Becca’s recent post made me think about reading habits, specifically the reading habits of my troubled youth when I read everything and anything without any discernment or even opinion.
My parents were both big readers. My mom’s favorites were Pearl S. Buck and Jean Auel and trashy romance. My dad’s favorites were Hemingway, Joseph Keller and trashy spy novels. So this is what I read, too. At least once I got past fifth or sixth grade and noticed what they were reading.
My dad had moved out by then but his books stayed for a long time. They came off of the shelves and lived in boxes in the basement. I must have gone through them but I’m not sure why I would pick whatever I’d pick. I remember being murderously offended by Jerzy Kosiński’s Blind Date (look how even that little tidbit calls it “erotically charged” when it’s nothing but rape, rape and more rape) and depressed by An Unmarried Man (where the protagonist’s mistress masturbates with a candle).
I felt like I should like Jean Auel but also got bored and was super annoyed by the tall, blonde woman trope (even cavemen yearn for a Cover Girl!) and all of the raping.
(Between my stepmom’s Cosmopolitan magazine and my parents’ novels I felt very depressed and resigned to the inevitably of sexual violence framed as erotic.)
I rode my bike to the bookstore with my babysitting money and an Anne of Green Gables book was $3.95, which meant I could take a five dollar bill and come home with something new to read. I think I bought science fiction there, too. It was a very small bookstore and there wasn’t much to browse so I’d buy from authors I’d already read, often books from the school library that I wanted to keep. I spent the rest of my money on 6-packs of diet chocolate soda because I was always hungry and also always worried about getting fat. The cans would poke me uncomfortably all the way home in my backpack and then I’d put them in the ‘fridge, each can designated to a day.
Once I had a car I could get myself to the Village Bookshop, which was a buy out bookstore (some used books, too) and was housed in an old church with creaky floors. I’d come in and go straight to the second floor where the novels lived. This is where I first found my beloved green books (Virago Modern Classics) and Dial Press, (which I think were Viragos before they were Virago and were black) and I also bought a lot of Penguin Books with the orange spine. These books were $1.49 apiece so I would bring a ten dollar bill and leave with nine books.
I absolutely 100% judged all the books by their covers because how else was I going to pick them out? I don’t know where all of those books went because I shed them all of the time, every time I moved. In our second to last move (from our house to the apartment), I gave away 11 bankers boxes of books and then in this last move when I dismantled my therapy office, I gave away another six or seven.
The Village Bookshop Books that stayed with me the most are:
- This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (already addressed in this here blog), which I’ve given away and repurchased several times. My current copy is a used one with someone else’s highlights.
- Several Milan Kundera books, after discovering Life is Elsewhere (I no longer have that one but I remember the figure of a man with a dog’s head gazing off into the distance).
- Face by Cecile Pineda, that also has rape but the rest of it is so interesting that I’d go back to it again and again anyway, re-grappling with that scene on every reread.
- The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth, which seemed like one of my dad’s books because it was so annoying and sexist but also is why I still say, “I have a hand like a foot” whenever I’m dealt cards.
- Precious Bane by Mary Webb, a small book that’s so lovely and romantic but so good that it ruined me for my mother’s bodice rippers forever.
- The Frost in May quartet by Antonia White, which is how I know that there is a difference between the immaculate conception and the virgin birth.
- 1982 Janine, a bizarre book that went completely over my head but that was written so bizarrely that my counterculture, angry little self couldn’t help but admire it (the protagonist attempts suicide in the novel and it looks like this:)
I finished everything whether I liked it or not. I read not just for entertainment but like a hoarder, like someone famished at an indifferent buffet. I wanted to be able to mark it off a list (even though I have never kept a list of what I’ve read, never used Goodreads or anything like that). I had opinions — disagreements, certainly — but always deferred to the book itself assuming that if it were published it had an unimpeachable respectability and authority.
I failed as an English major in part because I felt appalled by all the criticism, all the knowing we were expected to have, like we knew better than the authors. I wanted to use books to illustrate my life, slotting them in like metaphors and my professors wanted me to break them down into little knowable pieces. It was tempting but I felt like it would ruin my favorites. I thought being an English major would help me live inside books but instead we were showing them to be flimsy things.
That scared me, my beloved books.
But that’s another story.
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