Five Life-Altering Books

By Leo Racicot

 Aunt Marie used to say, “Leo liked to read straight out of the cradle. “She was only half-exaggerating; I’ve always loved to read and started reading at the age of 5 when I amazed my teacher, Mrs. Hare, and myself going through books at a much faster rate than my classmates. As I came up through the grades, I was reading at a level far beyond expectations and would go through a book in record time then head on to the next one. “No brag, just fact”, as Walter Brennan used to say in The Real McCoys.

I don’t think the SRA System is still in use in schools; SRA (Science Research Associates) was a program of reading acumen and development. It consisted of a series of color-coded cards, each card having a story or text followed by a group of questions that measured vocabulary sense and comprehension skills, seeing how much of what you read you absorbed. The student him- or herself then checked answer key cards to see how well or how poorly he/she did. The better you did, the higher you’d climb on the color-code scale, indicating a rise in reading development. My favorite part of these exercises was climbing up the color scale, orange, aqua and blue being the heights you wanted to aim for, with red, as I recall, being the highest. The competitive spirit was high as John Stewart, Mary Jo Sagaties, Tommy & Susie Quan and I challenged ourselves to outdo each other.

The first book I remember shaking me to-the-core was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Its story of racial injustice and the coming-of-age of three children in a small Southern town was so powerful, when I finished the last page, I sat dazed, staring down at it in front of me on my desk. I was thirteen. Prior to reading it, I didn’t know a book could do what this one did to me, stir up so many different and gut-punching emotions, could open one’s mind, teach such important life lessons while at the same time entertaining the reader. It has stayed with me all my days, and is the first book that comes to mind when I’m asked which books left a lasting impression on me. To this day, 65 years after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird sells between 750.000 to one million copies a year worldwide.

Some books, sadly very few, cast a magic over us, and over the time and place we read them, that lasts a lifetime. One such book for me, the memory of which even now resurrects a certain summer many summers ago, and the front porch I read it on, during what seemed to me the most beautiful of weather days, was As They Were, by an author I had never heard of, M.F.K. Fisher. The title still has the ability to thrill. I liked the book, in fact, so much, that I set off in search of another of the author’s titles, A Cordiall Water. I had no luck finding it; the book was out-of-print. A friend suggested I contact the publishers to see if a copy could be had from them. A month or so after, a package, brown-bundled, tied with plain, brown twine, came in the mail. It was from the author herself, accompanied by a note thanking me for my interest in her books, along with a wish that I enjoy this one. Thrilled, I dashed off a ‘thank you’ straight away. She wrote back, a longer, more personal reply, and so developed between us (me, here in Lowell, she, in California), a regular correspondence that evolved into years of visiting her, knowing her, loving her.  As They Were was more than a book; my discovery of it and of Mary Frances was life-altering. Prior to reading MF’s work, I had little interest in food, other than eating it. My friends used to joke, “Leo could burn boiling water.” I not only learned to cook and develop an appreciation for the culinary world; I actually became house cook for a ten year period for an elderly woman and her autistic son and their staff. Mary Frances opened a door to a whole new world. An enduring, endearing influence, all begun by simply opening the pages of a book.

When we were kids growing up in the 50s and 60s, murder was an uncommon, even a rare occurrence. The taking of a life by another was unheard of, compared to today’s almost daily killings across the nation and the world. Frighteningly, the society has become almost blase about it. That’s why it was so shocking here in Lowell when in 1972, Diane’s physician, Dr. Hugh Mahoney, his wife, Ruth and their 15 year-old son, John, were slaughtered in their home during a robbery attempt. The community reeled with horror. Nothing like this had ever happened here in the city. So, it was, too, that already-established American writer, Truman Capote, aimed his pen at the similar massacre of The Clutter family. He’d seen a small clipping about it in a magazine, saw it as a dire harbinger of a future of senseless violence in America, and taking his friend, fellow writer, Harper Lee with him, hurried down to Kansas, seeing this as fodder for a book and the opportunity of a lifetime. There, the pair of scribes, delved deeply into the murder and its aftermath; the capture of the two killers, the trial, their execution. (Capote even witnessed the hangings of the guilty men, Perry Smith and Dick Hickok). He laid this story out in what would become one of the most acclaimed, internationally read books of the 20th century, In Cold Blood, and claimed, quite rightly, to have invented a new form of literature, the non-fiction novel, overlaying novelistic devices over a true-life story. Because of this, and because Capote fascinated me, I was more than eager to read his book. The story of the mindless, sadistic killings of a decent, law-abiding, God-fearing family by two misguided souls and how all six people (victims and criminals) wound up where they did on that fateful night, the murderers stealing less than $50.00 in cash and hanging for it was so engrossing, so overwhelmingly powerful, thanks to Capote’s ingenious skills as a writer, that when I finished the book, I was shaking and couldn’t stop. As with To Kill a Mockingbird, I fell into a daze of amazement that a book was capable of stirring up such emotion.  A magnificent achievement on Capote’s part.

In the 1980s, following a series of personal losses and disappointments, I fell into a terrible depression. I’d been a lifelong reader but suddenly I found myself unable to read past the first paragraphs of any book, no matter which genre of book I tried. I couldn’t make myself read a thing, not a magazine, not a newspaper. I simply couldn’t concentrate long enough.  I’d never been a rabid fan of actress Maureen O’Hara. I liked her movies well enough but she didn’t have the effect on me that Julie Andrews or Barbra Streisand had. One day, I was in Pollard Library when on a book For Sale cart, I saw O’Hara’s autobiography, ‘Tis Herself. I’d read that the book was an international bestseller and the cover, with the actress in all her Technicolor glory – flaming red-orange hair, the brightest of blue eyes — drew me in. I paid my money and took the book down to a corner coffee shop, opened to Page 1. O’Hara’s writing style grabbed me, her life story so captivating, so well-told, I was amazed to see I’d worked my way past the first chapters in no time. I sat in that shop the rest of the day and some of the evening and finished the book. Thank you, Maureen O’Hara!  Your book broke the spell of my depression and helped me come back to myself. Books can do this, work their magic in many different ways. For me, ‘Tis Herself was almost medicinal.

Lastly, I mention a book by Dan Hofstadter, The Love Affair as a Work of Art. It combined and intertwined in marvelous ways three of the subjects that are dear to my heart: the French language and French history, epistolary relationships (of which I’ve had and continue to have many) and belles lettres, the genre Hofstadter’s book is written in. Reading it was such a soul-stirring book, I read it twice more and hope to read it a third. Books read for pleasure are maybe the best books of all.

Truman Capote & Harper Lee in Kansas researching the Clutter murders.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

SRA Reading Laboratory

The Love Affair as a Work of Art

‘Tis Herself by Maureen O’Hara

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee