Nine Books About Your Life:

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their life. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In this installment, we speak with Colin Dodds, author of the new novel Pharoni.

First Book
The Star Wars Storybook was the one I made my mother read until the binding gave way and the strings of the insides frayed. Even as a wreck, it persisted. Bones in the desert. Gray metal against a red planet and black space. Garbage eels and corrupt robots. Cast of characters up front. Corny good guys and bad guys who were never so bad as the bad guys in real life. So good. Nothing else matched up.

Most Cherished Book

Leaves of Grass. I bought my copy as a sixteen-year-old at a short-lived shop in a Massachusetts strip mall. I rode my bike there. I’d heard Whitman spoken of by someone with a degree of suspicion or contempt, and decided I should look into it. I remember the guy at the counter hesitating before he sold it to a teenager. When people talk about scripture like a fire burning a new shape into their uttermost selves, that was my experience. The copy fell apart, and I patched it back together. It’s the only duct tape spine on my shelves.

Most Perplexing Book
Four Quartets. Literature is full of complexity and obfuscation and trickery. And that’s often for the good. But I’m going to go with Four Quartets because it feels so urgent, and so insistent on clarity, and yet isn’t clear at all. It is an anthem of perplexity. But good luck singing it. Another candidate, for the same reasons – desperate urgency and brilliantly clear language driving an ultimately baffling message – would be the Torah. But it’s longer.

Life-changing Book
I’ve changed a lot since I was a baby. So, I’ll go quick. Beverly Cleary showed me what a book could be, and made me think a writer is as good a thing to be as a baseball player when I was seven, with Dear Mr. Henshaw. The Exorcist showed me how scared and upset a book could make a surly seventh grader in Catholic school. Freedom from the Known showed me a way to be smart without being suicidal when I was 16. At 22, Within the Context of No Context gave me a succinct taste of what I’d be up against in the 21st century. When I was 25, VALIS opened up the ways fiction can be at least as powerful as poetry, philosophy, or anything written. And so it’s gone on, one every few years, and predictably never from where I expect.

Most Underrated Book
I don’t know who rates anything. But I never hear anyone talk about Dave Hickey’s Pirates and Farmers or Perfect Wave. And they’re both awesome, and not spoken about very much. Between the lines, they both offer a serviceable and stylish game plan for keeping your heart, soul, and mind intact in this bestial, technocratic thresher of a world. Debt: The First 5,000 Years also deserves more attention.

A Surprising Book
It’s a surprise that keeps on surprising – where Violence and the Sacred starts, and where it ultimately leads its author, Renee Girard. The idea is easy enough. People want what other people want. People do what other people do. It seems like a solution. But it’s often the worst kind of problem. Here’s this guy in Palo Alto, working through this, and it leads him to a place you wouldn’t expect.  Masters of Atlantis is also surprising as hell, and funnier.

Your Most Recent Book
Pharoni is my most recent book. Here’s what you get for your money: When Harry Injurides returns from the dead, it sends his friends in strange directions. They build tech empires based on digital pain and start new religions. Their wild successes lead them into a vicious conflict with each other that forever changes what it means to be human.   

Your Next Book
The next one I’ll write seems like it’s about a dad with an accused serial killer for a brother, who steals a holy relic to keep his daughter in private school and who then betrays a real-estate magnate to save a compound full of squatters. But we’ll see. The next book I’ll read will be The Tablet of Destinies — the last book Roberto Calasso wrote before he died.

Plug a Book
I could recommend books all day. But most of the authors have gone on to their reward. I have some living pals with books hopefully coming out soon. I can’t even like them yet. But if I say their names to you now, then maybe they’ll reverberate in 9-18 months when their books come out. Matt D’Abate, Arthur Corwin, Mark Cecil, and Peter Thompson – they have been battling powers and principalities for many years now to get their books to you. I hereby plug them. Keep an eye out.  Or just buy some of mine. I’m still alive, too.