Plebians

I have 246 books in my little room. My four bookcases are jam-packed – I had to built another one and shove it in my closet. I have books everywhere: lining the back of my desk, books lying sideways on top of upright books, books in stacks on top of my ancient typewriter, books hidden behind other books. And trust me: there is a system. Novels are over the desk and dresser. The staunch-looking hardbacks are set aside on the desk (I’m particularly proud of the 1936 edition of Robin Hood addressed to “Eugene” from “Uncle Hubert and Aunt Helen” on Christmas Day 1957, a 1942 copy of Great Expectations, and a combined copy of Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1937). Biographies are in the closet with the seven Bibles I’ve accumulated since my first black KJV, issued to all new kindergartens at Middletown Christian. Textbooks (the ones that aren’t novels – English majors’ “textbooks” are more fun than everybody else’s) are next to my own meager attempts at literary genius.

Certainly there is overlap. Some of them were purchased before I realized we had a copy hidden somewhere in the house. I bought my own copy of The Da Vinci Code when I was in Paris because 1) I ran out of things to read on a “mission trip,” and 2) how can you not visit the Louvre and then read the book that takes place largely in those hallowed halls? I accumulated a Dickens here and there before my parents gave me a GORGEOUS set of Penguin editions for Christmas last year. And I received a copy of Gone with the Wind as a birthday present a few years before one of my closest friends gave me another edition for a graduation gift: it’s a little battered and one of the pages is missing, but the fact that she introduced me to the story in the first place and the first page bears a handwritten note from her, that beaten-up paperback is as special to me as if it had been signed by Maggie Mitchell herself.

Once while I was drying my hair I went around and counted how many of those I’ve read. 117. One hundred and seventeen. The rest of the ones I’ve read in the last seven years (how long I’ve been keeping track) have been borrowed, rented out, or given away to someone else who would appreciate them as much as I did. I can look at almost every one and think of what I was doing, where I was, what was happening in my young life as I turned the pages. I read most of Huckleberry Finn out loud, mulling over each of Mark Twain’s accents to an audience of none in my bedroom. Charlotte’s Web was the first novel I ever read, and Peter Pan was the first novel I ever read in a day. A Tale of Two Cities took me three days, Les Miserables three years. I’ve blazed through Prince of Tides three times; the first time I read Water for Elephants, I finished it in a day on the way to a Florida wedding and had to get No Place Like Home from Walmart to tide me over for the rest of the trip. Captains Courageous, Treasure Island, and The Sea Wolf are the exhilarating sea stories I love so much, each one bearing a different tone that makes them whimsical, riveting, and sinister in their turns. The first three of the four Robert Langdon escapades were amazing, while the last one fell flat and was an unwelcome weight in my backpack in England. The Road and Life of Pi were philosophical and deep and made you read them upside-down to catch the meaning lurking just beneath the surface – a far cry from A Liar’s Autobiography which you have to read upside-down to catch the fact that it has no meaning at all. My Last Days as Roy Rogers, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn only in the summer (just because it’s summer doesn’t mean you have to read beach quiki-mart shiterature); Little Women and Oliver Twist only in the winter; and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Kite Runner only if you feel like abusing your heart.

My brother found me six hundred pages into Gone with the Wind the other day and said he couldn’t see how I could read all the time. And honestly, I don’t either: how can anybody be content staring at a piece of paper with the same old words for hours? And I do mean hours: between a two-hour car ride and sixteen hours on an airplane I flew through nearly 800 pages of detail about the biggest bitch in all of literature. (I despise Scarlett O’Hara. Almost as much as I despise anything Jane Austen dreamed up: who wants to slog through three hundred pages of walking from room to room gossiping?) And I don’t like the Pinterest graphics that call reading an escape from reality, a chance to get away from your world to delve into another one. For me it’s merely an exercise for the imagination. Look at it from a writer’s perspective: the only way to get better at your craft is to write (no shit) and to look at other writers’ work. One of my writing profs told me last semester, “Don’t try something new with your writing: look at what other writers prove works and do that.” How the hell can you do that if you don’t look at examples of what works?

And when it comes right down to it, I do love a good story.