I'd Rather Be Reading Page 8

  Rereading can make you remember who you used to be, and, like pencil marks on a door frame, show you how much you’ve changed. The first time I read Crossing to Safety, I was younger. When I reread it recently, I had more experiences to draw on as I read, having done some growing up in the interim. I knew more of friendship and love, of loss and suffering. When we revisit a book we’ve read before, we see how life has woken us up to understand passages that previously went over our heads. The book itself highlights the gap between who I am and who I used to be. I imagine this is why readers frequently revisit their childhood favorites: they take us back to who we were then, reminding us of times long gone by. Rereading helps us see how we have changed. (For this reason, I should probably be required to reread everything I read as a teenager.) The experience is immensely different, for better or worse.

  And it can be worse. Some readers claim they avoid rereading out of fear: What if a book they loved back then disappoints them now? They’re afraid a favorite won’t be as good as they remember—and they would be devastated if the book didn’t live up to their own fond memories. Perhaps it’s better not to risk it.

  This happens to me, of course. Sometimes books are not as good as I remember—or rather, I don’t enjoy them as much as I remembered, not because my earlier judgment was wrong, but because I have changed. This happened to me with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, an excellent book that blew me away when I first read it. The first time through I found it revolutionary. The second time, though worthwhile, didn’t live up to my own expectations—but how could it have? When I first encountered Pilgrim as a college freshman, I had never read anything quite like it before. My first experience was made great by the thrill of discovery. On my second read, I experienced no such thrill, because I already knew the work. This is as it should be, and yet it hurts to see what we’ve lost. Sometimes that loss looks like change.

  Heraclitus also wrote, “A man’s character is his fate.” A reader’s character is her fate—and I’m determined to remain open to new experiences in the same old (new) books, to see the ways I’ve changed and how those books have too.

  A good book, when we return to it, will always have something new to say. It’s not the same book, and we’re not the same reader.

  18

  Book People

  Like many couples, my parents had differing opinions when it came to their stuff. My mom was fond of regularly “emancipating” her possessions (which is a fancy way of saying the folks at Goodwill’s donation drop-off window saw her often enough to greet her by name). My dad was more of a collector, and the difference was obvious in their respective book collections. The bulk of my mom’s holdings filled a single kitchen shelf; my father needed whole rooms to contain his.

  I was particularly fascinated by the density and sheer volume of books in my father’s study. There were books on shallow open shelves and books stacked high against the wall. A large wardrobe—wide and deep like the Narnia variety—held hundreds more titles, and these books were shelved three layers deep: books behind books behind books. On lazy afternoons I’d settle myself, cross-legged on the floor, in front of the wardrobe to explore what exactly was in there. My method involved pulling armfuls of books from the first layer to expose the second, setting neat stacks all around me until I hit the wardrobe’s back wall. I felt like I was digging for buried treasure, and looking back, I don’t think my first impression was too far off.

  My mom caught me once, perched in front of that wardrobe, snooping in the very back for something good to read. I wasn’t yet old enough to articulate the difference in my parents’ collections, and for the first time it occurred to me to ask my mom where the rest of her books were. She paused and then said (rather carefully, I thought), “Your father grew up visiting the bookstore. I grew up visiting the library. We haven’t really changed.”

  I am happy to report that, thanks to nature, nurture, and my parents’ dissimilar habits, I grew up visiting both the library and the bookstore, and I haven’t changed much either. My mom took me to the former, of course, giving me space to wander, browse the shelves at leisure, and check out whatever I wanted on my own library card. My father took me to the bookstore to do much of the same, except I had to buy any books I wanted to take home. A reader himself, he wanted to do his own browsing, and he encouraged me to do my own.

  Before I grasped what habits were or why they mattered, my grooves had been dug deep: I’d become the kind of person who sought out books. The library served its purpose well, but given the choice as a kid, I’d take the bookstore every time.

  My childhood bookstore was big, in that peculiar way common to bookstores of the 1990s. It wasn’t delightfully cramped or cozy, as so many independent bookstores are now; I would never describe it as intimate or charming. No, this bookstore was expansive, squatting on the kind of square footage reserved today for sporting equipment or home goods or groceries. The atmosphere wasn’t the big draw—I remember high ceilings, pale green walls, and yellow fluorescent lighting—but what it lacked in ambience, it made up for in books. That store was packed with books and people who loved them. They came to browse towering, well-stocked shelves and settle into enormous comfy chairs to read for hours, undisturbed.

  My dad took me to that bookstore on quiet evenings and on busy weekends and every time in between. He would often pile my brother and me into the car and take us to the bookstore in moments when—I now recognize in hindsight—he wanted to give my mom a break. We’d browse on quiet Saturday afternoons when there was nothing much to do; we’d stop in while we were out running errands on busy days. Long wait at the area restaurant? No problem. We’d pass the hour at the bookstore. We’d visit in pursuit of a specific book—the next in a beloved series, a required read for school, a book recommended by a friend or teacher, perhaps one we’d heard about on the radio or seen in a magazine.

  That store was a place where you could find what you were looking for. The expectation then, in the days before the internet, was if a reader wanted a book, it would be there, on the shelves. Sometimes we’d head to the bookstore when we wanted to find something to read but didn’t yet know what it was. My purchases were small, but frequent—some planned, some serendipitous. I picked up inexpensive paperback classics, birthday presents, crossword puzzle books, SAT study guides. I went through a Nancy Drew phase, and then a Winnie the Pooh phase (in my teens!). One summer I developed a full-fledged picture book obsession and spent many a hot summer afternoon opening half the books in the children’s section, ignoring the words, looking for beautiful pages to frame for my bedroom walls. I came home with books about quantum physics and dream interpretation and journaling. I spent a large percentage of my disposable income feeding my newly acquired stationery habit, firmly enabled by the bookstore’s gorgeous offerings, saving my babysitting dollars to spend on decidedly frivolous packs of Crane letter sheets and Kate Spade note cards.

  Once, as a fourteen-year-old, I chose The Prince of Tides from one of many staff picks shelves. I opened it that night, closed it forty pages later, properly traumatized, and took it back to the store the next week, determined to give it back if the store wouldn’t issue me a refund. (They did.) As a fifteen-year-old, I bought a pink paperback Jane Eyre I wouldn’t read for another ten years, though I didn’t know it at the time. As a nineteen-year-old I took a chance on a new author, buying myself the first Harry Potter in hardcover and my cousin the audio version to keep her company on the cross-country road trip she would take back to college.

  As I got older, visiting the bookstore seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, even if my dad wasn’t doing the driving. I’d head there with friends, or on a date, or to spend a pleasant hour by myself. I daydreamed of working there, and I idolized a friend’s mother, who actually did. I confessed this to my friend, who tried to talk me out of it. “It has cachet, but it pays like McDonald’s,” she said of her mother’s job. I was undeterred. Rumor had it that applicants had to pass a terribly diffi
cult test, demonstrating their knowledge of books and reading, and I was newly starstruck by the staff—the book lovers who stocked the shelves, made recommendations, and took my money. They’d passed the test.

  One summer, home from college for a few months, I submitted my application and, in a remote corner holding Latin American literature, faced the legendary test. It was hard. Until that moment, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, both as a person and as a reader. (I was awfully cocky for a nineteen-year-old.) Six weeks later, long after I’d given up on my summer bookstore dreams and taken a babysitting job, the manager called and offered me the job. “I have to go back to school,” I regretfully told her, but I relished the offer. That store never employed me, but it gave me bragging rights for years. I’m still bragging about it, often enough that were I to start the story again right now, my kids would ask, “This again?”

  My kids know how I feel about the bookstore, and about the library. Rarely does a week go by that we don’t pop in, together, to one or the other. When we’re on the road, we seek out good books and new-to-us bookstores in the cities and towns we visit. We’ve bent our driving routes so we could visit not-quite-on-the-way bookstores, and we’ve even planned entire trips because we wanted to visit a certain bookstore. It’s what we do. It’s who we are.

  I have hopes and dreams for my kids, as parents do. I hope they’ll live right and live well, find love and fulfilling work, and not endure too much heartbreak on the way. And I also, specifically, hope that one day—when they’re old enough to choose for themselves, apart from me—they’ll discover that they too are book people. One day, not as far off as I would like, they’ll head to the bookstore with friends, or on a date, or on a quiet weekend afternoon to spend a pleasant hour by themselves. Not out of habit or duty, but because reading is part of who they are. It’s in their blood. They’re book people.

  19

  Take Me Back

  Sometimes I fantasize about getting my hands on my library records. I can log on to my computer right now, of course, to see my current checkouts, pending reserve requests, overdue books, and late fee balance—but that’s not what I’m talking about. No, my recurring bookworm dream is to peruse my personal library history like it’s a historical document.

  My bookshelves show me the books I’ve bought or been given; I need only look at them to see, at a glance, what I’ve read. But my library books come into my house and go out again, leaving behind only memories and a jotted line in a journal (if I’m lucky). I long for a list that captures these ephemeral reads—all the books I’ve borrowed in a lifetime of reading, from last week’s armful spanning back to when I was a seven-year-old kid with my first library card. I don’t need many details—just the titles and dates would be fine—but oh, how I’d love to see them.

  These records preserve what my memory has not. I remember the highlights of my grade-school checkouts, but much is lost to time. How I’d love to see the complete list of what I chose to read in second grade, or sixth, or tenth. I frequented the library regularly in high school, and I expect my checkout history would trigger many a memory of Saturday expeditions to the big branch downtown, in search of scholarly commentary on Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky—the subjects of my first tentative term papers. But when I chose my own leisure reading, what was I reading? I remember little, but I trust my records would bring it flooding back.

  And what of the milestones in my life? I imagine my records would reveal my early, haphazard career exploration, and my impending, exotic first trips to London and Paris and Prague, and that time we moved into a house with a neglected formal garden I aspired to resurrect. Based on my borrowed titles alone, I’d be able to clearly see the months and years I spent away from my hometown, the one I’m happy to live in even now. I would be able to spot the summer I got engaged, when I checked out every book on wedding planning in the library system. The month I learned I was pregnant and immediately cleared the shelves of those books. The sudden surge of board book checkouts a year later, after we’d added another tiny reader to our household. It’s all right there, in my library records.

  A few years ago my family moved from that house next door to the library to one a full mile away. (Gasp!) After a move, it takes a while to get the hang of new rhythms and new routes home. It took me even longer to get the hang of my new library routine. An auditor evaluating my library records would notice the change immediately: the steady trickle of fines I’d garnered over the years turned into an avalanche overnight; my steady stream of checkouts and returns became a weekly gorging and purging.

  And what of my expanding interests, both personal and readerly? I expect I could pinpoint the library books that ignited my fascination with urban planning, or time management, or homesteading. My records must reveal the year I discovered Kate Morton, or Wendell Berry, or Wallace Stegner, and my subsequent binges of each author’s work, in turn. I could definitely determine how many times I checked out the Harry Potter series, and Anne of Green Gables, and how many successive times I checked out A Pattern Language before I realized I should buy my own copy.

  My photographer friend says a good photo album preserves two kinds of histories: the chronological and the emotional. The reminder of both what happened and what it meant to you. As a lifelong reader and library patron, I yearn for my own sort of album—one composed not of photographs, but of book titles and checkout dates. My simple rows of library records may not be as pretty as personal photographs, but when it comes to remembering—well, they take me right back.

  20

  Windows to the Soul

  Not long ago, I sat down to coffee with a newish friend, one I didn’t yet know terribly well. I hadn’t taken my first sip when she said, “I know you’re a reader. I want to read more, and I need some ideas. Tell me your favorite novel. Or a book that’s changed your life. Anything.”

  I love talking books with friends and strangers alike, but as I opened my mouth to answer, I realized that she’d just asked an extremely personal question.

  Aside from the sheer impossibility of choosing just one favorite book, her question was daunting for another reason: I felt like I’d been asked to lay my soul on the table. Reading is personal and never more so than when we’re sharing why we connect with certain books.

  In Gabrielle Zevin’s delightful novel The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, her fictional character owns a bookstore on a remote East Coast island. It’s a love letter to the power of books and bookstores to bring people together. At one point, A. J. Fikry, a wise man despite his fictional status, explains to his daughter, “You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?”

  I wasn’t sure I was ready for this new friend to know everything about me.

  I could have told her one of my favorites is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I’ve read it half a dozen times; it’s the only work of Waugh’s I’ve enjoyed, and I’ve read them all. I love its sad tone, its haunting complexity, its poetry and metaphor, and I love that it doesn’t end happily. What would these things say about me? Perhaps, if my friend hadn’t read it, she’d think my choice meant I was the kind of person who was hung up on some stodgy old classic.

  I could have told her I adore Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, for its wistful story and gorgeous prose and Stegner’s ability to conjure a moving tale out of the mundane events of ordinary life. My new friend might have branded me a hopeless romantic, an armchair philosopher, or maybe just a snob who reads only serious fiction.

  Since my friend wanted book recommendations, I could have told her some of my more recent favorites. I loved Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander; maybe she’d think I was the kind of person who enjoyed a good story, well told, and that I wasn’t afraid of a six-hundred-page novel. Or maybe she’d think I was one of those women hung up on the steamy scenes featuring eighteenth-century Scottish warriors, or a romantic soul hooked on the idea of star-crossed lovers.

  I c
ould have recommended a fun, lighthearted, easy-reading novel, like Marisa de los Santos’s Love Walked In. It’s a practically perfect romantic comedy, even if it’s probably not a book that will change your life. Maybe my friend would have thought I was fun, lighthearted, and easygoing, just like my favorite book. Or maybe she would have judged me to be a lightweight reader who only reads beachy reads.

  I could have told her about Anne Fadiman’s wonderful essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, in which she explores the pain and pleasure of merging libraries with a new spouse, confesses to utilizing questionable bookmark strategies, and self-identifies as a compulsive proofreader. When I called these essays smart, interesting, and laugh-out-loud funny, would my new friend have thought me a hopeless nerd? (Probably, but she wouldn’t have been wrong.)

  Reading is often viewed as a solitary act; that’s one of the reasons I love it, and it’s certainly my favorite escape and introvert coping strategy of choice. But reading is also a social act: readers love to connect over good books. If I read a book that legitimately changes my life (what a find!), or a book that becomes a new favorite, or even a breezy novel that’s tons of fun, I can’t wait to talk about it with my fellow readers.

  So when my friend asked for a favorite book, I answered cautiously—but how could I help but answer?

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained—and I’ve found talking about books to be a reliable shortcut to getting to the good stuff with our fellow readers, to cutting to the heart of what matters. That makes it a little dangerous, a little risky. When we share our favorite titles, we can’t help but share ourselves as well. Shakespeare said the eyes are the windows to the soul, but we readers know one’s bookshelves reveal just as much.