Renowned novelist Susan Choi, celebrated for her Booker-shortlisted works, offers a deeply personal glimpse into the books that have shaped her life and writing career. In a candid reflection, she traces her literary evolution from childhood adventures to profound adult discoveries.
Earliest Reading Memories and Childhood Favourites
Choi's earliest reading memory involves a moment of youthful impatience. She recalls asking her mother to stop reading bedtime stories from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, preferring to read them herself at a faster pace. This early independence hinted at a lifelong passion for literature.
Growing up, she developed a fascination with miniatures, cherishing E.B. White's Stuart Little for its depiction of a small, clever mouse with a relaxed and dapper demeanour. Similarly, Mary Norton's The Borrowers series captivated her with its imaginative tales of tiny people living under floorboards and creatively repurposing everyday items like safety pins and matchboxes.
Transformative Literary Encounters
The Teenage Awakening
As a teenager, Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories had a profound impact on Choi. She admired Barthelme's clever, mischievous, and irreverent style, which opened her eyes to the expansive world of art and literature. Notably, Barthelme was based in Houston, where Choi grew up, making his global literary stature feel both accessible and inspiring.
A Seismic Shift in Perspective
In the early 1990s, while in graduate school, Choi encountered Sigrid Nunez's short story Chang, later part of Nunez's first book, A Feather on the Breath of God. This story had a seismic effect on her. For the first time, Choi saw a multiracial character in fiction, mirroring her own background as the daughter of a white European woman and a brown Asian man.
Reflecting on this, Choi admits she had been so accustomed to the default whiteness of fictional characters that she hadn't noticed the absence of others. Even in her own early writing attempts about her father's life in Korea, she gave characters white-sounding, European-sounding names, influenced by models like Virginia Woolf and Henry James. Nunez's work shattered these constraints, thrilling Choi with its representation and broadening her literary horizons.
Literary Inspirations and Re-evaluations
The Desire to Write Like Woolf
Choi attributes her desire to be a specific kind of writer to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. She so desperately wanted to emulate Woolf's style that it initially made her own writing insufferable, yet this aspiration underscores her deep admiration for Woolf's craft.
Rediscovering Classics
Choi revisits F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby every few years, despite despising it in school. She now compares it to comfort food—not always nutritious and sometimes repulsive, but deeply familiar and satisfying. Similarly, she returned to Charles Dickens later in life, having long associated him with unbearable Christmas television specials. Reading Bleak House during the pandemic became one of the great reading experiences of her life, enthralling her with its depth and narrative power.
Current Reading and Reflections
Choi recently finished J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, describing it as one of the most extraordinary books she has ever read. She praises its uncategorisable, immersive, and transformative prose, which made her feel as if she had been sucked into a different time-medium. She is also fascinated by Homer's Odyssey, rediscovering it in different translations and finding new layers of meaning.
On the other hand, she could never read Tom Robbins again, citing works like Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as cringe-inducing compared to her teenage appreciation.
Susan Choi's upcoming book, Flashlight, will be published in paperback by Vintage next month. Her literary journey highlights the enduring power of books to shape identity, challenge perspectives, and provide comfort across a lifetime.
