The son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, Michael Gates Gill was a creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising, where he was employed for more than 25 years. He is the author of How Starbucks Saved My Life and has now written How to Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places, published this month by Gotham. He lives in New York within walking distance of the Starbucks store where he still works and has no plans to retire from what he calls the best job he's ever had.
On your nightstand now:
Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now is a surprising and helpful book. He shows that the best way of meditating is not to concentrate on a mantra or try to focus on a specific peaceful visual but simply not to think at all. I find his new idea very refreshing.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Babar the Elephant was a book and a character I loved when I was young. Whether he was confronting challenges in Africa or Paris, Babar always seemed to have a happy way of dealing with everything.
Your top five authors:
Virginia Woolf in her brief book The Waves gives a beautiful description of a daylong sea vision. F. Scott Fitzgerald created the most musically written prose--almost like a sustained symphony--about the inherent conflicts in the American Dream in The Great Gatsby. James Joyce wrote my favorite short story in "The Dead." He showed how heartbreak, if truly felt, can lead to deeper understanding. Thomas Jefferson, as author of the Declaration of Independence, proved that words if crafted with care could create a culture and a country. Ernest Hemingway showed all writers how dialogue can convey more with less.
Book you've faked reading:
I never read Darwin's The Origin of the Species although I like to talk about evolution all the time.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I am always telling people who wish to write: read Anne Lamott's wonderful Bird by Bird.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I noticed a book called The English American. It had a cover that pictured a young woman holding an umbrella with the flags of America and England. The visual seemed to capture the title so dramatically I had to pick it up and start reading. From the first sentences to the last the whole book gave me an amusing story full of true love and laughter. A great cover revealed a great book!
Book that changed your life:
After reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises I decided it sounded like fun to get drunk and run in front of the bulls in Spain. That almost cost me my life.
Favorite line from a book:
Molly Bloom's last sentence taking many pages from James Joyce's Ulysses ending with the words: "yes, I said yes, I will YES."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I keep going back to read the Bible and I find that each time I read in it, I find a new idea of how to live.
Book you would like to have with you if you were alone on a desert island:
I would like to have a book full of blank, lovely white pages. This could become a journal that I could keep as the sun went up and the sun went down. Even more than reading, I find that writing at least a few words every day helps me experience my life in a more aware way.