The snarl of my journey was untangled and laid out clearly by books. Viet Thanh Nguyen and Phuc Tran discuss writing, tattooing, and being Vietnamese weirdos. I wasn’t alone in my fear of being rejected, my fear of never finding my place, my fear of failing. Phuc Tran: Connecting Through Books, Music. I felt a connective and humanizing resonance in books: I wasn’t alone in my aloneness. Universal themes bound these great works together, and they bound me to their oaky, yellowed pages like Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship. As I read, I began to understand that all the great works wrangled with big questions, important questions: our place in the world, the value of our experience, the fairness and meaning of our suffering, our quest for love and belonging. As an immigrant, as a Vietnamese kid, as a poor kid, I had collected so many scarlet letters of alienation that I connected profoundly to the great works. I fell in love with the actual literature and the actual ideas of great literature. By some miracle-and by miracle, I mean great teachers-I pushed past the shallowness and stupidity of my own motivations. My reading molded me, the tool hammering its hand into shape. But in the course of reading great books, something happened. “In no particular order, I read what I could, sometimes with Fadiman as my docent, sometimes not: Flaubert, Twain, Kerouac, Brontë, Kafka, Camus, Ibsen, James, Thurber, Shakespeare.
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