A Book That Changed Me, by Katie Sone: "A Woman in the Polar Night," by Christiane Ritter

A book that changed my life is A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter. It is her memoir of her journey and year spent in Spitsbergen (Svalbard) in 1934 with her husband. She writes of her life in a tiny bleak hut where her life is paired down to the simplest of tasks, scrubbing the cabin, chopping logs for the stove, and where a cup of rationed coffee is an event to be revered and sipped in quiet contemplation. She writes of the foreboding landscape that is bleak, dark and harsh and the pure joy she experiences when, after a long winter, the sun appears. She writes of spending months alone, surviving storms that battle with the hut, and of crawling on all fours twenty times round the hut to get her daily walk. She knows she must. On her journey to Svalbard she is told by the manager of the telegraph station: “Madam, if you want to survive the winter well you must remember three things … you must take a walk every day, even in the winter night and storms. That is as important as eating and drinking. Always good temper. Never take things seriously. Never worry. Then it will be fine.”

I read this in March 2020 when all our worlds turned upside down. I sought solace in books that would take me to distant places. I could travel without leaving the house, escaping somewhere, whilst our worlds and lives became smaller. I took comfort in Christiane’s resilience and determination, thought of the simplicity of her life and her life being stripped back to basics. It was a calming read, her words comforting and helpful. I remembered the Telegraph Station Manager's words and, even though anxious and scared of what was happening all around us, I took a walk every day and found joy in the simplest of things and revered my daily cup of coffee.

 

About the reviewer

Katie Sone is a writer and delivers writing for wellbeing workshops. She is also a part time librarian for Leicester Libraries. You can find out more here.

A Book That Changed Me, by Mikiko Fukuda: "Obasan," by Joy Kogawa

I read Joy Kogawa’s well-known, CanLit novel Obasan for the first time while I was in high school in Ontario. As a young Japanese Canadian, I knew I was reading something that was important to the canon, to Canadian history and to me, but as I was still learning how to do close readings, I didn’t fully comprehend how much this book would mean to me.

Obasan is a story about a woman named Naomi who recalls her life while she lived in an internment camp in Canada. The dual timeline is narrated by Naomi as a child and as an adult. Her aunts, Obasan and Aunt Emily, help Naomi piece together her and her family’s history.

The next time I read Obasan, I was a busy undergrad student completing courses in North American history and English Language and Literature. During a history lecture about WWII and the Japanese internment camps, I knew I had to reread Obasan. This time around, reading the novel roused feelings of anger in me. Although I’m thankful for the emotions that it stirred in me, I kept thinking that my reading experiences with Obasan couldn’t end in anger. I wanted to turn my anger into positive action, so I did: I applied to the graduate program “Literatures of the West Coast” at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. I felt certain that UVic would be the place that I could finally write a thesis based on Asian North American literature and, in 2010, I turned my reading experiences of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan into my MA thesis.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Obasan. I know that it’s not a novel everyone will enjoy. But there is something powerful in Naomi, Obasan and Aunt Emily’s stories that reveal dark secrets about Canada’s supposed “multiculturalism.” For me, Kogawa’s novel highlighted incidents in my life that serve as reminders that - even today - I’m not welcome or accepted in Canada as a (Japanese) Canadian. 

About the reviewer
Mikiko obtained her MA in English Language and Literature from The University of Victoria in Canada. She has worked as a language and literature instructor at post-secondary institutions in Canada, Japan, Kuwait and Oman. She worked as the Editorial Manager at a publishing firm in Shanghai and currently writes reviews for sabotagereviews.com. You can find her on Instagram @mikifoo82 or on her blog, thetravellingeditor.blogspot.com.

A Book That Changed Me, by Neil Fulwood: “Collected Poems,” by Sylvia Plath

It was the mid-80s. I was thirteen. My Nan was housebound. Every couple of weeks I’d go to Bulwell library and take out some books for her. I remember borrowing a scattering of classics and regency romances, but her tastes predominantly ran to poetry. As can be imagined by anyone who knows the area, Bulwell library - back then far smaller than in its current incarnation - didn’t exactly offer the broadest selection of verse. Nor did I, at that age, have the broadest frame of reference. My literary horizons were bounded by the Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley thrillers on Dad’s bookshelf, plus the odd well-thumbed James Herbert paperback doing the rounds at school.

I knew Nan preferred what I’d heard referred to as the Romantics, so it was a pretty safe bet that if a collection or anthology had a woodland or river scene on the cover - or a reproduction of an oil painting with some dude in a silk shirt looking all moody with a quill pen - it would be the right kind of thing. Failing that, flick through a few pages and check that most of it rhymed. Even with these safeguards in place, though, it didn’t take long to exhaust their stock of Nan-friendly poetry. Which is how I came to take a punt on Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. 

Nan approached the book with some scepticism. She opened it at random, read one poem (I later found out it was “Daddy”) and asked me to return it. I did, but not before reading a fair few poems. I didn’t understand many of them, but the images, the immediacy, and particularly the white-hot fury of the final works struck a spark in my mind. Poetry can do this? I thought. I want in! When I finally returned the volume, I immediately checked it out again on my own library card. And renewed it over and over until the librarian started eyeing me suspiciously. I asked my folks for a copy for my next birthday. It was probably for the best that neither of them perused it before they got stuck in with the wrapping paper.

It’s because of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems that I read poetry, let alone write it. My third collection is out in July, and it’s all because I choose a book at random in Bulwell library when I was thirteen.

About the reviewer 
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published two full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere; his third, Service Cancelled, will be released on 29th July 2021.

You can read more about Neil's work and his collection Can't Take Me Anywhere on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

A Book That Changed Me, by Brian Wharton: "To Sir, With Love," by E. R. Braithwaite

A book that changed my life is To Sir, With Love, a semi-autobiographical novel written by E.R. Braithwaite and first published in 1959. The book centres on a young Guyanese engineer who takes a job at a tough East London secondary school whilst awaiting a post in his chosen career. He is appointed to teach a group of difficult 14–15-year-olds about the realities of life, as well as some lessons on good manners and personal hygiene.

I first came across the book as a 15-year-old when my own school seemed to mirror that in the book, albeit twenty years later when nothing had really changed for pupils in the secondary modern system. While I was at school we were subjected to an experiment where we kept the same form teacher for three years. Mr D was a good teacher who taught me English and provided us with Drama classes, a path that I was to follow later in life. However, unlike the teacher in the novel, he was unable to maintain discipline and so often lessons would descend into chaos. We did, though, manage to read some good texts including Kes, Animal Farm, The Long, the Short and the Tall, as well as this one.

To Sir, With Love concerns itself with many themes, including racism, class, and education. When I first read the book, I was aware of the conflict facing the black teacher in an almost entirely white community, but I also recognised in it my own problematic education. I re-read the book several times in my teens and, having seen the film which was made in 1967 starring Lulu, it gave me a romantic and nostalgic view of my own schooldays. The book and film still resonate with me today.

About the reviewer

Brian Wharton writes drama, short stories and reviews.

A Book That Changed Me, by Harry Whitehead: "Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience," by Gitta Sereny

For her ninetieth birthday, we took my granny to visit Auschwitz. I guess that’s as far as I’ll ever invoke humour about such a subject, but the poor thing was also promised a visit to Venice. So we set off on what proved an epic driving tour. Berkshire to Krakow to Venice and home. On the journey, I read Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Truce to try to comprehend the camps. I struggled for years after to get a handle on what I learned about humanity’s dark potential. Two things kept coming back to me: first, the freezing silence of Auschwitz Birkenau, the ‘extermination camp,’ until a fish leapt and plopped in the small lake that held the ashes of a million people; its banality seemed an abomination. Second, there was a town close by. What of its population? What of conscience? 

And so I came to Sereny’s celebrated work. Into That Darkness relates her series of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl was captured in the 1960s and given a long prison term. Granted access by Stangl and his wife, Sereny interrogates his conscience, but gently and with empathy, always seeing beyond the monster to the man. The book interviews the few survivors of Treblinka as well, many of whom speak of Stangl as just a functionary, not cruel per se. Yet here was someone who oversaw the murder of more than a million people. And, indeed, he proves a disturbingly ordinary individual, though one incapable of recognizing the enormity of his guilt. Over and over, Stangl describes his conscience as being clear, within the boundaries of the world in which he existed. He was protecting his own family; it would have meant their death to have resisted; there was no escape from the closed Nazi society. 

On and on it went, until at last, one day, he ran out of words. And Sereny, too, said nothing now, no longer offering him any help. Finally, Stangl spoke the phrase, ‘My guilt.’ He uttered a few more hesitant lines – ‘… only now, in these talks …’ Then, he said, ‘My guilt is that I am still here. That is my guilt.’

Nineteen hours later, Stangl died of a heart attack. 

Into That Darkness made me believe in the absolute justice of truth.

About the reviewer

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Before becoming an academic, he worked for many years in film and TV commercials production. 

A Book That Changed Me, by Rosa Fernandez: "If on a winter's night a traveller," by Italo Calvino

I first read If on a winter’s night a traveller in the summer break between the second and third years of my English degree as a way of getting ahead on my reading list. It was a hot summer and I curled up in a sunny window for hours while I devoured this absolute gem of magic realism. It was the first book I had ever read to be written in the second person. It completely absorbs the reader in the act of reading, narrating itself as page after page of starts of novels make up a puzzle only solved by reading on. Attention is drawn to the act of reading, and writing, and to all the things that we expect novels to do. Even the ending is a remark on what we ‘expect’ from a story, and it helps that there are also plenty of jokes.

This novel is like no other book I had read before or since and completely blew apart my idea of what a novel could do. It also, in a very real way, actually changed my life a few years later. At a job interview at a magazine, I was asked a final question by one of my two interviewers: who is your hero? I took a minute and answered that it was Italo Calvino, because he was responsible for this enigmatic novel. I left after the interview and they called me later to tell me the job was mine. Only a month in and the man who had asked me the question told me that it was that answer that got me the job, because most people say cliched things like ‘my mum’ or ‘my dad’. I should have said ‘my mum,’ of course, but then she would probably have said ‘Dickens.’

About the reviewer

Rosa Fernandez is a slam-winning poet and sometime proofreader. She also enjoys wearing silly hats. 

"A Book That Changed Me": New Strand on Everybody's Reviewing!

 

Everybody's Reviewing has now passed 150,000 readers! To mark this milestone, we're inviting submissions for a new strand on the blog. As you know, we already host book reviews and author interviews. We're now adding a third strand of articles, entitled "A Book That Changed Me."

For this new strand, we're inviting short articles about any book that has had a deep impact on your life, your way of thinking, your way of seeing the world. We want you to talk about the book and the impact it had on you. As Oscar Wilde may or may not have said, "All criticism is autobiography": we want to hear about what a particular book means to you. 

Your article should be between 50-400 words in length, generally positive and sent to the usual email address: everybodysreviewing[at]gmail[dot]com. We look forward to reading your submissions! See also About & Submit for further information.

And finally, many thanks to everyone in our wonderful community - readers, reviewers, authors, editors - who have helped Everybody's Reviewing reach this amazing milestone.