My long love affair with books
From Green Eggs and Ham to Judy Blume to an illicit detour into Jacqueline Susann, books have always seduced me. A love letter in tribute to National Book Lovers Day.
Since the days of Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, graduating to Ramona the Pest and Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret to my illicit pre-adolescent read of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (my mother didn’t hide it well enough; I read it when the babysitter was occupied in front of the TV), reading has been my comfort, my doorway to the world, my obsession and eventually, as a writer, my inspiration.
And so on National Book Lovers Day on August 9, an ode to the role of books in my life seems in order. I was the child who preferred to be left alone in her room with a fresh pile of books brought home from the library than to play with the other kids outside. Libraries continue to be a treasured home of my heart. My mother, knowing that, made sure we had frequent trips to the library to keep up with my appetite for reading.
I was the elementary school student who loved nothing better than being handed a vocabulary list and the assignment to turn those words into a story. I was the high school student who read the dictionary for fun, memorizing new words on index cards as I walked to school so I could use them in my English essays. That’s when I learned a new word, malapropism: to use a word that sounds like the intended word but in the wrong context. Still, my growing vocabulary allowed me to befuddle and frustrate my brother when I teased him: “You’re an invidious quidnunc!”
Not surprisingly, I became the English major in college who received every syllabus of required reading with complete delight. What?! This was college? Having to read long lists of books and write about them? It seemed like too much fun to be considered a college class. I lay on my dorm bed with those cinderblock walls, transported by Virgina Woolf, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Kate Chopin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Cheever and Joan Didion. When I had a chance to take a semester abroad, of course it was to England, birthplace of my beloved Shakespeare.
And of course, least surprising of all, I became a writer—a newspaper reporter, an essayist, a novelist, a steadfast keeper of diaries and journals, and a devoted letter writer—back when we still wrote one another long letters by hand (and eventually by the 1980s, typed on a computer and printed). Currently, I don’t own a TV and series and films don’t hold appeal. It is the unread books on my shelves that call to me. I am aiming to exceed the 50 books I read in 2023 and wrote about in this series.
For my mother and I, books were a mutual love affair
I can’t write about my love of books without it also being a love letter to my mother. She read to me from the very beginning. Among the first books I remember her reading to me was Curious George, “the good little monkey and always very curious,” the invention of Margret and H.A. Rey. I would clutch the stuffed monkey that was my constant companion, swingings its long arms around my neck as I heard about George’s adventures with his friend, The Man With The Yellow Hat. She also shared with me the beloved books of her childhood: Heidi, Pollyanna, The Bobbsey Twins and The Five Little Peppers. For her birthday this past year, I bought copies of both The Bobbsey Twins and Pollyanna, the orphan who brings sunshine into the lives of everyone she meets. I read aloud to her from The Bobbsey Twins the last morning we had together as I wrote about in my essay 'I wish I could be like a bird in the sky.'
My father Norman was a writer. When he met my mother he was completing a degree in English at Columbia University on the G.I. bill. He told Freda he had written “the Great American novel” and the manuscript was locked in a safety deposit box. She never saw it; I think the existence of the book was one of my father’s greatest fictions. He made his living first in advertising and PR on Madison Avenue and then as an author of books on genealogy and finance and as a freelance magazine writer. It is because of him I have ink in my veins—and an appreciation for one of his literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway.
Multi-generational book lovers
Books were among the first gifts Mom bought for my daughters: Goodnight Moon, Blueberries for Sal, Madeleine, Charlotte’s Web and of course, Curious George. My daughters have both grown up to be avid readers and like their mother and grandmother, prefer classic printed books to reading on a digital device. We pass books between us.
My oldest daughter Marielle took The Four Agreements off my shelf as a book she stashed in her backpack for a trip-around-the-world in 2023 and sent it back to Florida via Chile. For my tree-hugging environmentalist daughter Sara, Richard Powers’ The Overstory is now in her hands and we share a mutual love for Abraham Verghese’ novel Cutting for Stone and more recently, his Covenant of Water. All three of us fell under the spell of Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See. Currently we are passing around Writers & Lovers by Lily King.
Throughout my life, I have always initiated or been part of book clubs, where ever I’ve lived—living rooms in Stockholm, on the island of Malta and the southwest coast of Florida. Thanks to book clubs and the practice of rotating the selections among members, I’ve been introduced to books I might not have read and shared my passion for my favorite authors with others. Novels I’ve enjoyed recently about book clubs are Mary Alice Monroe’s The Book Club and Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club.
The book that matters most
Recently I read Ann Hood’s novel, The Book That Matters Most, featuring the story of Ava, whose twenty-five year marriage has fallen apart and finds refuge in a book club where the members each month chose the book that mattered most to them. It’s a wonderful novel, not only its devotion to books and the way literature can save our lives, but for prompting that question: What is the book that matters most to you? For my mother, the answer was Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, perhaps the best anti-war novel of all time. Mom was a fierce pacifist her entire life, marching for Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war movement in the late 60s.
For me, the book that matters most is the late Canadian author Carol Shield’s final book Unless. I reread it regularly, a sign of a truly captivating book because I seldom reread books. Its protagonist is Reta, the 44-year-old author of light summertime fiction and so we have the fascinating sleight of hand of a novel-within-a-novel as we see Reta wrestle with her creations on the page.
But the heart of the novel is Reta’s helpless grief as her oldest daughter Norah mysteriously drops out of college to become a panhandler on a Toronto street corner -- silent, with a sign around her neck bearing the word "Goodness." The Los Angeles Times described the book as: “A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.” It is ultimately about one family’s anguish and their healing. This is subject matter I find endlessly gripping. Every time I read it I see new layers of meaning.
Ann Hood has written her own ode to books, Morningstar: Growing Up with Books, the way they transformed and even saved her life. (Marjorie Morningstar was one of my mother’s most beloved books, too). Hood writes:
“Whatever book it is, it falls into your hands at just the right moment you need to read it. It transforms you. Perhaps it lifts you up when you are at your lowest; perhaps it shows you what love is, or what it feels like to lose love; perhaps it brings you places far away or shows you how to stay put when you need to.”
Anne Lamott wrote: “Books and stories are medicine, plaster casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits.” And Kafka said: ““A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
As I discover by reading my favorite literary newsletter, The Marginalian, as a child, Jane Goodall read herself into her unexampled life. As a girl cusping on adulthood, Helen Fagin read herself alive through the Holocaust. Author Jeanette Winterson sums it up beautifully:
Reading is an adventure. Adventures are about the unknown. When I started to read seriously I was excited and comforted all at the same time. Literature is a mix of unfamiliarity and recognition. The situation can take us anywhere — across time and space, the globe, through the lives of people who can never be like us — into the heart of anguish we have never felt — crimes we could not commit.
Yet as we travel deeper into the strange world of the story, the feeling we get is of being understood — which is odd when you think about it, because at school learning is based on whether or not we understand what we are reading. In fact it is the story (or the poem) that is understanding us.
Books read us back to ourselves.
Finally, I will leave you with this quote and an invitation today to sit yourself down and pick up a book:
“A woman whose mood improves with a book, a poem or a song or a cup of coffee is not defeated by anyone; even life loses with her.”
—Kahlil Gibran
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LET’S CHAT!
In the comments, please share:
What is the book (or books) that matter most to you? What are your childhood favorites? The ones you read in your teens and as a young adult that had a profound impact on you? What book have you read recently that you’ve told all your friends to read?
And here you go, an appropriate song for today’s essay:
Amy, I resonate so very much as I too am a dedicated reader and book lover. It is not lightly that I state, books saved my life. The opportunity to be transported away from the daily trauma of my childhood/teen homelife provide hope that another narrative was possible.
I read every book in my elementary school library. And as an adult stumbled into a beloved job as Chlildren's Librarian in a small economically disadvantaged town. I had the joy of connecting kids with books and possibilities. That job led to me being a Storyteller who got to travel the world and also who started her own volunteer literacy project to get books into schools and libraries and the hands of kids who otherwise wouldn't have any.
I'm forever grateful to books for showing me possibilities. ♡♡♡♡
I loved the Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese! Tenderness by Alison MacLeod is also a great read.