The Books That Stick With Us
Posted by David Duhr in 
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Discussion questions: When you think about the books that have a long-lasting impact on you, what stands out about them? Do those books have anything in common? How do you work to create those same effects in your own writing? Let’s discuss in the comments.
In this week’s episode of Yak Babies, “Books & Memories,” we talk about the reasons why a particular story or book might stick with us, and for how long.
When you think about the books that have a long-lasting impact on you, what stands out about them? Do those books have anything in common? How do you try to create those same effects in your own work? Let’s discuss in the comments.
Aaron kicks off the episode with his thoughts: “I’m almost always stuck on the ending of stories,” he says. “And that applies to both reading and writing: When I work on my own writing, the ending is what matters the most to me. I really want to stick the ending. So a story that has a good ending really hits me.”
Meanwhile, our co-host Brick looks for the vibes a book gives off: “There’s some books where the atmosphere sticks with me more than the actual plot,” he says. Which can lead to moments, days or weeks or months later, “Where you get zapped back to that book for a second. There are certain scenes that burn in some books, and they just stick with me.”
“That [emotional] connection, when you can get it, is the best,” Aaron adds. “As a writer, you want to give that experience to someone else; the best motivation for writing is to have someone feel that way about your own work.”
For me, much of it is about the feelings/emotions a good book can leave me with: “Often I don’t remember the contents of a book or story as much as I remember the feeling I had when I read it, or was left with after I read it,” I say on the show.
Also, where I read a book plays a role in how it affects me: “I’m much more inclined to remember … the experience of reading the book if I’m doing it somewhere other than just my couch at home.”
Sometimes those two concepts come together to create a memorable experience. A few months after my dad died I took a weekend getaway to Mexico, where on the beach I devoured George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo. That unique setting, combined with the fact that the book kicked the emotional hell out of me, creating a reading experience I may not ever forget.
“I can’t remember a whole lot about the plot,” I tell my pals on the show, “but I remember — I can even feel it now, just thinking about it — the feeling in my stomach as I was reading that book, and then when I finished it.”
What about you? What makes a book stick in your mind and memory long after you’ve finished reading it? Feel free to offer a few examples. And do you try to offer these same effects to readers of your own work? Tell me about it below!
WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is fiction editor at the Texas Observer and co-host of the Yak Babies podcast, and has written about books for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others.
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This is a neat subject and a great YB episode. I can amen the points you and the YBs have made. When I’m moved by a book it is inevitably on several levels. I perceive associations that resonate. My goto example is “Lost Horizon” where I identify with the protagonist (Conway), connect with the location and time (the wider and wilder world of the 1930s), love the images (friends discussing stimulating topics over cigars and whiskey), and find the themes compelling (Beauty is “…a fragile thing that can only live where fragile things are loved.”) How much I like a… Read more »
Wow, I kind of want to copy and paste Raymundo’s answer.
Yeah, no doubt. I’m thinking of having it tattooed on my face.
I may have suspected “Lost Horizon” would come up (just like you can probably a title or two I would’ve been inclined to mention). Serendipity and gold, for sure. It sometimes seems that the more I try to create the kinds of effects that appeal to me, the less successful I am in doing so. Thinking back to groups and workshops, I’m often surprised by what will move a reader. A passage I trot out as a throwaway can be the one that lodges in a reader’s brain, and the passage I’m proud of and moves me is the one… Read more »
Like Raymundo, I find myself deeply moved by the currents of a novel and especially enjoy when I have to hold on for dear life at the end. Anyone building a story can go through the motions (think along the lines of James Bond novels because they are essentially the same novel retold in different ways), which does not necessarily make them bad, but sometimes you just want to grab a novel where the back third is like jamming a penny in a socket. Where anything can happen and the author isn’t afraid to go there, when you’re most vulnerable.… Read more »
I might have this tattooed on my face too, if there’s room:
“I find myself deeply moved by the currents of a novel and especially enjoy when I have to hold on for dear life at the end.”
What’s the book that’s most recently done this for you? (Was it too written by someone named Dan? One of mine is from Dan Barry. What’s with these damned Dans?)
The most recent novels to turn my legs into a veritable vat of Smuckers would have to be by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Still Life with Crows, Brimstone, and, what the hell, throw in the 4 Gideon Crew series – (spoiler) the main character dies in the end. I’m listening to the tenth book in Richard Kadrey’s “Sandman Slim” series on audiobook (read by MacLeod Andrews) and Stark has me chomping at the bit. Its heady, masculine, laugh-out-loud hilarious, and perfect for anyone who loves explosions, R-rated situations, magic, Heaven, Hell, and a range of characters who are good,… Read more »
“replay an audiobook.” I’m always curious which verb an audiobook reader will choose. Some say “read,” some say “listen to”; you say “play,” which I don’t hear often. I think I’d be inclined to use “listen to,” though I’m oh-for-two on audiobooks. I just can’t manage to follow the narrative, and/or it puts me to sleep.
For a book to stick, there needs to be two forces at work; your mind set as you are reading that book, and the book itself. The first book I read for me as a kid, was “The Black Cloud,” A si-fi I had to turn back in before I was finished and didn’t find it again until 20 years later. I still can easily retrieve the images it conjured. After my appetite was wetted by that book I feasted. We were somewhat poor at the time, so my dad shopped occasionally at the Goodwill. They had a great supply… Read more »
Hi pal. So what is it about your mindset that, when joined with the right kind of book, creates a memorable experience? Is it about, as you mention, “the images [they] conjure”?
For me, it’s all about the character. Without that protagonist that you can relate to, you have no vibes, emotion, or ending to worry about. If you can’t become that character, feeling, seeing and experiencing what they are going through, you have nothing. a flat, who cares exposition that I’ll put down and never finish. Make me feel what the character is feeling, and I’m there with you. It’s all about escaping into someone else’s world and staying there for me that makes a book unputdownable.
What is it that makes you relate to a character? Do you have a few good examples?
A character with relatable flaws and has foibles like normal people. Evalle of the Belador series is like that. Eve Dallas series written by JD Robb. There there are the classics by Daphne De Maurier, Louisa May Alcott, and then there is Kya of Where the Crawdads Sing. Most have a flaw that you can relate to. Each character is believable, unique and relatable to where you want to follow them and see where the author takes you. With a good character, there really isn’t a story. I may not remember the plot, or even the MC’s name, but I… Read more »
Which of your own many characters do you think come the closest to being what you look for in a character as a reader?
Kelly Lancaster. She is an older lady of 50. Her husband died of cancer and she is estranged from her two sons. She decides after being dumped by Cal Sanderson to do the trip to Alaska she an her husband had planne don doing. She Meets Rafael (Rafe) Sanderson while traveling, not aware of his last name or relationship with Cal until Cal shows up and she has to explain how she knows Cal. Long story short, She and Rafe fall in love but it isn’t until she almost loses her life in an accident that things begin to fall… Read more »
I like it, especially the Dalton Highway angle. You’ve ridden that? I’m kind of fascinated by that idea.
I was there, but it was wet, under construction and extremely muddy so I couldn’t do it with the trike. But I did fly around Denali and got to see Columbia Glacier and some Orcas and this absolutely beautiful stated called Alaska.
Since my first episode of Northern Exposure as a kid (filmed, of course, in Washington rather than in Alaska) I’ve wanted to get there. Someday…
“I can’t remember a whole lot about the plot…but I remember — I can even feel it now, just thinking about it — the feeling in my stomach as I was reading that book, and then when I finished it.” That describes me, too. I can point to a book and say I loved it, but ask me what it was about and I usually haven’t a clue. The books that stay with me meld characterization, world-building, and story arc in such a way that they interact tightly with and affect each other (the environment itself becomes a character) and are also… Read more »
This feeling of remembering the reading experience more than the plot or other details always reminds me of an excellent New Yorker piece, in which the writer discusses his problems with retention but finds the bright side: “If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are still charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a particular place. What I remember most about Malamud’s short-story collection The Magic Barrel is the warm sunlight in the coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before high school. That is missing the more important points, but… Read more »
Crouch’s line later in that paragraph resonates with me: “How much of reading, then, is just a kind of narcissism — a marker of who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text?” I wonder whether I would feel the same about Marge Piercy’s Small Changes and Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa if I had not read each at a time that dovetailed with turning points in my own life. (In particular, a single line in the Zweig leapt out at me like a thousand-watt bulb.) Crouch’s bit about Tabby in A High Wind in Jamaica… Read more »
“who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text.” Right, who you were at the time. We all have those books we reread a decade or two later and have a totally different experience than we did the first time. Obviously nothing about the book has changed, so, just as obviously, what’s changed is the reader. I mean, other things have changed too, the culture and whatnot, but we change along with it. In late undergrad or early MFA I really enjoyed Aimee Bender’s story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. So it was with… Read more »
The Little Prince be Antione de St Exupery is a little story that always moves me because of the excellent development of the two characters. Another book I have read over again is Among the Living, by Ayn Rand. The development of the MC and especially the atmosphere, the way it makes me feel, gets me.
Hi Silke. It’s good to see you here! Do you try to replicate these things in your own writing?
I would love to develop memorable characters, and I do work at it.
When I was just starting college, the book I couldn’t put down was The Once and Future King. I read it even while walking to class, on the bus, waiting in line at the co-op. It was everything–the archetypal legend, the hero’s journey, the magic realism and how he made an old legend new by making the characters so really human with thoughts and feelings and struggles and pain and wisdom and failure. I think the book was therapy for me, being of that generation whose “one brief shining moment” was cut short so brutally by one brief horrifying moment… Read more »
I’ve never read that book, but I know several people who adore it. (Now I know another!) Do you retain flashes of these moments you read it, or just the fact of having read it in stolen moments?
I can’t say I remember too many specific moments of reading that particular book because I read a lot of books that way during those years, but that was my favorite. I do recall once reading it while walking down the sidewalk, though, and a guy asked me what I was reading and I was nervous telling him because I thought it wouldn’t be counterculture enough or something.
Haha. He looked a counterculture kind of dude? I would love to walk and read but I’m never able to pull it off. It’d probably be easier if I picked a quiet corner of a park, but at that point I’d be more inclined to just plop on a bench.
Everyone looked a counterculture kind of dude back then in Madison. Paul Soglin was the mayor, and he looked like Al Pacino in Serpico. I was intimidated by all the social and political awareness there, and all the ‘beautiful people.’
I love that Paul Soglin keeps coming back for more.
This is a great question, David, and the variety of answers show just how unique each writer’s muse is. How wonderful a world where writers are inspired by so many different things. I’ve actually been thinking about this for a few years, and I know my answer. I haven’t shared it with many people yet, because I only know how to share it with people who are familiar with some obscure branches of psychology and mysticism. Will you take a short journey with me? We’ll start with Carl Jung’s framework of a collective unconscious. What if there is a shared… Read more »
Thanks for sharing, Sid. This makes me want to revisit (after nearly decades away) my Jung.
And my Tolkein.
Not so much Bruce and the Beatles, but only because they’re never in need of revisiting because I never move away from then. I’ll talk all day about “Born to Run,” but all week about “Jungleland.”
So how do you incorporate these influences into your own writing, in an effort to make a similar impact on your readers?
Thanks for Jungleland, David. It touches something in me on this very issue, the very gritty, real, physical, violent, and sexual dimension of creative arts. (More Freud than Jung, but the body is like that some nights.) How do I incorporate. I have done and will keep doing a few things: A realization that I’m trying for something very high and demanding, and thus forgiving myself for spending 5 decades learning to write before starting to publish fiction. Of course, just reading these writers. When I ask, “How can I do X?” in my own stories, I say, “how did… Read more »
It’s huge that you can enjoy reading your own writing. I’m still working on that; sometimes I can do it without cringing, but often not.
Thanks for the reminder. We’ve talked about this before. Many writers can never do this, especially if the piece is finished and published. Many actors can never watch a performance, including many great ones. (See https://www.insider.com/actors-that-dont-watch-their-own-movies-2020-1.) I think three issues are at work. Are you reading as a critic, or to enjoy the piece? Are you caring that you are the one that wrote it? And is the topic of the piece of interest and value to you now? To put that last in another way, if this piece were not written by you, would it be what you are… Read more »
Interesting. So subconsciously you may be thinking something like, “If I never publish this, I won’t have to say it’s done, which means I won’t have to judge it as a finished piece but rather can view it as a work-in-progress, and works-in-progress always have some flaws… that’s why they’re in progress.”
I meant that as a question rather than a statement.
Yup. A simpler version is, “If I write this by myself, I save myself bullying and being ridiculed.”
Oops, you bucked me. What do you mean “write this by myself”? Like keep it to yourself? Don’t show anyone?
My bad. Better to say, “If I write this just for myself (and don’t publish it), I save myself bullying and being ridiculed.”
You also save yourself from praise, which some writers find equally scary. Not suggesting you’re one of them, but.