The Books That Changed My Life

I have always been a book person. I was an easy mark at school fetes, they could sell me anything that was bound together and had words. I remember Mr Perks selling me a book about history and saying “I know you’ll take care of this one.” I think it was a sales pitch, but I have taken care of it. I still have it on my bookshelf.

I have 11 bookcases. My removal guys constantly complain about my inability to purchase a Kindle. Books are very much a part of my life. I love the ideas contained inside, the individual way that each author conveys their message. My oldest best friend hates books. To me, it’s proof that friendship isn’t always based on like-mindedness.

Books, or the ideas contained inside, change lives. I’d like to share some of the books that changed mine.

The Frantic Phantom by Norman Hunter – a kid’s book. I won this book for getting a history question right in an end of year quiz. Thanks Mr Perks! This was a major coup for two reasons. My main academic rival in history was Andrew Hunter (who we called Norman because of his phenomenal knowledge of 1066…) and the author was Norman Hunter! (He was also James’ brother!) I managed to beat him to prove that I was the best at History that year! A small and pyrrhic victory I acknowledge now, but it helped a young boy realise that he could be good at something.

All the Worlds A Stage - Ronald Harwood  - My mum bought this for me from a second hand bookshop in Leicester in the summer before I joined my schools 6th form performing arts called. This gave me a potted history of european and american drama and I obsessed over the Russian section reading it again and again. Not a surprised that I have a shelf devoted entirely to Stanislavski.

An Actor Prepares - 16th Birthday present from my Mum and a life long obsession with acting begins. Stanislavski was the first person to effectively systemise acting into a set of repeatable practises. I read and re-read this, completely obsessed with how the actor does what they do. I still kind of hate the diary format of the book, but I understand from my own experience why he chose it.  When the publishing rights finally ran out on this book, Jean Benedetti, rewrote/retranslated Stanislavski’s original, and although it’s a gargantuan, it’s even better. I’ll be honest and say, it’s the ideas that fascinate me – personally I believe the core principles and some of the ideas on beats, actions and objectives are the most important. The rest, I’ve chosen to leave behind in my own practise.

True and False - When I first read this in 1998 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I was so mad at David Mamet. I loved his plays, but I couldn’t believe the heresy he was committing here. It was directly in opposition to the love affair I’d had with Stanislavski. I got so mad that I read it through and tossed it into my suitcase. On returning from a disastrous first directorial outing at the Fringe, I re-read it, and this time it started to ring true. I read and read and read it. It made so much fucking sense. Here was a guy who hadn’t bought into the hype, who didn’t want actors to delude themselves, who didn’t want actors to be humiliated by stupid pointless exercises and made to feel guilty for not sensing the imaginary coffee. I stayed up all night arguing with my then girlfriend that this guy was really onto something. It so undermined her worldview about acting, she couldn’t agree with me on single thing. I’ve been having that same conversation with people in and out of the industry since then.  This book changed my life, I became an acting coach because of reading this book.

A Practical Handbook for the Actor - I had finished drama school and I was inspired by Mamet still, but I didn’t really know what to do with his manifesto. Then it was suggested that I take a look at the Practical Handbook for the Actor, written by Melissa Bruder and some other students at the original Practical Aesthetics Workshop lead by William H Macy and David Mamet. Now I finally had a name for this approach that Mamet favoured. People read Mamet, but didn’t connect it with this book. Most exceptional for its amazing section on scene analysis, this slim volume is a simple and essential book about the craft of acting.

Actions – The Actors Thesaurus - Marina Calderone and Maggie Lloyd Williams. Verbs. Actable verbs. Thousands of ‘em. And now it’s an APP, I am beside myself with happiness.

Seth Godin - I would not have a career without this man.  When I decided to set up my own acting studio, I needed to know how to compete on Google where I could find students. Seth Godin’s books taught me how. Meatball Sundae and Purple Cow started me off. But as I grew the studio, we knew that we were heretics, telling a story to our students that flew in the face of established wisdom in acting. People loved this new way of looking at things, Seth’s book Tribes helped me understand that a tribe needs a leader. And I stepped into those shoes. Then he wrote a book about making art called The Icarus Deception, about how we fall for the myth of Icarus. Icarus dared to fly and in doing so, failed and died. And other people use stories like that scare us away from doing things we love that might involve risk. Then there’s an early book of his called All Marketers Are Liars, which looks at the psychology of marketing from a storytelling perspective. Completely segues into my thinking about how people should face the challenges in their lives, by examining the stories, the inner narratives we tell ourselves and each other. By taking his marketing technique and applying it to myself and then others, I’ve able to examine what was often holding me and others back. I wrote to him twice. He wrote back each time.

The Talent Code - Daniel Coyle – I don’t remember why I bought this. Journalist Dan Coyle, he’s spoken to me on Twitter, so I’m calling him Dan now which is terribly presumptuous, has written an amazing and insightful book about how skills are really developed. Rather than being bestowed magically, they are earned through expert guidance, deliberate practise and 10,000 hours. Skill is visible in the brain as myelin sheaths that are electrical insulation around neurons. They help data flow more rapidly in the brain. People with great skills have a lot of this stuff and it allows them to achieve high levels of ability. The book challenges traditional thinking on talent and focuses instead on the studies and examples of those that chose to be talented.

I realise that not everyone learns well from books, people certainly tell themselves that story anyway – my life has been inspired by the books I’ve read. And I could read and re-read most of these books over and over.  What books changed your life?

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