We Heart It
A twenty dollar gift card to Books-A-Million. That’s all it took to inspire this post. I was scanning through my list of TBRs on Goodreads for books to buy and I found myself completely torn between two books. Do I go with seasoned Jeffrey Eugenides or newcomer Lois Leveen? Both The Marriage Plot and The Secrets of Mary Bowser sounded interesting. History told me that I would definitely like Leveen’s debut novel surrounding slavery and the abolition movement, but then I remembered that Eugenides visited my university last year to lecture the MFA students on writing, and that made me wonder if I should go with his book, since I do fancy myself a writer and am always looking to hone my skills.
Shouldn’t I branch out and read something different, I wondered. I eventually want to read Jeffrey Eugenides, but as I sat there staring at my virtual cart of books totaling well over the twenty dollars on my gift card, my resolve was weighing heavily on the story of Mary Bowser. It didn’t help that only moments before I deleted Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried from my cart in favor of The Great Gatsby and A Room With A View. It’s not that I didn’t want to read O’Brien’s classic war novel, it’s just that at the moment of clicking books into my cart, I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a war novel. “The problem, here,” I said to myself, “is that I just have too many books I want to read.” Earlier yesterday evening, I had decided to return my library books to finally show attention to my own library of stories waiting to be unfolded.
I looked over at my bookshelf. Am I a good reader? Is this the library of a possibly future published author? ”Oh, this is ridiculous,” I mumbled. “My library is my business and no one else’s.” I decided that this was a perfect example of me creating problems where there were none, creating doubt where there needn’t be, creating trepidation that only proves my tendencies toward self-sabotage. Nicole Krauss, Marilynne Robinson, Alice Sebold, and John Irving sat just as politely beside Willa Cather and Virgina Woolf as did Kristin Hannah or Elizabeth Noble. So what if their books weren’t considered post-modern literature? So what if they were chick lit and women’s fiction?
“I’m being stupid,” I decided. “I have a nice library, as libraries go.” There are J.K. Rowling and Julia Cameron; Jon Krakauer and Julia Glass; Cecilia Ahern and Michael Cunningham; Betty Smith and Sue Monk Kidd; Audrey Niffenegger and Chris Cleave; Jodi Picoult and J.D. Salinger; Michael Kun and Toni Morrison; Carol Plum Ucci and Stephenie Meyer; Josephine Humphreys and Margaret Atwood; Sarah Gruen and Maria de los Santos; Nicole Baart and Tosca Lee. There was Jane Eyre and The Hobbit and The Portrait of a Lady.
My library is fine. It may not be as developed as I’d like, but it’s a representation of who I was, who I am, and who I hope to one day become. Behind these stories are my stories. Sure, I may not want the Twilight series in my library anymore, but there they stand on the top shelf with all the other hardbacks, because at one point, I was an 18 year-old girl obsessed with Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. Sure, it only lasted about a month before I moved on, but it tells a story in my life. I could tell you things that were happening to me as I read those books. I was meeting a high school friend at a local burger joint, I was having family problems, I was about to start college, someone close to me considered breaking away.
I finally read I Capture the Castle after my love affair with the Harry Potter series, because J.K. Rowling wrote a blurb for the classic young adult story of a poor English family living in a ruined Victorian castle. I read the book, because I felt I needed to move on from Harry Potter before I dug myself so deep a hole within its magical realms I’d never want to read another book besides again. I bought How to Read Novels/Literature Like A Professor, because I wanted to continue learning how to read analytically as a way to reconcile my slack educational efforts in college. I bought those books because I wanted to be a better reader, writer, and student, because I knew I could be better, because I knew I’d sold myself short in college.
All of the books I own have stories behind them. Some of them are so small as to not be remembered in full detail; others are so large I could fill an entire journal with them. My British Literature professor once said, “All reading is good reading.” While I may not exactly agree with that statement 100%, I can definitely understand her point. The stories we read have a way of filling us up, so that they become our stories, too. So, it really doesn’t matter whether or not I decide on Eugenides or Leveen or O’Brien. What matters is that, whichever books I decide to read, I’m reading them honestly. I’m reading them because I want to read them, and not because I think I should lest I be judged. The fear of being criticized for what we read is silly, because those words are shaping us into the people we are meant to be.
