Benjamin Wood: The Only Book I Threw at the Wall
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Benjamin Wood traces his earliest reading memory to Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson, bought by his mother when he was eight, a book his sons now adore.
- The Red Pony by John Steinbeck was his favorite in secondary school, and the first novel to make him cry.
- Bed-bound with illness around age 20, Wood read Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, Mr Vertigo, and In the Country of Last Things back-to-back, an experience he says made him ache to write fiction himself.
- Wood returned to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead after becoming a father, finding that John Ames's letter to his young son 'resonated fully' in a way the book's religiosity had blocked on two earlier attempts.
- Wood rereads ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and shares the story The Ant of the Self with undergraduate students at the start of term, calling it 'a near-immaculate piece of work' about a father-son relationship.
- The Magus by John Fowles is, in Wood's words, 'perhaps the only book I've ever loved so much that I had to throw it at the wall for disappointing me,' frustrated by an ending Fowles himself revised across updated editions.
- Wood's comfort reads are Tobias Wolff's Old School and James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, a 1930s novel he found himself unexpectedly invested in a chicken and waffle restaurant's success.
Why it matters: The piece offers a working novelist's reading map, useful for readers hunting their next book, but the through-line is emotional: Wood frames the books that broke him open (Steinbeck at school, Auster in illness, Robinson after fatherhood) and the one that finally frustrated him (Fowles). His recurring detail — rereading ZZ Packer's father-son story every term with new students — is a small window into how a teacher chooses what to hand to the next generation.
Ask SkimNews
