The books that shaped Will Archives

Rogue Warrior

by Richard Marcinko

Will says: I'm not sure if this is the first Navy SEAL memoir but it was definitely the first I read. Marcinko is brash and full of himself but he's definitely got the stories to back it up. During the Vietnam War, he led the most successful SEAL operation in the Mekong Delta and ran a rescue mission during the Tet Offensive, then followed up his deployments by advising on the Iran hostage crisis and was later named the first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, the top counter-terrorist fighting force. While the general vibe of these types of memoirs is “let me amaze you by how tough I am,” I tend to gravitate towards memoirs and military histories that go beyond that. Some notable mentions from the past few years include Fearless by Eric Blehm, Unbecoming by Anuradha Bhagwati, Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, and Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

by William Shakespeare

Will says: Thank you to that one English teacher who let me come in during his free period and admit that I was completely lost. This family drama had too much palace intrigue and madness for me to follow. I still remember the line my teacher explained that made it all click for me—it being Hamlet, Shakespeare, and the idea that books might be saying more than what's right there on the page: "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton

Will says: What a page-turner! This eco-thriller is one of the first books that I specifically remember the ending of. What a surprise to think, “whoa, that's more than I bargained for.” I think most people are familiar with the story and the way scientific hubris creates chaos (or maybe can’t overcome chaos) courtesy of the film franchise. But the book includes a small nugget (maybe an epilogue) that’s not included in the movie. While it doesn’t add much to the plot, I remember feeling like it cast a different feel over the whole book. I still gravitate towards books with these very science-y themes in science fiction, like Crichton’s books The Andromeda Strain and Westworld, and even non-fiction books, like The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston and Worm by Mark Bowden.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

by Tom Stoppard

In this absurd, existentialist tragicomedy, playwright Tom Stoppard reinvents <em>Hamlet</em> from the perspective of the two minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, childhood friends of Hamlet who King Claudius uses to get more information about the insane prince. There's plenty of witty, rapid-fire dialogue to accompany the existentialist philosophy. (PSA: this is easy to read for a play, but the 1991 movie with Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfus isn't half bad.)

The Firm

by John Grisham

Publishers Weekly says, "Grisham's gripping fiction debut describes the inner workings of a law firm. Readers will be totally hooked by this unusual and absorbing story." My husband says this is the book that made him a reader—it was the first novel he couldn’t put down!

Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt Adventure #4)

by Clive Cussler

Will says: Dirk Pitt was the first action hero I spent any significant time with. He's a Jason Bourne–Indiana Jones–MacGyver type with the slightly-too-memorable unique name. This is the fourth book in its adventure series, but it’s the one that sticks with me. The U.S. government is after a precious mineral thought to only exist in a significant quantity aboard the RMS Titanic. They task Pitt and his crew with finding it, literally raising the massive ship to the surface and then towing it to shore to search for the missing mineral (based on then-current theories of the wreck, since this was a decade before the ship was actually found). Along the way, there’s international intrigue, double-crossing, and danger on the high seas. I still like a too-good-to-be-true hero in a long-running series that I can fall back on any time I'm feeling stuck in my reading life. I'm all caught up on the Cork O'Conner series but I’m still following along with Alex Carter, Anna Pigeon, Joe Pickett, and Walt Longmire.

The books that shaped Will