Derrick Uso: “I Didn’t Read a Book Until I Was 24” | books

My first memory is reading
When I was four or five years old, I think. I was living in Long Melford, Suffolk, with my foster father, and my foster father was trying to teach me how to read using those Beef and Chip books.

My favorite book growing up
I didn’t read a book until I was 24, so there wasn’t a favorite until I was about 25, and they usually changed with every new book I read. It started with “St. Mawr” by D. H. Lawrence, then “Where Angels Fear to Tread” by E. M. Forster, “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, then “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald for a very long time. But that lost its place last year when I finally read The True Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov.

The book that changed me
The book that changed me as a young man was The Will to Change by bell hooks. Until I read that I didn’t really know what it meant to be seen as a man. I just kind of drifted through life and never really thought about it. Or if you did, it was so superficial that it essentially meant nothing.

The writer who changed my mind
Benjamin Zephaniah. I emailed him out of the blue once and we started a correspondence that turned into a friendship. He and my partner at the time convinced me to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing. I was hesitant, because I always considered myself not very smart. But he said I could do it. And I did.

The book that made me want to be a writer
There are three: “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” by Claudia Rankine, and “The Terrible” by Yrsa Daley Ward. Ellison gave me access to the novel’s threads, and showed me the parts they were made of. Rankin and Daley Ward gave me permission to write the novel however I wanted, and to shape it in whatever way I felt was necessary.

the Author I have returned to
Henry James. I tried it about a decade ago—I think it was Washington Square—and it seemed so dry and impenetrable that I decided not to bother again. But I tried again, as I always do, earlier this year. I picked up Asburn’s papers and suddenly James’s writing opened up to me, the voice on the page so powerful, the sentences unique and satisfyingly complex, that I ended up reading five novels in a row. Next is Boston.

The book I re-read
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I can’t remember how I discovered it but I read it whenever my self-esteem drops to dangerous levels.

The book that I could never read again
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray. At first I remember thinking how beautiful the prose was. That changed very quickly and everything became really bloated. Once I got to all the descriptions of jewelry and beautiful things from around the world, I stopped. This was the first time I had gotten this far in the novel and stopped. Even thinking about it bothers me.

The book I discovered later in life
A Good School by Richard Yates. I think it’s his best novel. A work friend told me her favorite novel was Revolutionary Road, so I made a note to read it. Years later, I picked it up and decided to read everything Yeats wrote. It wasn’t until I got to a “good school” that I was truly struck by this feeling of loving something immediately and intensely.

The book I’m currently reading
Departure (Departures) by Julian Barnes.

Read my palm
Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. For anyone suffering from depersonalization, this book will snap you out of it and remind you that the outside world is actually real.