Live From BEA
First Book, First Hook
By Ron Hogan -- Publishers Weekly, 5/30/2007 12:37:00 PM
Each year, as BEA draws to a close, many exhibitors, faced with the prospect of shipping all their books back to the office, choose to donate their display copies to First Book, a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books. Over the last 15 years, it has distributed nearly 50 million books. Earlier this month, 
the organization began its annual campaign with an online poll that asks, "What Book Got You Hooked?" Participants were invited to share the books that inspired their lifelong interest in reading, and to vote on a community that would receive a donation of 50,000 books. You can also vote in person at First Book’s booth (1344) before the winning community is announced Sunday.
In the meantime, we thought we’d ask some publishing luminaries about the books that hooked them as children.
Michael Chabon, who returned to bookstores last month with
The Yiddish Policemen's Union (HarperCollins), says that Ray Bradbury’s "The Rocket Man" is the most important short story in his life. "I read it for the first time when I was 10," he says, "and the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot, but of language."
"The book that got me hooked on reading was
Madeline", recalls Slate cultural editor
Meghan O’Rourke, whose debut collection of poems,
Halflife, was recently published by W.W. Norton. "I made my parents read it to me over and over, and finally they got so sick of it I had to learn how to read it. For a while, it was the only book I could read, largely because I had memorized it. I think what I liked about it was the language, its musicality and punctured rhythms—not to mention the impishness of young Madeline."
Leslie Schnur, former editor-in-chief of Delacorte and Dell, was blown away by reading
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden when she was 12. "I remember identifying with what Deborah was going through and being relieved that she was crazier than me," says the author of
Late Night Talking, published this month by Atria. "I wept and wept, something I love to do when I read."
"Every book I read as a kid hooked me one way or another," reflects
Sarah Crichton, who edits her own line of literary fiction and nonfiction at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, "but the first book to actually change me was
Suzuki Beane," a children’s book written by Sandra Scoppetone before her success as a mystery writer (with pre-
Harriet the Spy illustrations by Louise Fitzhugh, to boot). "It inspired me to grow bangs (which I still have), dress entirely in black (which I still do) and insist on being called Suzuki (which I largely gave up in second grade)." It’s worth noting that Suzuki’s love interest was named Henry Martin, and Crichton married a writer named Guy Martin. "Coincidence? I don’t think so."
