We are so excited to dedicate this week’s Inspired By to the author of Mireille, Molly Cochran!

Here, she shares the five books that inspire her most as an author.

Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice

            Written before the vampire novels that made Anne Rice famous, this beautifully written book about a castrato singer in early 18^th Century Italy taught me how music could be experienced through words. The two are utterly different art forms, yet the skill with which the author wrote allowed me to “hear” the soaring voices of the opera and the strains of the orchestra even as the composer wrote down the notes. It made me realize that words can do anything.

Shogun by James Clavell

Clavell took me into a completely different world with this book. But it wasn’t a world of the author’s imagination. It was a real place—Japan—in a real time—the turn of the 17^th Century—and on every page I felt its authenticity. This masterpiece of modern fiction taught me the value of research. Telling the truth starts with finding the facts.

 

The Boys From Brazil by Ira Levin

Levin’s greatest skill was his ability to push pace to impossible levels. His writing moves with the ease and speed of falling water, without so much as an extraneous word to slow things down. Liquid readability: Most bestsellers have it, but The Boys From Brazil is in a class by itself. Every writer should study it.

 

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

More than any novelist since Henry James, Nabokov possessed the wisdom to respect his reader. Complex, sometimes contradictory emotions were the source of the dark humor in this extraordinary novel. Reading it for the first time was a total surprise for me in terms of what I thought the author believed, because, in truth, I never knew. What he taught me was that “good” characters don’t have to be all good, that “bad” characters can have redeeming, even endearing, qualities, and that the storyteller himself might be a liar. In the Nabokov universe, the writer only writes, leaving the readers to sort out all the moral issues for themselves.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

This was the book that inspired me to become a writer. I was twelve—Anne’s age—when I read it, and I still recall the revelation that struck me like a hammer blow in my brain: All she wanted was to keep writing, I remember thinking. That was her dream, to spend her life as a writer. When she grew up. When the war was over. When the world became a better place.

She couldn’t achieve that dream—she died young in a concentration camp—but I could. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to write what she would have if she’d had the chance. I couldn’t pick up the pieces of her life and undo the evil that was done to her. But I could, I realized, give myself the chance she never had. I could try, as she tried, to see the world as better than it was. I could, and would, and did, embark on the adventure she had looked forward to so fearlessly, and for that I am grateful beyond words.