Susan Choi: “I’ve long associated Dickens with insufferable TV Christmas specials” | imaginary

My first memory is reading
I asked my mom if she could stop reading me a bedtime book and let me read it myself, because I felt like she was going too slowly. The book was either Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, both by Roald Dahl.

My favorite book growing up
I loved Stuart Little, and all his clever little things—his little canoe, his little sailboat. He had such a relaxed demeanor and was so personable! I also loved Mary Norton’s “The Borrowers” series – little people who live under the floorboards and improvise household goods from safety pins, “borrowed” matchboxes, etc. Obviously I had a passion for miniatures.

The book that changed me as a teenager
“Sixty Stories” by Donald Barthelme, because he was having a good time and seemed very intelligent, but he was also mischievous and disrespectful. It may sound corny, but these stories made me realize that there is a world of art and literature. Barthélemy lived in Houston, where I grew up, yet he was a major international writer.

The writer who changed my mind
In the early 1990s, when I was in graduate school, I read Sigrid Nunez’s short story “Chang,” which later became part of her first book, A Feather on the Soul of God. Chang had a seismic effect on me. Up until that point, I can’t remember ever seeing a multiracial character in fiction. I’ve become so accustomed to the default whiteness of fictional characters that I don’t even notice the absence of characters from other backgrounds. Even when I was trying to write short stories about my father’s life in Korea, I would give these characters white-sounding, European-sounding names, as if I hoped to hide their specificity. It really pains me now to look back at this trend in my writing, which took off directly from the kind of writers I took as models, like Virginia Woolf and Henry James. When I read Sigrid’s story I was amazed that the narrator was the daughter of a white European woman and a brown Asian man – just like me! I didn’t realize this kind of character was possible. It’s kind of heartbreaking that my thinking was so restricted, but disrupting that thinking was exciting.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I wanted to be a writer from such an early age that it’s impossible to pick one book to hold myself accountable to, but the book that made me want to be a writer of a certain kind was To the Lighthouse. I wanted so badly to write the way Virginia Woolf wrote in that book, that it made my writing unbearable for a very long time.

The book I re-read
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I hated in school, but now I love the way I love some comfort food. It’s not the most nutritious and in some ways it’s disgusting, but the deep familiarity of it always hits the spot.

the Author I have returned to
Charles Dickens. I had long associated it with insufferable Christmas TV specials, so I didn’t sit down and attempt to read it until shockingly late, and then I was blown away. I read Bleak House for the first time during the pandemic, and it was one of the great reading experiences of my life.

The book that I could never read again
Anything by Tom Robbins. Another roadside attraction, Even Cowboys Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume: They seemed cool in my teens but now even just the titles make me cringe.

The book I discovered later in life
Homer’s Odyssey. Obviously I had heard of it and must have read it for the first time in college, but it wasn’t until recently that I became completely enamored with it and started wanting to re-read it in different translations.

The book I’m currently reading
I recently finished The Peregrine by J. A. Baker, one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It’s very short, but the writing is beyond pigeonholing, so immersive and transformative that I felt as if I’d been sucked into a different time medium.