Ruth Ozeki: ‘All my books are an attempt to recreate Charlotte’s Web’

The US author, film-maker and Zen Buddhist priest on smart young girls, the difference between irony and cynicism, and working her way through 13 volumes of Chekhov

My earliest reading memory I was reading, or pretending to read, before my brain could encode memories, so probably around three or four? I “read” Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, but that was mostly pictures.

My favourite book growing up Charlotte’s Web by EB White. For years, I remembered it as a story about a little girl named Fern who saved her pet pig, Wilbur, but it’s not. It’s a story about a writer named Charlotte, who happens to be a spider, who spins words into her web that save Wilbur from slaughter. It’s about the power of language to save lives. Looking back at the books I’ve written, I can see now that all of them are an attempt to recreate Charlotte’s Web. It’s the perfect book.

The book that changed me as a teenager Teenagers change constantly, hour by hour, book by book. I read voraciously as a teenager because we didn’t have smartphones, and every book I read left its mark. The Catcher in the Rye certainly was one of them . I must have read it when I was 12 or 13 and learned two skills critical for my adolescent survival: a disaffected attitude and how to spot a phoney.

The writer who changed my mind Every writer I read changes my mind. Isn’t that the point of reading? But OK. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I read it in 1975 in Nepal, when I was 20, during a month-long trek in the Himalayas from Pokhara to the Tibetan border. That was 50 years ago, and there were very few trekkers back then. We had no GPS. I was trekking with my friend, following winding trails across the mountains, through forests of bright pink rhododendron. Sometimes we’d pass sherpa heading down to town. Their donkeys wore bells on their harnesses, and we could hear them echoing long after they’d passed. I didn’t know the term “magic realism” yet. I just knew that magic was real.

The book that made me want to be a writer Most of the books I read as a child were about smart little girls (or spiders) who were writers: Harriet in Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; Emily of New Moon; Anne Frank; Meg in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, she wanted to be a scientist, but still. And then there were books about obstinate, contrary, misbehaving little girls, like Eloise, Madeline, and Pippi Longstocking, who were obviously destined to be writers even if they didn’t know it yet. I’d also argue that any story told in the first person by a misfit female narrator, like Jane Eyre, is about being a writer, since their subtext is always “Dear reader, I survived to tell the tale.”

The book or author I came back to I don’t really have a simple answer to this question, so I’d rather talk about Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels I read and loved when I was younger, but who I haven’t revisited. Why? I learned something important about humour from Vonnegut. About the difference between irony and cynicism. About earnest irreverence. That it’s OK to be funny about serious things. I hope I would still find this quality in his books, but what if I didn’t? I’d rather just keep his tone alive in my mind.

The authors I reread Poems and poets: Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop. I tend to give their books away and then buy new ones. I bought Geography III after reading Bishop’s poem One Art in the New Yorker in 1976. That poem is all about loss. Every time I survive another loss, I reread it, and every time I reread it, I am reminded of how to survive.

The book I could never read again Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig. I love Zen. I love motorcycles. I loved this book when I was a teenager, and I’m still inspired by Pirsig’s ideas about quality and craft. But when I tried to read the book again as an adult, I found the narrator’s pomposity irritating. Naturally I didn’t notice it earlier, when it was eclipsed by my own teenage pomposity.

My comfort read Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories . I am comforted by the brevity of her stories and the precision of her sentences.