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Habitual Reader Profiles - Page 2
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Name: Sandra Shwayder Sanchez |
| City & State: Nederland, Colorado | |
| Vocation / Avocation: Lawyer and Writer |
Why I'm a Habitual Reader:
When I was a very little girl my Dad read me an alphabet book: A is for Apple (with a picture), B is for Bat (the baseball kind), C is for Cat and so on. It seems my fascination with words began then and I was reading long before I started school. I was one of those kids who read under the covers at night with a flashlight that I would quickly switch off when my mom came in to check on me. I was one of those kids who used to hide that engrossing book behind my algebra text book in class. It's part of who I am and so I guess it was inevitable that one day I would start writing as well as reading books. It was Wuthering Heights that did it: I was twelve and so captivated by the tragic, romantic story on the windy Yorkshire moors that I couldn't bear for the book to end. So I started it all over again and read it probably a half dozen times that year. When I was younger I could keep the plots and characters of several different novels straight in my head and so read 3-5 books at any given time (besides school books) but now I read them one at a time and even review a few for the Boulder Daily Camera.
My First List of Ten: Novels Evocative of Foreign Lands
1. Wuthering Heights
Author: Emily Bronte
Because this was the novel that awakened in me the desire to write like that:
to transport the reader to another time and place so completely that reading
it was like a dream and when you woke up you felt you'd been there. Because
of this book I always wanted to travel to Yorkshire and when I finally did
it was a wonderful experience, like revisiting a long remembered but abandoned
home.
2. The Collected Works of Hans Christian Anderson
Author: Hans Christian Anderson
I always loved myths and fairy tales and especially those of Hans Christian
Anderson. I still love to read them. It awakened in me at an early age a desire
to see these northern lands.
3. Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
The foreign landscape here is not geographical but psychological. She forces
you to feel what her characters have gone through. It expands your experience
as a human being.
4. Love and Other Demons
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This has all the exquisite elements of South American magical realism that
made 100 Years of Solitude so fabulous but is tighter, more focused. My favorite
book by one of my favorite authors.
5. The Alexandria Quartet
Author: awrence Durrell
Especially Justine. Reading Durrell's writing about or set in the Levant is
like traveling there and seeing the scenes, hearing the music and inhaling
the fragrances. Reading his work is like creating your own memories.
6. A Winter's Tale
Author: Mark Helprin
I love magical realist writing and this is one of the most exquisite examples
of it. Like all the other authors I've listed, this writer recreates a place
with such attention to sensory detail that I feel like I remember riding in
a sleigh through the snowy upstate New York landscape behind the magical white
horse. I'm in love with that horse!
7. Katerina
Author: Aharon Appelfeld
I love Appelfeld's work but this one is my favorite because it has a fable-like
tone. He sits you down among autumnal wheat fields waving in a breeze and you
become Katerina and remember.
8. Inheritance of Loss
Author: Kiran Desai
This was my trip to India.
9. Beyond the Summit
Author: Linda LeBlanc
And this was my trip to Nepal and farther up Mt. Everest than I could ever
have trekked.
10. The Gift
Author: Ita Willen
This exquisite mss., again a journey to and through psychological rather than
geographical territory, was the reason I decided to gather some other authors
and start a publishing collective.
My Second List of Ten: Books About Or Narrated By Non-Human Characters
1. Watership Down
Author: Richard Adams
Does anyone not love this book?
2. Travelor
Author: Richard Adams
I am going to read this one on the recommendaton of my oldest daughter who
loves horses as much as people.
3. Black Beauty
Author: Anna Sewell
One of the first books I read as a child and read to my daughter. It is wonderful
how the author creates empathy for the horses.
4. Charlotte's Web
Author: E.B. White
I didn't read this children's book until I was a mother. I guess pigs and
spiders also deserve our empathy.
5. Aesop's Fables
Author: Aesop
I loved these tales when my father read them to me and I still find them
useful analogies in understanding human nature.
6. Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
By ennacting this sinister scenario from human history in a fable, the author
makes his point that much more effectively.
7. Frankenstein
Author: Mary Shelley
After seeing Hollywood treatments of this classic I was not inclined to read
it until recently and found it extremely moving.
8. Lord of the Rings
Author: J.R.R. Tolkein
"Humanoids" notwithstanding, the characters I loved the most were
the Ents and the Eagles. I read the entire trilogy every few years as a kind
of "vacation" right at home.
9. Call of the Wild
Author: Jack London
Reading this as a teenager I longed to travel in Jack London's steps in the
company of a dog who is part wolf.
10. Haint
Author: Joy Ward
I highly recommend this newer work which tells the story of the post apocalyptic
survival of humans with and because of their dogs, told alternately by a
human and her dog named Haint. I especially loved Haint's narrative: both
scientific and spiritual, it is a wonderful read.
Have you read any of these titles? Review one now.
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