From time to time, we like to ask distinguished authors to tell us about their most memorable reading experiences. Which book made a big impression early on? Which one showed them the full power of the written word?

Here's what B.C. author Kevin Patterson told us. Patterson, who lives on Salt Spring Island and practises internal medicine in the Arctic and on the B.C. coast, first won acclaim for the 1999 travel memoir The Water in Between, an international bestseller. His work Country of Cold took the 2003 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His latest is the newly released News From the Red Desert, a gritty novel about the war in Afghanistan. Patterson is himself a former soldier, who joined the Canadian army to put himself through medical school. He'll be discussing the book at appearances on October 19, 20, and 22, as part of this year's Vancouver Writers Fest.

There is a window in adolescence and early adulthood when one is open to being rocked by books in a way that does not persist long enough. That feeling of watching a movie play in one’s thoughts, of losing even the sense of turning pages: for a lot of us it was Jane Austen, for others Tolkein, one of the Brontës, or Hemingway. I think one can guess sometimes who it might have been for other people, depending on their interest in complex social issues—or in whiskey and terse violence.

For travellers and travel writers, it is often Bruce Chatwin. I read The Songlines when I was in my 20s and was bewitched. This is his account of a journey through Australia, supposedly to learn about the indigenous people there and, in particular, their creation myths. In fact, the book is about movement, and human restlessness. Nomads and nomadism were Chatwin’s preoccupations; he felt that the instinct to movement was at the core of contemporary unease, in our cities and little apartments.

I read it when I was in the army, and not at all mobile, but rather stuck on a little artillery base on the prairie. In the evenings, alone in my little house, I read his description of how the first people and animals dreamt the world into existence as they wandered along still-remembered lines, tracks that young indigenous people walk along to this day.

Chatwin walked some of these lines, the songlines of the title, and he met eccentrics of various ethnicities; the most memorable of these he calls Arkady. At times he suggested that this was his friend Salman Rushdie, but Rushdie says he does not recognize any of the conversations attributed to Arkady. It grows clear that this book straddles the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, and in the hands of another writer such ambiguity would probably have been fatal to the power of the book. But to the extent that there is a gauziness about the narrative, it only evokes the dreaming tracks themselves, and I was not bothered by it—though even at the time, I wondered at that.

Chatwin had a formidable erudition; he had worked for a long time at Sotheby’s evaluating art for its importance and authenticity. He seemed also to have read everything, and befriended every writer of his time. He was close to Patrick Leigh Fermor and Paul Theroux as well as Rushdie—the list of his interesting friends goes on, but his narrative voice is his own. His style uses sequences of short snatches of exposition laid alongside stretches of description, most of which can be read in isolation and simply sing. But taken together, Chatwin’s paragraphs resonate in a gorgeous nonlinear pulse of imagination, music, and wisdom.

 Alone, in the winter on my artillery base, he lifted my eyes from what was at hand and pulled them toward the horizon.