It has entered my mind to formulate a list of books which have been meaningful to me, both in the pleasure they offer and also in the effect they had. These are books which stand above.
Hamlet
This entry should want no introduction. I often pestered my father to tell me stories, and remember one day when I was dying in the summer heat of an interminable car ride—it was the law in those days as it is in these, that as a child I could not ride in the front seat, but it also was in those days that air conditioning did not reach the back seat; so the law was that I should die of heatstroke—that he recounted the basic plot of Hamlet to his son. I was enthralled, and kept asking him to tell it to me again. He eventually rented a copy to show me, but I promptly fell asleep (I was still quite young, and the play lasts over three hours).
I grew old enough to read the play for myself and in full time watched a production. It has to be one of the most meaningful works of literature to ever be written.
Outside of the Bible, this may have been my first conscious interaction with depth. I don’t think as a child I quite understood the story, but I could experience it. My dad, I think, brought out the questions of Hamlet for me to consider, and such thoughts helped to develop who I became. I remember chanting to myself one day in church the question, “to be or not to be,” and like a child tried to come up with puns around that phrase—but I was still thinking about it, considering it, searching for an answer. It was when I finally saw the play that I knew something deep and profound had been given me. It was as if I had always had it but was only now seeing it, as if I was a prince allowed to play with my father’s crown as a boy and was now wearing it as a king.
Who did it make me? It made me one who at an early age loved the pain of unknowing. The scene that always stood out to me was the final duel where the queen would drink the poison meant for her son, the son who at the same time faced an opponent with an unbuttoned and poisoned blade, and the false king who would finally die. I dreamed that scene in my mind over and over again, and even now can recall the pictures I created.
Hamlet is deeply engrained in who I became. It expanded and enriched my imagination.
Tale Told 