If you’re hoping for a post dripping with sex and sarcasm, today is not the day. Today is the first post from the “Dog-Eared Book Club.” Reading is as big a part of me as sex, happiness and travel, so here we go.
I didn’t retire from teaching because my husband passed away. His death just rushed the process. I retired because I grew weary of trying to persuade technology-addicted teenagers to read the books on my syllabus. Any English teacher can tell you that it’s the kiss of death when you no longer care if your students just look up the summaries online, and that’s where I was in 2017, my thirtieth and final year of high school English teaching.
“Why do we have to read?” they would ask. Gee, I don’t know, why do you have to breathe, eat, drink, and move? Early in my career I knew how to answer that question. By 2017, I had nothing.
“I’m not reading this,” a student would say.
“So, don’t,” I would answer. “Marinate in your ignorance.”
Yikes. Time to go.
Rather than wax on about how reading defined my childhood, my high school and college years, my professional writing career and beyond, perhaps I will let that trickle into my posts gradually. I will simply start at the beginning. The books that molded me into the reader, writer, student, teacher, mother, and human being that I am. I managed to whittle it down to ten, and it wasn’t easy. All ten books sit in exalted positions in my personal bedroom library, a very small and select collection. These books are never more than an arms-length away from my heart:
- Eric by Doris Lund
- Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther
- David’s Story by Marie Rothenberg
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
- Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly
The first three deal with sick or injured children who overcame great odds: Eric Lund, who died of leukemia, Johnny Gunther, who battled a brain tumor and David Rothenberg, who in 1983 when he was six years old suffered burns over 90 percent of his body when his father burned him alive in a hotel room (David recently passed in 2018 at the age of 42, a very advanced age for such a severe burn victim).
Maybe I was a little morbid as a young girl, but the inspiration I gleaned from these stories lives on today, as charities such as St. Jude’s, the Children’s Burn Foundation and March of Dimes continue to be organizations I stridently and aggressively support.
Charlotte’s Web and Watership Down are not books to me, they are family tomes, and characters like Charlotte, Fern, Templeton, Wilbur, Fiver, Hazel, Bigwig, and Blackberry are not abstract literary characters, but close friends. I revisit them often, just to say hello.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume showed me how stream-of-consciousness dialogue can connect you to a character, a plot and a setting like nothing else. This book is one of my best friends, and made me want to be a writer.
The romance books: Mrs. Mike, the love story of Boston girl Mary O’Fallon and Mike Flannigan, a sergeant in the Canadian Mounties, and the life they built together in such a harsh, unforgiving land defined to me what it means to sacrifice for love. And the sweet, pure, ethereally-beautiful love story in Seventeenth Summer, the falling in love of Angie Duluth and Jack Morrow was (is) for me the apex, the pinnacle, of what it means to fall in love. I still get chills when I re-read the chapter when Jack begs Angie not to go away to college, because he can’t bear to be without her.
Sigh.
I re-read Jane Eyre every year. Jane and Rochester. My God. And Velveteen Rabbit? I read it every Easter, and it never fails to bring tears to my eyes.
So that’s the list, for now.
Sex and sarcasm tomorrow, I promise.