I'd Rather Be Reading Read online

  We knew all the employees, and they knew us. We saw them all the time, as they were taking breaks on the library path by our driveway, practicing yoga in the shady grass, or eating lunch at the outdoor picnic table—the one closer to my kitchen sink than to the library’s circulation desk. Some days I saw the circulation workers more than I saw my husband.

  We stayed in that tiny starter house much longer than we’d originally intended because we didn’t want to leave. Not long after we moved away, my grade-school daughter crafted a wistful essay for school about her first home, with its unique location and shaded yard and flowering trees and nearby walking path. “It sounds like heaven,” her teacher commented at our first parent-teacher conference. “Why would you ever move?”

  Library or not, we had to deal with reality. Practicalities won out. “One bathroom,” we told him.

  A parent himself, he understood.

  A few years ago, after thirteen years in our first house, we said good-bye to the library next door. We’ve moved now into an old home I can see being our “forever house,” despite the obvious drawback: I can no longer see the library from my kitchen window. But because we hope to spend many years here, the first project we took on after moving was building lots of bookshelves so we’d feel at home—even if we must fill those shelves ourselves.

  From our new place, it’s an easy walk to the closest library, the one we’ve now made ours. It’s a beautiful old Carnegie with a decent selection, friendly staff, and charming little garden. If it hadn’t been for that first house, I would feel pampered, library-wise. But there’s a difference between visiting the library two or three times a week and two or three times a day, between having a library in your neighborhood and a library in your own backyard. The first is wonderful, but the second is a book lover’s dream come true. It was my dream come true.

  That little house next door to the library is where I grew up as a reader, where I came into my own as one. I read literally thousands of books there. When it comes to all the pages I’ve read in my life so far, I’m certain I read more pages in that house—in every room, on the patio, while tending the grill, on the front steps while the kids rode their bikes on the sidewalk, and in the hammock under the dogwoods—than I have at any other location on earth, there in the shadow of the library.

  Maybe we all look back wistfully at the conversations that changed our fate and the places that shaped us. I was shaped, as a woman and a reader, by a chance conversation between two women, and the first house it brought us, the one next door to the library.

  5

  Hooked on the Story

  As a kid, reading came easily to me, and so I read—blowing through early reader books and chapter books, choose-your-own adventures, time travel novels, popular tween series. Reading was my fun, adult-approved escape, both adventure and leisure.

  Somehow—I wish I could remember how—I found my way to the L. M. Montgomery story Emily of New Moon, the darker and broodier literary cousin to Montgomery’s better-known Anne books. Pre-Emily, I liked to read—I might even say I loved it—but it didn’t captivate me. Yet.

  Then came Emily, the first book I finished under the covers with a flashlight at 2:00 a.m. because I couldn’t put it down. The book had a hold on me and wouldn’t let go. I was so caught up in Emily’s fate I couldn’t sleep until I found out what happened next. For the first time, I was hooked on the story.

  My husband’s experience was different, though not uncommon. He was sixteen. He liked to read, but he didn’t love it. Then he picked up The Firm, and for the first time he got it. He couldn’t sleep until he found out what happened next. That experience made him understand what a good book could do, why some people love to read. He was hooked.

  Now that my own children are getting older, I hope to see them hooked by a good book, by turns. My kids have been reading for years, of course, but they’re still learning to appreciate the pleasure and power of a good story.

  I think they’re getting somewhere. Last summer my teen read the Agatha Christie classic And Then There Were None. It was assigned reading for school, not the typical starting point for inviting a kid to fall in love with reading. He began reading, skeptically, but then—as sometimes happens with a good book—the story sucked him in. He kept reading, much faster than required, because he had to figure out the mystery, puzzle over the epilogue’s explanation of the perfect crime, and then read it again. He had to know what happened next, and he couldn’t put the book down until he did. He called it the best book he’d ever read. In hindsight, will he name this as the book that hooked him? I hope so.

  Can every devoted reader point back to the book that hooked them on the story? I’d like to think so. Not a book they appreciate, or grudgingly respect, but the one that captivated them, the one they didn’t want to put down, the one that made them decide, for themselves, to make reading a part of their life, forever.

  6

  My Inner Circle

  Some of my best ideas are born of envy. Not the green-with-it sort, but that brand with which many readers are familiar: book envy. Or more specifically in this instance, bookshelf envy.

  While traveling, we once stayed in the apartment of an author friend, a little-used second home furnished just enough to feel homelike. Her full-time residence is predictably packed with books, but this apartment held only a few modest bookshelves. One held her current reads, another her lifetime favorite titles, but one shelf held a motley assortment of books I couldn’t figure out. In addition to her usual jumble of literary fiction, mysteries, and classics, this shelf held her lesser-read genres—poetry and science fiction, memoir and self-help—as well as trail guides, neighborhood histories, and recipe collections from small Illinois towns. I couldn’t decode the pattern, and I was left in suspense until the author herself provided the key: she calls it her friends and family shelf.

  This shelf initially held only books written by true friends, the dozen or two fellow authors she personally knew, and knew well. Because friends and family sounded much nicer to her ear, she tacked on the family—and reassured herself that some of her friends were dear enough to feel like kin. Since then, her son has written a slim volume of poetry that now graces her shelf, making the moniker both emotionally and technically accurate.

  That good idea was begging to be stolen, and I lost no time in doing so, reorganizing my bookshelves (again), emptying a shelf for the purpose of filling it up again with books by friends and wish-they-were family. Not knowing as many authors as my friend, I was forced to be more generous with my definition. I waver on the exact standards: Did someone I meet once at a conference count, or perhaps at a bookstore signing, or that I met in the bathroom at a publishing conference, or exchanged an email with once or twice? (The answer to all these, at one time or another, has been yes.)

  My shelf holds books by people I know from Twitter, or whom I’ve met a few times in person, having shared dinner or drinks once upon a time. It holds books by actual friends, and those numbers—of books and of friends—increase every year. I’ve shelved books by old friends who became authors and by newer friends I met because they write books. The shelf holds books by people I talk to on the phone and text when I think a deadline might kill me, friends whose funerals I would hop on a plane to attend should it come to pass that they are killed by one of their own dreaded deadlines. It holds books by friends who’ve seen my home in all its dirty-dishes, cluttered-counters glory, and in whose homes I’ve seen the same, and by those whose children I know and who know mine.

  Then the shelf holds books by those authors with whom I would very much like to be friends, writers whose works have shaped me—who, it seems, get me, but will never sit at my table or scratch my dog’s ears or use my dirty bathroom. They feel like kindred spirits despite the fact that I’ve never met them—and never will outside the pages of their work because they lived a hundred years ago. (I’d like to put Jane Austen on this shelf, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Instead she re
mains safely ensconced with my favorites, keeping company with Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson and Wallace Stegner—authors with whom I feel compelled to be on my best behavior, who intimidate me too much to feel like friends.)

  Some authors I shelve here because we’re on a first-name basis, though they would be surprised at this intimacy. I’ve called Witold Rybczynski by his first name for years simply because I fear I’d butcher the pronunciation of his last name. Dallas Willard is Dallas to me—not because Willard isn’t easy enough to pronounce, but after talking about him so often, for so long, it seemed silly to keep calling him by his full name, and Willard didn’t feel right. Madeleine L’Engle is Madeleine to me, because I feel like we understand each other. I refer to these authors personally and often, and putting them on the friends and family shelf seems fair, even if the authors themselves don’t know I exist.

  If I’m feeling generous, or my shelf is looking a little empty, I may further blur the line between fiction and reality, shelving titles here because I feel they could be friends. I’m not talking about the author this time, but the characters themselves: Anne Shirley, Jo March, Veronica Mars . . . I could go on, but you’re already questioning my judgment, I’m sure.

  When I started my friends and family shelf, I felt a little silly; I had to be embarrassingly creative with my definition to fill it, in the beginning. Do my family members write books? (No.) Do I have enough writerly friends to fill a bookshelf? (No.)

  Envy is a deadly sin, but bookshelf envy has proven to be a source of inspiration. Reorganizing my shelves has changed the way I think about books and the people who write them. Here on these shelves I’ve gathered my own inner circle: the books I feel closest to, the people who matter to me.

  7

  Life Imitates Art

  People read for a multiplicity of reasons. Nearly forty years in, I can tell you why I inhale books like oxygen: I’m grateful for my one life, but I’d prefer to live a thousand—and my favorite books allow me to experience more on the page than I ever could in my actual life. A good book allows me to step into another world, to experience people and places and situations foreign to my own day-to-day existence. I love experiencing the new, the novel, the otherwise impossible—especially when I can do it from my own comfy chair.

  Books have another advantage over reality. In books, we often encounter those things first, vicariously experiencing rites of passage on the page long before we live them for ourselves—we fall in love, or suffer a bad breakup; we lose a beloved pet, or a parent. We go to college, take on a new job, fight with a roommate, bicker with a spouse.

  Books draw us deeply into the lives of others, showing us the world through someone else’s eyes, page after page. They take us to new and exciting places while meeting us right where we are, whisking us away to walk by the Seine or through a Saharan desert or down a Manhattan sidewalk.

  Books provide a safe space to encounter new and unfamiliar situations, to practice living in unfamiliar environments, to test-drive encounters with new people and new experiences. Through our reading, we learn how to process triumph and fear and loss and sadness, to deal with annoying siblings or friend drama or something much, much worse. And when we get to that point in our real life when it’s happening to us, it’s not so unfamiliar. We’ve been there before, in a book.

  This ability to “preview” real-life experiences through books is one of the big perks readers enjoy. But I didn’t always think so.

  As a child, whenever I felt a little out of place in my own life, sometimes I wished I could exchange my reality for the world in the pages, which seemed a little more meaningful and a lot more interesting than my own ordinary experience. My middle-class, grade-school upbringing felt mundane compared to the lives I read about in fiction; I wanted to be Caddie Woodlawn or Sara Crewe or Alice through the looking glass. I didn’t want my life to imitate art; I wanted what I read to remind me of something I had already experienced.

  I am low-grade obsessed with the 1990s movie You’ve Got Mail, a 1990s Pride and Prejudice–inspired romantic comedy featuring Meg Ryan as indie bookseller Kathleen Kelly and Tom Hanks as her rival, Joe Fox, owner of the big bad box store Fox Books that threatens to put her out of business. It’s got everything I love—Jane Austen, the Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a world of books and reading—so it’s no surprise I’ve seen it an embarrassing number of times.

  I was in college when I first saw You’ve Got Mail, and I loved Kathleen Kelly instantly. I was mostly past my wistful grade-school days of wishing myself into every novel I read, but I was alarmingly struck by how she echoed my old fear of settling for my real life, musing in one scene, “So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

  Her impetus was this: once she’d read a story about a butterfly in a subway train, and then . . . she saw one! The film shows Kathleen rattling along on the train, an open book in her lap, when a butterfly suddenly flits into her field of vision. You can see her visceral delight. That thing she’d only read about had come true.

  Yet she wondered if her experience was cheapened because she’d read it before she lived it, and my twenty-year-old self wondered right along with her. But I’m not the girl—or the reader—I was then, and I now know the times when reading cheapens anything are few and far between. I’ve seen how our on-the-page experiences set the stage for our actual lives. Our books frame the scenes for us so we can better understand and experience what’s happening when it happens to us—whether that’s transitioning to a new line of work, or grieving an unexpected loss, or vacationing in Tuscany.

  Sometimes our on-the-page experiences mean so much to us that we create a real-life experience that intentionally imitates art. We sign up for a class or take on a project, travel to a different city, or, in our case, visit a certain bookstore. We show up to meet the authors who penned our favorite contemporary novels, or trek to the homes of the greats, maybe Austen or Brontë, Fitzgerald or Faulkner—visits significant not just because they happen in our “real life,” but because they’re rooted in what we first read.

  I’ve been dragging my husband to literary destinations for years, but last year my whole family got in on the action, making a pilgrimage of sorts to Manhattan’s Books of Wonder, one of the bookstores that inspired The Shop Around the Corner in You’ve Got Mail. My family loves to visit bookstores, and Books of Wonder is especially lovely. But what really made the experience for us was that we’d already encountered this store before—in fiction.

  Many years after I saw You’ve Got Mail for the first time, I was on a train, high in the Colorado mountains. The day was sunny and warm, the windows were open, and as we climbed, a butterfly fluttered in through the open window across the aisle. It floated down the length of our car, paused a moment, and flitted out through another window, back into the mountain air.

  That thing I’d first experienced so many years ago in fiction was happening to me—and my experience was richer for it. Because a story planted that idea in my imagination all those years ago, it meant something more when it happened to me, in my own life. It called back a special moment I had already experienced through art, and it didn’t make it less meaningful.

  With apologies to Kathleen Kelly, what I’ve come to learn is this: if my real life reminds me of something I read in a book, I’m reading well—and I’m probably living well, too.

  8

  How to Organize Your Bookshelves

  For beautifully styled bookshelves, follow this decorators’ rule of thumb: each bookshelf should hold one-third books, one-third accessories, and one-third empty space.

  You’re a book lover; you don’t have enough shelves to begin with. Ignore the decorators.

  Determine a method of organization. Alphabetical order ensures you will be able to find any given title, but this is only the beginning of the avid reader’s concerns. The Dewey Decimal System will wow your friends and ensure they’ll talk about you
at cocktail parties. Organize by color, and everyone who doesn’t organize their books by the rainbow will think your efforts are seriously misguided, but your shelves will be breathtaking. To relish the twin delights of baffling your friends and finding your books, organize by Trivial Pursuit category.

  Stay open to possibility; you’ll change your system soon enough. Some people play tennis in their spare time. Others knit or scrapbook. You’re a reader; your hobby is organizing your bookshelves.

  Develop strong feelings about dust jackets. Leave dust jackets in place and shelve your books, because dust jackets are an important part of the design process. Silently curse dust jackets every time you examine your bookshelves. Remove all dust jackets and place them in the recycling bin. Wait for regret to set in.

  William Morris famously wrote, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Make William Morris your guide. Buy books you don’t like and will never read because they are beautiful: Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics, classic Penguin editions of any genre, abridged editions of anything at all. The lower the literary merit, the more attractive the book should be.

  To “quiet” the room, arrange books with the spines facing in, like you saw on Pinterest. You won’t be able to find anything you’re looking for, but it will look nice.