and book are delightfully unexpected (Nelson DeMille on
Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged!). Of course, many classics appear among
the favorites, but this anthology also contains many remarkable
books that merit rediscovery, such as Sebastian Junger on Dee
Browns Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Roxanne J. Coady is the founder of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut. R.J. Julia hosts over two hundred author events each year, and won the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award in 1995. In 1996, Coady and a small group of women founded the Read to Grow Foundation, which provides books and literacy information to tens of thousands of newborns and their families each year. Roxanne is a regular guest on Public Radio and has appeared on Good Morning America and The Today Show. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and son.

Joy Johannessen has been an editor/executive editor at Grove Press, Oxford University Press, HarperCollins, and Delphinium Books. Among the writers she has worked with are Dorothy Allison, Harold Bloom, Michael Cunningham, Nien Cheng, Ursula Le Guin, and Arthur Miller. She lives in upstate New York.

In memory of my father and in honor of my mother
R. J. C.

For the friends who saved me
J. J.

INTRODUCTION

ROXANNE J. COADY

Its funny that reading and valuing words is now what anchors my life. When my mother first read to me, neither she nor I, her two-year-old listener, understood the words. She was a recent immigrant from Hungary and hadnt learned English yet, but she read to me almost every day. She just sounded out the words phonetically, and mostly that worked, except we thought know was ka-now and high was hig-ha. Actually, it isnt surprising that I grew up to value wordsmy mother snuggling up with me, reading in her beautiful voice, both of us enjoying the illustrations, trying to figure out the story, making up the story. It really was all about words, and my earliest pleasure was about those books, even just holding themor catching them.

My brother Gary was born in 1955 at Jewish Memorial Hospital on 197th Street in New York City. In those days, children were not allowed on the maternity floor, so my dad brought me and my sister Barbara around to the side of the hospital to visit our mother, and there she was, four floors up, smiling down at us. As was her nature, she had gifts for us. From the window that day she dropped two Golden Books, one for me and one for Barbara. I think it was at that moment, with books falling from the sky, that the notion solidified in my six-year-old mind that books were from heaven.

As I grew older, I read incessantly, to the point of exasperating even my mother when I was lost in a book and therefore ignoring any tasks she had in mind for me. Through high school and college and beyond, I found myself always excited to talk with friends about the books I was reading, always eager to hear about what they were reading, and inevitably lending my books out all the time. Reading was my passion. Although I ended up majoring in finance and accounting and tax law, I was a bookseller at heart, and after a twenty-year detour as a tax accountant, I came back to books. I left New York and my job as national tax director for BDO Seidman, moved to Madison, Connecticut, and opened R.J. Julia Booksellers. My dream was that the store would be a place where words mattered, where people would gather, where writer could meet reader, and where our staff would work hard to put the right book in the right hand.

Dreams can come true. R.J. Julia has now been welcoming readers and writers for sixteen years. Every day in the store we see how books change lives, in big ways and small, from the simple desire to spend a few quiet hours in a comfy chair, swept away by a story, to the profound realization that the reader is not alone in the world, that there is someone else like him or her, someone who has faced the same fears, the same confusions, the same grief, the same joys. Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure. It is a way to learn how to knit or build a house or solve an equation, a way to be moved to laughter and wonder and to learn how to live.

Watching R.J.s customers, Ive seen beyond doubt what books can do for them. Ive begun to feel that in all our fascination with technology weve forgotten that a simple book can make a difference. We are still the same people weve always been, and the fact that we live in a high-tech world has not changed our emotions and needs. Time after time, when authors come to the store to read, I hear members of the audience tell them how their books evoke those emotions and speak to those needs. One summer night in 1994, with the temperature in the nineties and the stores air conditioning broken, Pete Hamill read to a packed room from A Drinking Life and stayed on for hours as one person after another came up to shake his hand or touch his arm and say that his book made them feel understood at last, as if he had told

Next page

1234567...37

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Book That Changed My Life»

Look at similar books to The Book That Changed My Life. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Doris Lessing

A Small Personal Voice

Roxanne J. Coady

The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Leadership in Turbulent Times: Lessons from the Presidents

Tuchman

The Guns of August: the Outbreak of World War I ; Barbara W. Tuchmans Great War Series

Coady

Who needs books? Reading in the digital age

Goodwin Doris Kearns

Leadership, Lessons from the Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson for Turbulent Times

Goodwin Doris Kearns

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Leadership

Antonia Fraser (Editor)

The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books that Inspired Them

Doris Kearns Goodwin

No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

Mark Haddon

Stop What Youre Doing and Read This!

Discussion, reviews of the book The Book That Changed My Life and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.