I read three books and my life changed
Published
Nobel Prize
“Bir gün bir kitap okudum ve bütün hayatım değişti.” One day I read a book and all my life changed. This is the iconic first sentence of the 1994 book Yeni Hayat (New Life) by Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. It took three books to change my life, in the most pleasant way. Let me tell you.
Scene 2
I told you before. I live in Turkey. In this piece I will mention things from my culture and I am not sure how much of this is also part of your culture. Please bear with me and if you get even some of the concepts, this will be a richer read.
Pasaj: A passageway but with a twist, it is not just a corridor but it has shops on both sides, sometimes the passageway is inside and/or through a building. The guilty passageway in the scene had shops back then; almost all were old bookstores, sahaflar (plural).
Eskici: (here I get help from an AI/translator) Junk Dealer / Rag-and-bone man: A person who travels the streets (often with a cart or truck) calling out to buy or collect old household items, scrap metal, and discarded goods. My hero had old books on his cart. The cart was standing in front of one of the old bookstores, inside Akmar Pasajı.
The scene is set. But the story does not start there. This is the middleware.
Holiday with a Bonus
I was 13 years old. We were visiting the summer house of a friend of my father. Parents and my sister and me, two visiting kids, four in all. Our hosts also had two children, their son was younger than me and their daughter was older but away at the moment. If your head is spinning with this younger/older stuff, I had to tell you because it mattered at the time. Being the oldest in the batch, I was the designated au pair: I was tasked with keeping the kids happy and occupied so the adults could have their fun. I remember being praised by our hosts for how capable I was at entertaining the “kids”, playing with them even though I was a teenager myself. You get it. Not many teenagers do that, right?
(In my culture, we call any man our father’s age or older an “uncle”, even if there is no blood connection) The “uncle” (my father’s friend) had a brother who happened to live in the USA, visiting his homeland in the summers. He visited and left before we arrived. He brought a couple of board games and some books with him. Vacation time killers. He was reluctant to haul this stuff back to the USA, so he left them with his brother. I knew English. The books were in English. I was politely pointed to the books. To read in English is good (present tense, always is) if you are not a native speaker. It helps you “develop” your English.
One of the books was Watership Down by Richard Adams.
Rabbits?
So, some ship sank, right. That’s how deep my English was, then. No, Down is something else and Watership is the name of a place. Years later, the book was translated into Turkish and was named Watership Tepesi, translated back, this is Watership Hill. Little did I know back then. I was already reading SF. Maybe this was not SF, but the title really smelled like an adventure. It is/was. But not the way I thought it would be. The book was hardcover, with another thin paper cover over it and I realized there was a pencil drawing of a rabbit only after I read the first few chapters because the book was indeed about rabbits.
Please, if you have a chance, go find the book and read it. It will be a few pleasant hours to add to your bag of nice things. I read it twice in three days. 429 pages. I loved it and still love it. Read many more times.
The part that closes the first Scene and paves the way to Scene 2 is what they printed on the flaps of the thin paper cover, hugging the hardcover’s, well, hard covers. There it said (as best as I can recall) very good things about the book as it should so you skim the critique and are compelled to buy the book while checking it out in a bookstore. That was “the sales effort” for a book in good old times. The critique mentioned two other books, putting Watership Down on par with them.
Alice in Wonderland The Hobbit.
AiW already read and known. The Hobbit? What kind of a name is this? What is a Hobbit? Another place? No, it is “The” Hobbit.
Scene 2, enter from left
Cut Scene 1 to Scene 2. Only it took two and a half years. I learned what The Hobbit is, began searching for it in Turkey. This was early 1980s. Turkey was behind a mile-high imports wall. Nothing in.
But my hero, that eskici in Akmar Pasajı, had, on his cart, The Hobbit. Just waiting there to be sorted and traded to the owner of the old bookstore. The poor owner didn’t have a chance. None. I bought it from my hero, directly. I read it. Then I read it again. And many times again in the coming years.
The Hobbit led to The Lord of the Rings, obviously. It was not translated into Turkish then. Nobody was selling it in English. My hero was a once-a-hero. Our lives intersected for a brief moment, then and there, and we moved on. I was never that lucky again. About books, anyway.
Scene 3. A sad story.
I had a friend from high school. He was like a brother to me. We went to military service together (mandatory in Turkey). He was my best man. We worked together, both as employees for the same company, doing the same work. I was the developer, he was the designer and the people person, also doing some development himself. We liked the same stuff. I introduced him to his partner; she was a work friend of mine.
He had the Big C. He fought for 5 years and left me. I was with him till the end. I “invented” remote working back in the late 2000s just to be with him as much as I could.
Sometime before he took his leave of this sad planet, before he learned he had the Big C, he had a chance to visit the USA. Before he departed for his flight, he asked me what I wanted from America. You guessed my answer. The Lord of the Rings. He did bring it. Houghton Mifflin 1987 Edition, in three volumes. He closed the circle, and passed away. I was never the same Burak after he left. I am eternally grateful to the powers that brought me to the summer house, to my hero eskici and especially to him.
Curtains
High Fantasy is now the second genre I have pursued along with SF, throughout my years on this sad planet.
LOTR is my favorite book of all time, all genres. Since that day I laid hands on my dear friend’s gift of three volumes, I have read them, I read about them, I watched them, I watched about them. I cannot tell you how profound its influence has been on me. We are still reading and watching with my daughter, who turned out to be a fan, too.
You have read the chain of three books. Am I right to call them the three books that changed my life?
My copies, photographed where they live. The Hobbit has been mended more than once.