Travel & Leisure

The Book That Changed My Life

Author Jonathan Lethem on the book that transformed him

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, two books that are one book, had an incredibly intoxicating and transformative effect on me. They are children's books that are stealth adult books. The personalities that Alice meets—the Mock Turtle, the Gryphon, the White Knight, Humpty Dumpty, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum—have these strange adult agendas and moods. There's the sort of fairy-tale problem they present and then there's this extra layer of their annoying or entrancing personality. Humpty Dumpty has this really irritating egocentric personality and reminds me of how children feel when meeting their older relatives and their parents' friends. This extra layer of emotional information is an entrance into novels. It gave me an appetite for the feeling of allegory without the obviousness of allegory. When you don't understand what the signifiers are, that's the same ambiguity as when you discover a writer such as Franz Kafka or Haruki Murakami. Everything seems charged and meaningful, but you can't translate it into simple symbols.

Lethem's latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet , is being published in paperback by Vintage.

QUICK READS: Samples of great new writing, compiled by Kyle Smith

Soldiers of Reason
By Alex Abella (Harcourt)
NONFICTION

Herman Kahn was what most RAND analysts, by dint of their belief in their intellectual superiority, never deigned to be: a showman. And his shtick was death. Death by the millions, the tens of millions. It is with Kahn that RAND becomes, in the popular mind, the place where people think the unthinkable.…

RAND stands for Research and Development, or as wags have always put it, Research and No Development—but its influence is immeasurable. This first-ever history of the secretive organization with deep ties to the Department of Defense and the White House was written with the surprising cooperation of its subject.

Everyday Drinking
By Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury)
ESSAY