 This lecture is inspired by a book by Elif Batuman called Possessed. What she says, at least I think what she says, is that books not only, they don't only enlighten us or accompany us in the evenings or entertain us. They're not just something that is sort of a side part of our lives, but actually create our lives. Or we create our lives because of the books that we read. And I thought, well, that's kind of an interesting thought. I never thought of books that way, that they actually create our lives. So I decided I would think back on my own life and try to remember books where I really had a solid memory of the book and of reading the book and seeing myself reading the book. This is me reading the first book that I recall. I'm sitting looking at this book. It's called Die Fröhlichen Steinzeit Kinder. It's a German book, actually a Swedish book, translated into German. I'm looking at the dog Uraks. The book says, in the cover, it says, dies ist Buch gehört Christopher Dürnbaugh, which is my name at the time. Although I can tell that I wrote that later, this is a picture of me when I was five. My first language is English, but I have lived in Germany a number of times. I can remember, you can see my haircut, which I hated. The barber made it asymmetrical. You're supposed to comb it to the side. And I can remember the scar on my forehead from falling against the radiator, which is behind the table there. And if you look out into the courtyard, you can see my downstairs neighbors, Jost and Jutta, who the first time I went out to play with them, jumped on me and pulled my pants down. And this is the character, Sten, from the story. This is the book. This is my favorite page from the book. Schoenhaar, the horse, has run away. And they have gone to find him. They've found him. Uraks, the dog, has found him. They're heading home. And I like this page, especially because of the hair standing on end. A second book that came to mind immediately as I thought back was a book of Austrian sagas. You can see me in bed, my mother reading the book to me. You can see the devil behind my bed, leaning over my bed. Because a lot of these stories are about outwitting the devil, making a deal with the devil. The good ones, the ones I liked, were the ones where you outwitted the devil. A lot of them are quite gruesome. I will read a little bit. Tag und Nacht engstigte ihn der fürchterliche Gedanke anstatt im Bett schlief, which means that he was so afraid that someone was going to steal his treasure, that he slept on the trunk instead of in bed. And that kind of font is called Fraktur. It's old German. And I just learned recently that Hitler, when he came to power, outlawed this because it was too hard to read. And it would hinder the overtaking of the world that he had in mind. But this book, this book was my answer. And the other thing that I loved was often the book, The Stories, dealt with real places in Vienna. The gruesome, horrible crucifixion is stands on the outside of the great cathedral, St. Stephens. I remember the Lord of the Rings paperback, Houghton Mifflin editions. They were so fat, and like bricks, and they were purplish and bluish and pinkish. And suddenly, they were the biggest, fattest books. I was amazed that I had read such a wonderful, fat book. It was our Harry Potter. And I also remember painful memories. The first book, the most important scene, Gandalf the Wizard, falls off of a bridge and dies. And my neighbor, Brian Miller, casually mentioned to me, as I started the second book, that Gandalf wasn't really dead and destroyed the second book for me. He also did that with Agatha Christie's and then there were none, told me who did it. However, when I returned from Germany one year and in middle school and was completely lost in math, had no idea what a negative number was, Brian Miller spent many afternoons telling me how to do the math. So all is forgiven with Brian Miller. In high school, I remember Ms. Kelsey. I was quite short as a freshman. She was very tall, very enormous. And she was very dedicated. She was the first person to tell us, to think about the structure of a book itself. And she explained to us what Omniscient Observer was, what first person and third person and second person was, and that even that a book might have several layers of meaning. And I remember she blew my mind. And we read, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which is Omniscient Observer. In college, I don't remember many books because most of the books were textbooks, of course. So you don't quite have the same relationship with the books. I remember we read The Chosen by Chaim Potuck and he came to our school. And I remember that very, that's about the only book I remember other than The Selfish Gene. And this is a picture of me reading The Selfish Gene over the winter break. As mentioned, I was a biology major. And The Selfish Gene is one of the first books of Richard Dawkins, a geneticist and sociobiologist in England. And the entire premise of the book is that not only do we function based on evolutionary principles in terms of individuals, but our own genes function on that. And our own genes really don't care who, what person, our genes are in. They only care, if you can use the word care, about propagating themselves. It's a very careful and logical progression. And it's very reductionist. I read this over the course of the winter break and got extremely depressed because I could not argue with it. I had no way to come up with an alternative view, even though it's just the view, because it is so deterministic, really depressed me. This is the cover that still haunts me. And the first page, it's hard to describe why this could be depressing. But on the very first page, he writes, philosophy and the subjects known as humanities are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. I don't know, it was kind of the arrogance of Richard Dawkins' writing that just put me off. I don't know why. And well, I mean, that's part of it. So instead of going directly into graduate school in biology, which was my plan, I decided to take a year off to think about life and followed a friend of mine to Germany, a friend of my name, Bruce, who wanted to learn German. And he, my mother, found a kind of volunteer position for him. And I tagged along in a different town. And I worked in a institute for handicapped children. And this is Heiko, he and I in the wheelchair, Heiko, he and I actually hitchhiked in this picture. We had hitchhiked to Berlin, which was complicated in a wheelchair, as you can imagine. And from that time, I remember taking my friend Bruce to Vienna to meet my family, my aunts and cousins. And I remember reading New Year's Eve, reading the tin drum in the bathtub. And Bruce peeking in, because I'd left him with my tongue to Gusti and my tongue to Ilze to have to deal with them. And I guess I remember this, because it was one of those kind of things that bonds you with a friend. We had our, I would mention little things, like little poems that appear in the book. Ist die Schwarze Kechenda, ja, ja, ja. So that must be why that stays in my brain. I came back to the United States not knowing what to do. Bruce's mother suggested I go to medical school. I said, OK, I'll try to do that. I lived in a house. And I got sick with the flu. I was sick in bed or on the couch for a few days. And one of my housemates, Lighty, read Henry James' Portrait of a Lady to me in the evenings. So, I mean, you can't really read something like the Portrait of a Lady allowed to someone, obviously, without consequences. So after we were married, we joined the Peace Corps, working in an orphanage in Frederickstead, St. Croix. So suddenly, we were just married. I did apply to medical school. I was accepted to the University of Michigan. Didn't want to go, of course. So I got this two-year deferment. So we could go in the Peace Corps anyway. So suddenly, we were newly married, and we suddenly had nine children. That's Maria, Elizabeth, Jose, Carmen, Angel, Trevor, Leo, Lee, and Henrique. And those dolls were made by my mother. She made all those dolls and sent them down to us. So we were headed back. We stayed down there for, let's see, have to hurry up. We stayed down there for two years. And the summer before, I forgot, we read straight through Graham Greene, many of whose books are set in the tropics. And perhaps the comedians was the first one, which is set in Haiti, the first one we read, that is. And describes the beauty, but also the great sadness and terror so beautifully. And so before going back to medical school, I decided we should go visit my family in Vienna, my aunt and other friends. And on the way, we stopped at my friend Bruce's house, who was now living in Philadelphia. And I said, Bruce, I need something to read. I'm about to travel for six weeks in Europe. And he just kind of leaned around the corner and said, well, read The Razor's Edge by Somerset Mom. Or he suggested that it was on his bookshelf, a little paperback. So I took that along. And The Razor's Edge is the story of Larry Durell. It was written in the 30s. And he becomes interested in Eastern philosophy. And he kind of throws away his life to, as he says in the novel, loaf. He'll just loaf in Paris and read and think about things. And this book, actually, reading about it, as I was remembering the book, was sometimes we think of Somerset Mom as just kind of a popular writer. But he was very much ahead of his time and his own interest in Eastern thought. Then we came to New York. I didn't go to medical school. We came back. I read The Razor's Edge. And on the first day, we came back to Michigan on the first day of medical school. Well, the night before medical school, I stayed up all night fretting. And then on the morning of the first day of medical school, I called up and said I wasn't coming. And that was the beginning of my freelance artistic career. That was the jumping off the cliff. And that jump eventually landed us in New York City. And because of the Graham Greene's, I read through Evelyn Waugh. And this book came to mind, The Diaries. I'm a little bit sheepish to remember, because I remember them vividly for the fact that for some reason, Liddy was out of town. And I thought it would be a good idea to listen to an opera. I don't remember the opera, but I do remember I drank probably, well, probably just drank one bottle of wine. But still, it was enough to make me feel so sick the next day. It was probably cheap wine. And I had planned to go for an enormous walk out to Rockaway Point in Queens. The subway ride to Queens is two hours. And I sat on the subway, read Evelyn Waugh's Diaries, and felt really ill. And of course, Evelyn Waugh was drunk much of his life, early life. So somehow the two have remained in my memory. And almost finally, I read, because I've been reading so many English folks, I thought I should read Saul Bellow. And I kind of read through Saul Bellow's books and loved Humboldt's gift the best. And there's a couple of passages I want to read from this book. Then my respected friend Dernwald mentioned, kiddingly, that the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner's books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will, there fell a gap of sleep. It might be brief, but it was deep. For one of man's souls was a sleep soul. And this human beings resembled the plants whose whole existence is sleep. And later, thus went my meditation on the green sofa. Of all the meditative methods recommended in the literature, I liked this new one best. Often I sat at the end of the day remembering everything that had happened. In minute detail, all that had been seen and done and said, I was able to go backward through the day viewing myself from the back or side, physically no different from anyone else. So I ended the first part with mentioning Rudolf Steiner because I went to a Steiner school for one year when I lived in Germany the second time. And Rudolf Steiner was a mystic. He was a friend of Madame Blavatsky's. He was kind of a crackpot. He was a visionary, but he was a true visionary. His ideas about farming and about education and about building. He was one of the first people to build with poured concrete, formed concrete. He was really a very interesting man. And I spent one year at a Steiner school. And at that one thing I learned there was the backstitch. And if you don't know the backstitch, I will tell you how the backstitch goes. Well, first you thread your needle. Then you plunge the needle threaded into the fabric from the front. Now the needle goes through the fabric. You grab it on the other side of the fabric with your hand. And here comes the mysterious part if you're a 12-year-old and your handwork teachers explaining how you do this. You poke, you kind of poke back from the back, even though you don't see where the needle is. You have no idea where the needle is going to come up. And you're assured that that's what you're supposed to do. So you poke, poke back up, pull it out, and now you go back to where you were before. Plunge back into that same hole. Now the needle has disappeared again. Where will it come up? You have no idea. It's behind the fabric. You can't see what you're doing. Poke it up again and come back. Very mysterious. And you keep going, and eventually you keep making sense of your decisions by going back and looping forward. After a year, you make a lion. And one thing about the backstitch is it's very, very strong. And I brought for your consideration my 40-year-old lion. So here's my lion. He has followed me around. And this was actually quite a revelation to me as a sixth grader that you could spend one hour a week for a year every week and make something, which was unusual to me, which was new. So now very quickly, I want to talk about some of the books that particularly were memory very much played a part. In my own work life as a children's book writer. And first of all, if you were counting the books that went by, I said there were going to be 12. Only 11 went by, because this is the 12th. This is The Pup Grew Up, illustrated by Vladimir Radonsky. And this is the book that I held in my hands at the original boarder's bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that made me want to be a children's book writer, an end illustrator. Vladimir has become a friend. I visited him a month ago. He lives in Rome now. This is him, his dog Tsetse. He's cutting salami. The first book, when I started writing Making Dummies, one of the very first ones was Arlene Sardin. And Arlene Sardin came from memories of Queen Louise home, where we got all of our food from donations. And once a year, a big truck came that had been loaded with things from the United States. And we unloaded the food into the pantry. And I was unloading it. And there I held in my hand a little can of sardines. And I thought, this can of sardines, this sardine has traveled the world to get to us. So remembering that, I thought of a text. So you want to be a sardine. I know a little fish who wanted to be a sardine. Her name was Arlene. I started writing, and then I thought I'd better do a little research. I wrote to some sardine companies. They sent me things. One company, Xeroxed, an entire book. The golden book of Portuguese tinned fish. Lisbon, 1938. And in that book, in my research, I learned that the definition of a sardine is that a sardine is a fish in a can. So I kept going. I'd already started the book. I just thought, well, we'll just keep going. I always liked her fish swim one way and then the other way. Described how she's caught. And unfortunately, on page 16, here on the deck of the fishing boat, Arlene died. However, Arlene's story is not over because she was put on ice in a box with her friends. Later, she takes a short salty bath. She's smoked delicately. She's delicately smoked. She's packed like sardines. And finally, Arlene was a sardine. A sardine is what Arlene was. This was one of my very first book dummies. And I realized I could never sell this book. But as a matter of fact, 10 years later, it was published. And some people hated it very much. Some people liked it fine. Thank you. When doing a book, I generally try to find what is most powerful in my either for me now or memory. And one of the most frightening times of my childhood life was not being able to sleep, probably because of the books that my mother was reading me. But so I wrote this book about not being able to sleep. And I made myself a little dog. And the moon is invoked as a comforting figure. I remember walking on Broadway and looking up at all the lit windows. And it's a very abstract kind of feeling. And I made the book like this. And then the moon could rise on the left and set and even come in and kiss the dog when he was sleeping. These are the finished pictures. So when morning comes, the moon will go to bed. Now, you may stay awake and keep her safe. You'll keep her safe. So very quickly, I did a book called The Purple Balloon, which is about a child who knows of his death coming. And so I based it very much on Heiko, who actually visited us when we lived on St. Croix, came with an attendant. And we were living at the time in a little house in the rainforest that didn't have glass windows or no doors, no bathroom. And he came for three days and a tropical storm hit us. It was pretty fantastic. And Heiko died just a couple of years after he visited us. He was 17 when I first knew him. And this became this book in which I made the characters more just anthropomorphized balloons and made it a broader kind of story. So the last book I want to show you is based on my very earliest memory that I have. Over the winter holidays, I was just sitting and trying to remember or conjuring up the very, very first memory that I possess. And I asked my mother if this was a true memory, because I never really asked her about it. But she confirmed that it was true. So I thought, what would happen if I just drew this strictly from those remembered images? So I've made this little, this is a dummy of a potential book which I haven't shown to anyone yet. So I will just, it's mostly wordless. So I think I will just show it. It's called Holding Hands. All you need to know is this is basically my family. You'll see me, then my father, brother, and sister, and mother. And there's some changes, but it's very much true. So it's Holding Hands. I guess I will conclude that Elif Batuman, as far as I'm concerned, excuse me, is correct that books aren't simply part of our lives that we love and cherish and so forth, but they actually manage to create our lives in some way. And I'll finish with just two more quick stories. When Arlene Sardin was published, I was on a little book tour. It started in Seattle, went down the West Coast. And we stopped at one of the hot pools. And I was sitting in the pool, and I brought the razor's edge along with me again, just to reread it, because it was almost exactly 12 years, and I thought, I'll read it again. And as I was lying in that delightful water, a pool attendant came by and looked over my shoulder and said, oh, the razor's edge. I'm reading that book right now. It's really interesting. I said, yeah, changed my life. I said to him. And finally, I was coming home from an event traveling with another author whose name I won't mention, because he was at the time going through a terrible time in his life. And the whole way, I was reading Anthony Trollop's Phineas Finn and was completely absorbed, completely happy. And he leaned over to me at one point and he said, oh, I wish I could read. And I said, why can't you read? And he said, my life is just too upside down right now. I simply can't read, which I thought was a terrible thing. He can read again now, I will say. So I will finish back with Lighty Reading, which I think is a nice place to finish. Thank you all.