THE BOOK EFFECT
by
Nick DiMartino
When I look at my life and see what books have done to it, it’s difficult not to be appalled. I can no longer define my life without including books in the definition. Without books, I would be someone else. I would not be a bookseller of over thirty years, the author of three books of my own, the adaptor of over twenty books into plays. 
A box of hand-me-down children’s books from my older cousin Barbie included a battered copy of RINKITINK IN OZ. I read it three times. I treasured it. I still have it. Those were the first books I ever owned. But book-loving had a price. It separated me from my family, good people who lived for sports of every kind, watching them, playing them. While my family went to Little League games or the Kingdome or watched the World Series or played golf together, I read. While the other boys were out playing catch, I was down in the basement lost in the adventures of OZMA OF OZ. 
The damage was irrevocable. When my brother and I divided the universe, he chose the Empire of Athletics while I became the Book King. We were doomed to never understand each other. Fortunately, the Oz books celebrate the unique individual. As a young reader this was some comfort, since I was well on my way to becoming one.
The bookmobile came to Maple School once a week. The driver knew me well. I checked out armloads, sometimes two loads on the same day. My own collection of books swelled until I needed a second wall of the bedroom I shared with my brother. It was my brother’s wall. He refused. I retreated to the basement, where I created a wall-to-wall library entirely surrounding the bed.
The compulsion to buy books never stopped growing. My home has been swallowed by my book collection. Books are everywhere. In shelves, in stacks and piles, on end-tables and coffee tables and desks. For every topic I’ve ever been fascinated by, there’s a shelf packed full of volumes – Socrates, Chekhov, Proust, Iris Murdoch, Venice, Oz, the Bible, Greek classics, Italian comedy, classic ghost stories, Jean Genet, Jim Thompson, Hermann Hesse, the Arabian Nights.
In my first quarter at the University of Washington, I read Albert Camus’ THE PLAGUE three times.
I was shaken to my intellectual core, stopped being a Roman Catholic, and began a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of Goodness. Tell me about how books can change your life.
Books illuminate your interior, help you to understand yourself, and as a consequence, understand others. The worst social bunglers I know, the folks with the least people skills, the misinterpreters of the world, are people who don’t read fiction. An imagination exercised in venturing into other people’s minds develops powers of empathy. Walk through a book tradeshow and listen to how people talk to each other. Or science fiction conventions. Or the book department at University Book Store. Wherever book-lovers are talking to book-lovers.
When enough gratitude builds up, an artist looks for an opportunity to pay back his debt. George Lucas paid his debt to the Saturday matinees of his boyhood in the tributes of Star Wars and Indiana Jones. My debt is to storytelling. Some readers are addicted to words. Sure, words are important, but I’m addicted to plot and character, to the unfolding of “And then, and then…”.
Of the twenty plays of mine which have gone into production, most of them are adaptations of classic tales I loved as books – The Snow Queen, Dracula, Aladdin, Pinocchio, Frankenstein and Snow White. They’re dramatic attempts to lure new children into the magic cave where I discovered so much treasure. Some art is spawned by reality, by experience. But much art is simply books reproducing themselves.
Take the example of Jean Genet. 
In prison throughout his youth for petty crimes, he was the jail wimp and always arrived at the book bin last on reading days. He got stuck with the book no one else wanted. WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE by Marcel Proust. Out of that intoxicating style Genet crafted his own OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS.
My three published novels are all tributes to a British book tradition from almost a hundred years ago, the Victorian Christmas ghost story. I inherited the genre, the formulae, the classic techniques, and then re-invented them in the real streets and homes of Beacon Hill (Christmas Ghost Story), the U. District (University Ghost Story), and Ravenna Park (Seattle Ghost Story).
Would I know how to think if it weren’t for Socrates? Would I know how to live my daily life without having read Epictetus? And what about the terrors and wonders of my unconscious, which I discovered when poring over Jung? The great books don’t leave you the same after reading them. Wuthering Heights, Steppenwolf, Maurice, the stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Counterfeiters, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Red and the Black, the tales of Chekhov. An irreversible alchemical process occurs, and the mind is permanently altered.
I still think back to that fateful cardboard box of old books my cousin Barbie gave me so long ago. And I wonder, every time I open a new book, if it will be one of those special books that leave me forever changed.