Books That Define Us

I think most readers have at least a few books that matter more than others: books that inspired them, opened new interests, or otherwise helped shape who they became. Mine mostly come from childhood and adolescence, when a book could still redraw the boundaries of the world.

My mother used to read to my brother and me when we were young. I loved it, but I also found it frustratingly slow; I always wanted to know what happened next. I obviously do not remember that time perfectly, but I suspect that impatience helped spur me to learn to read, so that I could devour books on my own.

I do not know exactly when I moved from children’s books into books aimed at older readers. I do remember reading The Hobbit on my own in second or third grade, after my mother had already read it to us. It was probably one of the first books to carry me beyond children’s fiction and into a much wider literary world.

My mother later read The Lord of the Rings to us. I cannot place the year precisely, but I have distinct memories of reading it myself around fourth grade. Tolkien made an enormous impression on me. For many years, I probably reread The Lord of the Rings at least once a year, and it undoubtedly helped shape my lasting interest in fantasy literature.

Around third or fourth grade, I also discovered the classics. This widened both my horizons and the selection of books available to me, even if that selection was still limited to what the local library happened to contain. The books that stand out most from that period are Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow.

My interest in science probably grew partly out of the science fiction I read in my youth, especially writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. The first popular-science book I remember making a major impression on me was Asimov’s The Collapsing Universe, which I read in eighth or ninth grade. It made me realise how important books and libraries were as gateways to knowledge. The internet has made information vastly easier to reach, but finding the right book at the right age can still change the direction of a life.

For several years, my scientific interests centred on cosmology and the laws of physics. I vividly remember reading Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace in high school, where I first encountered string theory. That fascination lasted for years and probably culminated in my reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe in 1999. I later returned to that sequence of books in more detail in a reading journey through cosmology.

My interests later shifted towards genetics and eventually led me to study biomedicine for fun. Apart from textbooks, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is probably the single book in the field that has had the greatest impact on me.

Since my first child was born in 2013, the number of books I finish has declined noticeably. I read less widely than I once did and probably more often for pleasure. But becoming a parent changed reading rather than simply reducing it: some of the time I once spent reading alone became time spent reading aloud to my own children. That seems an appropriate continuation. My mother’s reading helped make me impatient to read for myself; perhaps the books I read to my children will open doors of their own.