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While Elizabeth Gilbert's roots are in journalism -- she's a Pushcart Prize-winning and National Magazine Award-nominated writer -- it's her books that have granted her even more attention.
What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?
Generally speaking, anything by Charles Dickens. I got started young on Dickens. My mother used to read us A Christmas Carol every year around the holidays, and my father, when I was 14, suggested that I might like Great Expectations, which I did. As I grew older, I worked my way up to the more difficult novels, and finally read Bleak House in my late teens and was staggered by its delights. Nothing I have ever read has filled me with more wonder. I love the compassion and sentimentality and breadth, and I use as my own example his businesslike approach to his task, the lack of tormented drama in his personal life that enabled him to be so ridiculously productive. When I was struggling through my own first novel, I turned to "Bleak House again and studied it like a primer on how to tell a story, how to differentiate characters -- basically, how to write a novel. He is the best teacher I've ever had.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
- Bleak House By Charles Dickens
(literature and fiction, classics)
"I can open this book to any page and be in the dazzling presence of a master. " - Leaves Of Grass By Walt Whitman
(literature and fiction)
"Our own beautiful American mystical prophet -- this is the most sacred text I know." - London Fields By Martin Amis
(literature and fiction)
"Indefensible and misanthropic and evil and delicious and dirty." - Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog By Dylan Thomas
(literature and fiction)
"My favorite collection of short stories ever, heart-punchingly beautiful and tragic and sublime." - Close Range By Annie Proulx
(literature and fiction)
"My favorite living American author. Like everyone else who read the short story "Brokeback Mountain" for the first time, I was struck-down by the sheer, bare, unflinching power of it." - Meditations By Marcus Aurelius
(literature and fiction, nonfiction)
"I keep this in the bathroom and read from it, literally, every day. I like his humble, common-sense and somehow very contemporary philosophy." - Refusing Heaven By Jack Gilbert
(literature and fiction)
"The purest artist writing poetry today. If the topic is not the very nature of dignity, wonder, humanity and grace, he isn't interested in writing about it." - Portrait Of A Lady By Henry James
(literature and fiction, classics)
"I relate to Isabel Archer more than I do to any character in literature. I wrote my novel Stern Men as a reply to this book -- my own sort of optimistic American answer to its haunting old world questions." - The Gift By Hafiz
(literature and fiction, religion and spirituality)
"I guess maybe you could call Hafiz the 14th century Persian version of Walt Whitman. An incandescent, ecstatic pipeline to God." - The Rings Of Saturn By W. G. Sebald
(literature and fiction)
"Sebald's writing was something between elegy, poetry, contemplation, diaries. Nobody wrote, or thought, or -- I dare say -- FELT quite like him. I read his sentences with my heart in my throat. Every word is important, deep and resonant -- like chords played on a distant cello. We lost him too soon."
Source:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com
Book Elizabeth Gilbert’d like to give
- The People’s Act Of Love By James Meek
(literature and fiction)
"Book I’d like to give: “The People’s Act of Love” by James Meek. This year, I'm trying to make everyone read this brilliant British novelist’s book. It’s a love story (though admittedly a dark and complex one) set in Siberia in the final days of the First World War, and it reads so much like a classic Russian novel, you’ll be constantly checking the cover to re-verify that Tolstoy didn’t write it."
Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
(literature and fiction, classics)
"Also (although for no reason that I can link to New Jersey), I just started reading “Bleak House” again, for the fourth — but hopefully not the last — time."
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com
Best books … chosen by Elizabeth Gilbert
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
(literature and fiction, classics)
"I divided my six favorite books into six genres, to make the choosing somewhat tidier. So we shall begin with fiction—and my favorite novel. David Copperfield was Dickens’ own favorite among his novels—no better recommendation than that!" - The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
(happiness, literature and fiction, nonfiction)
"This is a masterpiece of compassion—the fascinating true story of a Hmong immigrant family with an epileptic daughter, struggling through the American health-care system. In nonfiction, it’s the book I most deeply admire." - Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas
"The best American memoir of late. With frank simplicity, Thomas remembers her husband, whose sudden debilitating brain injury left her with a man who was both there and not there. Neither maudlin nor shallowly “triumphant,” Thomas’ writing shines with honest intelligence." - Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert
(literature and fiction)
" Gilbert (no relation to me, though I wish he were) is my favorite poet, and Refusing Heaven is his greatest volume. If you’ve never read Jack Gilbert, find him. He is timeless, bold, sly, magical, fearless." - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
(literature and fiction, nonfiction)
"For anyone interested in self-help, I’d suggest this slim, readable book, which still holds up nicely after almost 2,000 years. There are days when we all need the clear-headed advice of a dead Roman emperor."
Source:
http://www.theweek.com
The most important category is children’s literature. I am a writer today because I learned to love reading as a child—and mostly on account of the Oz books. After The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum wrote more than a dozen other tales about Dorothy’s continuing adventures, and these lushly illustrated epics have been republished in their original form. If you have a child and a lap, you really should own the entire set.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Book 1)
(children books (Ages 9-12), children books, sci-fi, children books series, literature and fiction) - The Marvelous Land of Oz (Book 2)
(children books (Ages 9-12), children books, adventure, sci-fi, children books series) - Ozma of Oz (Book 3)
(children books (Ages 9-12), children books, adventure, sci-fi, children books series) - Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (Book 4)
(children books (Ages 9-12), children books, sci-fi, children books series, teens) - The Emerald City of Oz (Book 6)
(children books (Ages 9-12), children books, sci-fi, children books series) - The Patchwork Girl of Oz (Book 7)
(children books (Ages 9-12), children books, sci-fi, children books series, teens)
Source:
http://www.theweek.com
What books got Elizabeth Gilbert hooked and why?
- Great Swedish Fairy Tales by John Bauer
"I was lucky enough to grow up in a book-obsessed family, so I was always surrounded by stories. But the one book which really woke me up to reading was a book my great-grandfather gave to me and my sister for Christmas, when I was about four years old, which was called Great Swedish Fairy Tales. It was an elegant, hardcover tome, full of the most exquisite illustrations of trolls and witches and lost beautiful girls on dappled horses. My great-grandfater - correctly - thought my sister and I would become more proud of our Swedish heritage by reading these stories. Indeed, I made my mother read to me from this book every night, and I will never forget the moment, sitting on her lap on the big reading chair, that - as she read - something popped off the page: a word, a funny little word, which somehow looked familiar, which grew up out of the book like a rose, begging me to pick it. I pointed to it and asked, "Does this say, 'RED'?" I got many hugs and kisses as a response; I had just read my first word. Using my finger to follow along, my mother showed me the whole sentence, which was about a little boy named Olaf who had bright RED cheeks, but I could barely follow the thread of the story anymore because of my excitement over that word RED, which I had just READ and which now veritably throbbed on the page. After that, I'm afraid, there was no stopping me."
Source:
http://www2.firstbook.org
Why should you listen to her?
Elizabeth Gilbert faced down a premidlife crisis by doing what we all secretly dream of – running off for a year. Her travels through Italy, India and Indonesia resulted in the megabestselling and deeply beloved memoir Eat, Pray, Love, about her process of finding herself by leaving home.
She’s a longtime magazine writer – covering music and politics for Spin and GQ – as well as a novelist and short-story writer. Her books include the story collection Pilgrims, the novel Stern Men (about lobster fishermen in Maine) and a biography of the woodsman Eustace Conway, called The Last American Man. Her work has been the basis for one movie so far (Coyote Ugly, based on her own memoir, in this magazine article, of working at the famously raunchy bar), and now it looks as if Eat, Pray, Love is on the same track, with the part of Gilbert reportedly to be played by Julia Roberts. Not bad for a year off.
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