Response for Fall for the Book.

On Wednesday the 21^st of September I attended Benjamin Percy’s reading of his debut novel “The Wilding”. I had low expectations walking in because his name was unfamiliar and generally, I have not heard of this event before. Surprisingly I found it very intriguing once Percy started reading with his deep and fearsome voice.

 Once Percy was called up he began to introduce himself and talked about the influences in his life which mainly was his father. His father always criticized his stories for being too short. When Percy attempted to write a novel, his dad called it a “schnovel” for being short when he read it.

Benjamin Percy then introduced his debut novel “The Wilding” and he seemed to send a message to everybody that he has excelled above all expectations when he said it was originally seven hundred and fifty pages but had to make it into a two hundred and fifty page book.

The first part he read was about Brian, the American soldier that had come back to Oregon from the war in Iraq. What I clearly noticed about Percy was his mind capturing way of describing and when he writes about a character he puts himself in the character’s shoes and thinks  about what that character would do or say.

For example, the second part he read was about Karen, a woman that is thinking of leaving her marriage and he wrote exactly what she was thinking and it was extremely realistic and believable.

Percy fascinated me so I asked about what made him choose being a writer as a career. I thought he had known from a young age that he was destined to be a writer but was shocked when he said it was recent and that it was a shove from his girlfriend.

-Ali Al-Saadi