The best-selling writer handpicks five 20th-century novels that provoke, haunt, enchant, and upend her thinking (in the best way possible).
I think we have stories because they help us understand who we are. But there's a tendency to assume that a story must be ingested in a certain way, that it must mean one thing. So readers are always trying to ferret out the truth. I want to argue that this idea is a raging and utter lie. The reader brings as much to the book as the writer does: You're bringing your past, you're bringing your thoughts, you're bringing your future. It's my job as a writer to tell you a story that's going to take you away from whatever you're doing—your laundry, your kids, whatever—but that, to me, is the least important part. When I sit down to write a book, my goal is to make you ask yourself, "Why are my opinions what they are?" I'm not going to make you change them necessarily. You might if I've done a good job, but at the very least, you're going to ask yourself where you stand on a given issue. To me, the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.
E os cinco eleitos de Jodi Picoult são:
1. The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Turtle Moon
By Alice Hoffman
3. Out of Africa
By Isak Dinesen
4. First Light
By Charles Baxter
5. Life of Pi
By Yann Martel
