Elizabeth Zelvin
Fair warning: this is not a list of mysteries. In a recent post on SleuthSayers, my blog brother Brian Thornton posed a question about “a book that helped you through a rough patch,” claiming that a certain book had “saved [his] writing career.” When he gets blocked, he said, “reading a timeless work...inspires me and helps break the log-jam across the stream of invention.”
I don’t have a comparable story about a book breaking writer’s block. The closest I come is the book that unexpectedly unlocked the gates of poetry to me. There’s my mystery conversion book, the read that introduced me to the joys of genre fiction. And I’ve spoken and written many times about the childhood reading that made me a writer. In addition, I can list a handful of consecutive favorites, books I returned to over and over and gave copies of to fellow readers at different periods in my life.
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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868). The beloved classic, in my opinion not considered the Great American Novel only because its author, protagonists, and readers are female. Several movies and editions of the book are available. I read it first at age 11 and can still be moved to tears when I reread it. A work that influenced not only my dream of being a writer but also my vision of sisterhood among women.
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The Sotweed Factor by John Barth (1960). A brilliant literary novel that I call my prefeminist favorite book. I read it many times in the Sixties, before I had a context for thinking critically about “guy books.” The publisher called it “a hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices with lasting relevance for readers of all times.” An irreverent historical novel set in colonial Maryland, it’s notable for an intense delight in language.
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Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers (1933). I would not be a mystery writer today if a coworker at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, where I worked briefly in 1964, right after graduating college, hadn’t recommended this book. I became a mystery reader on the spot and consider the character-driven traditionals I write and still delight in reading in a direct line of descent from the great Dorothy L.
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The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin (1974). This novel was my favorite during my belated political period (a Sixties sensibility in the Seventies). The author is one of the giants of speculative fiction. One edition gives it a subtitle, “an ambiguous utopia.” The story brings to life an idealistic vision of an anarchism that’s about voluntary individual social cooperation, not about bomb-throwing and social chaos. (On our planet, it’s never worked on a national level, but you can find something like it in an AA meeting.)
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