Bookworm

I was six or seven when our parents first began leaving us kids alone. In a tiny town on the vast wheat fields of North Dakota, there wasn’t much shopping to be had, so they went to Grand Forks or Fargo for the day. We could certainly take care of ourselves. We were four little girls, myself the eldest. We could cook on the gas stove; draw, color and cut out paper animals and dolls; play games; and listen to music on a little phonograph. As for me, I had my nose in a book.

I remember feeling the hollow in my stomach when our parents were gone. The best way to ignore it was to read, to enter some other world so compelling that when I looked up, I would have to try to remember where I was and what was going on around me. I became known as a “bookworm,” and very soon I had the glasses to prove it!

The characters in Little Women or the “Laura and Mary books,” were as real as my sisters. I read and re-read them. But I also found books on the shelves at the back of our grade school room, which came from a circulating library. I remember especially Blue Willow, the story of a migrant child in California who longed for a house like that in the pattern on her plate, a story so different from mine.

Thus, very early I learned the values literature has for us. It allows us to compare our own reality to those of the characters in a book, helping us fine tune and enlarge our view of the world. It allows us to escape our small, finite existence and go back and forth in time or explore other geographies than our own. It can deepen our moral and emotional lives, educating us to empathy for others in the world. And it can quiet our chattering brains, allowing us to find peace in well-written, rhythmic language.

In junior high I remember scouring the library shelves for more Robert Heinlein. And when I discovered, in high school, a list in the Life magazine of the top ten books teenagers were supposedly reading, I determined to find and read all of them. This list, including 1984, On the Beach (about people living through a nuclear apocalypse), Cry the Beloved Country, and The Catcher in the Rye, scared my mother, and occasionally me too. I never did finish 1984.

Reading has been a life-long habit. I resisted it at times, bringing only five small paperbacks with me when I moved to San Francisco. And again, when I began studying tai chi, I tried to resist the temptation to read so much. As a consolation for growing older, however, it cannot be beaten. I recall my friend Babs, 97 at the time, being so absorbed in the world of Anna Karenina that she could hardly come into the present for dinner! I knew how she felt. And it thrills me to find that I can re-read books now, entering their realities even more fully than I did the first time, making connections I could not before.

Stories are our life-blood. They run in our veins. You can get them from the people around you, from books, or, for the less patient among us, from television and movies. We choose our profession based on the stories we watch around us. Finding a mate may begin with animal attraction, but will not succeed unless this is backed up by the stories a couple learns about each other. Decisions about who we vote for are based on the stories of the candidates. And who among us has not tried to move to a neighborhood or place which first intrigued us in someone’s story.

Recently a friend, Amy, and I agreed that books are coming back into fashion. Don looks at us skeptically. He doesn’t see this in his world. But Los Angeles is full of book clubs and younger people are beginning to stretch them into walking clubs, bookshop crawls and author visits. I’ve even heard of “silent” book clubs, where the members read quietly before socializing. The digital world is pretty lonely and reading groups bring people together to talk. I’ve been involved in three of them since coming to Los Angeles. The first died during COVID, the famous Coyote book club at Skylight Books is a bit too intense for me, and my current one, at the Highland Park library is just right.

With the proliferation of books comes the proliferation of readers. Most of the new books cannot be called literature and will be forgotten next year. But some stand out above the crowd, full of life and offering enduring insight and pleasure. If you want to know what I’m reading these days, you can join me on Goodreads.com. I also maintain a somewhat literary blog pointing to characters and writers I find interesting at Women and Mountains. I am probably more of a bookworm now than ever!