Tuesday
So the day has arrived that I have been working towards for the past 10 years: Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History (Quoir, 2024) has just been released to the world. You can order a copy by going here.
Although I’ve been actively working on the book for just over a decade, its roots go far deeper. All my life I have been fascinated by people’s book choices, in large part because it was wonderful to find kindred souls. As a child, for instance, I loved that the Bastable kids (in the Edith Nesbit series) were enthralled with Kipling’s Jungle Books and that David Copperfield lost himself in Tom Jones and that Tom Sawyer sought to reenact The Count of Monte Cristo. I would have been smitten with Roald Dahl’s Matilda had it been written when I was a child
As I grew older, I realized you could get special insight into people by learning about their favorite books. That’s why, in this endeavor, I delve into why Plato loved The Odyssey, Aristotle Oedipus, Sir Philip Sidney The Aeneid, Karl Marx Robinson Crusoe, Sigmund Freud Hamlet, W.E.B. Du Bois The Three Musketeers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Jane Eyre, and on and on. And of course, from the very beginning of my teaching career I was interested in why my students responded as they did to the books in their lives, whether read in class or out. Better Living through Literature is the culmination of this life-long fascination.
The fascination went further, however. I wasn’t only interested in why people loved (or in some instances, hated) certain books but if and how these books had changed them. I became aware as early as 11 that books could be transformative: that’s when Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird helped me negotiate our community’s desegregation battles. It made sense, therefore, that I would go on to examine what the great thinkers had to say about the matter. As the synopsis on the back of the book reads,
For 2500 years people have been debating how literature changes lives, and versions of those debates continue today in classrooms, school and library boardrooms, and state legislatures. The life-transforming potential of books caught the attention of Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Percy Shelley, and many others…Contending that reading is sometimes like playing with dynamite, Robin Bates brings the issues alive with compelling accounts of stories and poems upending individual lives and sometimes history itself.
From as far back as I can rememberm poems, stories and plays have had (to quote W.B. Yeats) “all my thought and love.” Better Living through Literature grows out of that love. I am honored to be able to share that love with you in book form.
