I'd Rather Be Reading

by Anne Bogel

  Reader, whatever secret you’re keeping, it’s time to spill it. I’ll take your confession, but the absolution is unnecessary. These secrets aren’t sins; they’re just secrets. No need to repent. C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

  Reader, you’re not the only one. Keep confessing to your fellow readers; tell them what your reading life is really like. They’ll understand. They may even say, “You too?” And when they do, you’ve found a friend. And the beginnings of a great book club.

  *Emma and Persuasion are my other very favorite Jane Austen novels, but Modern Mrs Knightley didn’t have the same ring, and Anne Elliot and I share a first name, which seemed confusing.

  2

  The Books That Find You

  Sarah Addison Allen’s charming debut novel, Garden Spells, features a character who feels compelled to give odd little gifts to her friends and neighbors: strawberry Pop-Tarts, two quarters, a silk shirt that’s three sizes too big. There’s a bit of magic about each gift, because the giver never knows what it’s for when she gives it. Yet the gift always turns out to be vital to the recipient, who soon finds she needs strawberry Pop-Tarts for an unexpected guest, or two quarters to make an emergency phone call, or whose life changes when she goes to exchange the shirt. Each gift seems odd—even random—when it’s given, but it turns out to be exactly what the recipient needs, at exactly the right time.*

  I’ve been fortunate to receive quite a few of these magical gifts. Not in the form of breakfast treats, or coins, or clothing, but time after time I’ve been given a strange, unexpected, and completely perfect gift: a book. Not any book, but the right book, right when I needed it.

  I choose what to read based on a whim and friends’ recommendations, by publication date and library due date. I don’t carefully plan exactly what I’m going to read next, and in what order. I may walk into a bookstore and leave with my next read at the emphatic urging of an excited bookseller, even if I didn’t know that book existed an hour before. Maybe three unrelated people recommend the same book to me in the course of a week, and I decide to take the hint. Maybe my kids tell me I have to read a certain title, or for reasons I can’t articulate, I decide it’s finally time to pull one of those unread paperbacks off my own shelves and get to reading.

  I don’t carefully plan—and yet it’s uncanny how often I seem to be reading just the right book at just the right time. Sometimes I feel compelled to read a book—or someone feels compelled to recommend it—for reasons I can’t discern, and only later do I find it’s essential to me, right then. Not before I started reading it, but after. The book may seem random when I choose it, but halfway through I realize, I need this right now.

  Call it chance, or fate, or divine providence. Blame it on probabilities or my own state of mind—when the student is ready, the teacher appears, etcetera. Credit it to dumb luck. I just know it’s served me well to pay attention to subtle hints, and that includes hints about books.

  A decade ago, it seemed like everyone I knew was telling me to read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy. So when I saw the five-dollar hardcover on the remainder table at our now-defunct local bookstore, I snatched it up—and didn’t read it. Years later, someone or something inspired me to pick it up again. I began reading, a few pages at a time, finding it wasn’t the kind of book I could read quickly. I was a few chapters in when my son was unexpectedly diagnosed with something scary, out of the clear blue sky. He was fine, and then he wasn’t—and it happened fast. He was diagnosed just before lunch, and by dinnertime we were on a plane to visit a world-class medical specialist. (Pro tip: when only the best will do, you’re in trouble.)

  We packed in a mad rush, tossing essentials into our suitcases, including our current reads. (I never leave home without a book, even in an emergency.) Had I been in the middle of a legal thriller, or fluffy romance, or parenting book, I would have grabbed that. But The Divine Conspiracy was the book on my nightstand, so that book—about living right, and living well, and beginning to do so right now—accompanied me to unfamiliar doctors’ offices, airplane terminals, hotel rooms, waiting rooms, recovery wings. Willard seemed to be speaking only to me, telling me exactly what I needed to hear, moments before I needed to hear it. He told me how to hang in there and how to hang on, how to get my head straight and my heart settled. I couldn’t have asked for a better companion for that journey.

  If this has happened to you—if the right book has almost magically appeared in your life at the right time to hold your hand for the journey—you know it feels like a special kind of grace.

  A few summers ago Parker J. Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak was the book I couldn’t escape. I owned a copy, and I had been meaning to read it for years, but I kept putting it off. The book, published in 2000, wasn’t old, but it wasn’t exactly hot off the press. So when numerous friends and acquaintances happened to bring it up over a week or two, speaking of its importance in their lives, asking if I’d read it yet, I paid attention. I took the hint.

  I moved Let Your Life Speak from my bookshelf to my nightstand. In it, Palmer wrestles with vocation and calling and making tough decisions in these areas. These were topics I’d been wrestling through, although my fellow readers didn’t know that. It was the book I needed, right then.

  Why this book, or that one? I never know at the time. Sometimes, of course, I seek out a book I need. But sometimes it’s more apt to say the book seeks me. I’ve learned books move in mysterious ways, and I’d do well to pay attention.

  Sometimes these serendipitous reads are of big-picture, soul-level importance, like Willard and Palmer were to me. But sometimes they’re right in more prosaic ways—a book that makes you laugh when you desperately need comic relief, or provides needed practical advice about a subject you’re struggling with, or delivers important information just before you need it.

  Last year I happened to read Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference while we were negotiating the sale of our old house. The author, a former FBI hostage negotiator, recounts fascinating tales from his days at the bureau. His specialty was international kidnapping negotiations, and those stories didn’t unfold like I anticipated. (It turns out what I expected kidnappers want from a negotiation and what they actually want are very different things.) I was impressed by how Voss applied the principles he developed from high-stakes talks with hostage-takers to comparatively mundane acts like negotiating a salary, or talking with your teenager about her day, or buying a house. Or, more aptly, selling a house.

  I read the book in only two days, passed it to my husband, who did the same, and then—with our Realtor’s encouragement—we put Voss’s advice into action. We established a high anchor price and didn’t leave much room to negotiate. We phrased our starting and counteroffers carefully, relying on his guidelines. We sold our house on the first day, for more than the asking price. Right book, right time.

  Years ago I happened to read The Geography of Nowhere, with its dedicated chapter on Seaside, Florida, just weeks before a long-planned trip to the region. We drove twenty minutes out of our way and experienced the small city that sounded so interesting on the page. I read the fascinating Frederick Law Olmsted biography A Clearing in the Distance just before a visit to Chicago, where I visited the Olmsted-designed parks and neighborhoods I’d just read about. I happened to read Walkable City, with its copious Manhattan examples, right before a trip to New York City, and the timing made my Manhattan experience infinitely richer.

  Once, I finished a nonfiction book about urban parks and then showed up at a cocktail party, now knowledgeable about the one thing I didn’t know a rarely seen distant relative loved to talk about. Instead of chatting about the weather or how long it had been since we’d seen each other, we had a delightful conversation about the history of landscape architecture. Word got back to me later that she was newly hopeful about the younger generations because I spoke
intelligently about a subject dear to her heart. (Thank goodness I happened to read that book when I did.)

  As a devoted reader, I lovingly give countless hours to finding the right books for me. I don’t think those hours are wasted; part of the fun of reading is planning the reading. But I’ve learned that sometimes, despite my best efforts, a book unexpectedly finds me and not the other way around. And when it does, it’s okay to reshuffle my To Be Read list and go with it.

  *Allen’s books often have a bit of magic about them. In The Sugar Queen, one woman’s unique gift is that the specific book she needs in her life right then mysteriously appears—on her bedside table, on her desk at work, in her handbag. Because of the nature of its contents, she knows exactly why it’s there—unlike the strawberry Pop-Tarts.

  3

  I’m Begging You to Break My Heart

  I can still picture the scene. A late fall afternoon, southern light slanting through the tall windows onto the wooden desks of our fifth-grade classroom, our teacher sitting primly in her straight-backed chair, legs crossed at the ankles, a worn copy of Where the Red Fern Grows in her hands. Not one of us knew what we were in for.

  She’d taught fifth grade for twenty-five years. I don’t remember a warning, but surely she knew what was about to happen. By the time she read the last page, there wasn’t a dry eye in the classroom. Girls sobbed, some of us to the point that we couldn’t catch our breath. Others sat with tears quietly trickling down their faces. At the sink, I grabbed crunchy brown paper towels to wipe my eyes. A friend joined me, hand proffered, and I gave him one.

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s not the book or anything. My allergies are really bad this year.”

  Sure they are, John.

  By age ten, I’d already read hundreds, if not thousands, of books. But that was the first time a book provoked a visceral, gut-wrenching, puddle-of-tears reaction. Before that day, I didn’t know a book could do that to a person. I didn’t know I could care so much about events that happened on the page. I didn’t know an author could convince me—if only for a moment—that what happened there was real.

  The best books move you, drawing out the full range of emotions from the reader, and sometimes that includes breaking your heart. Not every reader enjoys this experience. (Some adult readers claim they were scarred for life by their own grade-school experience reading tearful classics like Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, or Bridge to Terabithia.) But we still admire—albeit sometimes grudgingly—what an author accomplishes when he or she makes us cry.

  Sometimes you know the tears are coming. The sad parts aren’t going to blindside you; you know going in to expect a tearjerker. The Fault in Our Stars, Me Before You, and—unless you’re an innocent fifth grader who doesn’t yet know the scoop—Where the Red Fern Grows. You pick up these notoriously gut-wrenching titles only if you’re not opposed to a good cry; maybe you even welcome one. (These are such reliable heartbreakers that if you don’t cry, you might worry about yourself: Do I really have a heart?)

  Sometimes a moment resonates specifically with you, personally, in a way that wouldn’t send another reader running for the Kleenex, because it touches on something you’ve experienced in your own life. When our twelve-year-old chocolate lab died, I found a copy of Dog Heaven, gathered all the kids on the couch, and we cried our way through it together. The book spoke to where we were, capturing the truth of our experience, validating our loss.

  Sometimes the tears surprise you. I finished listening to A Man Called Ove on audio while getting ready for church on a Sunday morning. I had so little idea what was coming that I swiped on mascara while listening to the book’s final minutes, unafraid. But Fredrik Backman made me laugh, and then sob, almost simultaneously, with the inky wand still in hand. I had to wash my product-streaked, tear-stained face and start over. (We were late for church that day.)

  Sometimes a great book makes us feel the loss of what could have been—a dream, a baby, a future. Several years ago I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent Abraham Lincoln biography Team of Rivals. I knew the basic outline of his life from history class; American students know that story’s sad ending. But Goodwin’s version astonished me, making me feel, for the first time, an overwhelming sense of how much was lost that night at Ford’s Theatre—by his family, yes, but also by the nation and the world.

  Goodwin demonstrates how important Lincoln was to the cause of what was right, painting a vivid picture of what he accomplished in office, of what he was carefully working toward after the Civil War, and of why the man himself was desperately needed. And then they killed him. When she described what happened that awful night in Ford’s Theatre and across the city, I felt like I was there, and for the first time I understood the scope of the disaster and how it affects me even now. I didn’t expect her history to make me weep, but it did—because Goodwin made me feel its weight.

  Sometimes a book prods you to grieve with its characters. You’re immersed in the story, so much so that you feel what they’re feeling. When a beloved character experiences loss—of someone they love, of a friendship, of their innocence—you feel their pain. When he grieves, you grieve with him. Sometimes you grieve the characters themselves: they die, you feel like you’ve lost a friend, and you weep.

  Sometimes a book brings the tears because you don’t want it to end. You’ve been on a journey together, you and your fictional friends, and you don’t want to close that literal chapter of your life and move on. When my daughter read Holly Goldberg Sloan’s novel Short, she cried so hard she scared me a little. The novel is about an unlikely band of people who experience something exceptional together, and when their time together ends, the book ends too. When I asked if they were happy tears or sad tears, she told me through sobs that they were good tears: she was just so sorry it was over.

  I don’t relish crying over a book, but I’ll say this: it’s not easy to earn a reader’s tears—and if an author writes well enough to earn mine, I’m in.

  Pass the tissues. It’s time to read.

  4

  The Books Next Door

  A single conversation in 1999 changed my life, although I didn’t know it at the time. I wasn’t even present. My mom was visiting an old friend, thirty years her senior, and as women often do, they talked about their children. My mom told her friend that my longtime boyfriend, Will, had just popped the question. We’d be getting married in a year, after we graduated from college, and we hoped we could afford a little starter house in town.

  “Maybe they’d be interested in mine,” this woman said.

  The house wasn’t actually hers, but she’d been tasked with selling it on behalf of a friend’s estate. The woman had been a spunky widow much loved by her friends and neighbors, and her last significant purchase had been a red sports car. She had died a few years earlier at age ninety-three, leaving behind her 1939 Cape Cod, which she purchased new that year for two hundred dollars.

  We went to check it out. The house was neglected: white paint peeling on the outside, mint-green paint peeling on the inside, floors covered in faded linoleum and torn green shag. The air-conditioning hadn’t worked in years, and the electrician stamped dire warnings on our inspection. But the house had good vibes and good bones, the price was right, and it was next door to the library.

  It was perfect.

  When we moved in, three weeks shy of my twenty-second birthday, I wasn’t yet the reader I would become. I loved to read, but I wasn’t yet—how should I put it?—a true bibliophile. (Although now I wonder if addict better captures the idea.)

  The library’s proximity was a nice bonus. I’d always used the library. I’d even visited this particular branch as a child. It wasn’t a historic library, or a beautiful one, but it had a nice selection, friendly librarians, and convenient hours. And it was mine.

  I had been looking forward to living in our new neighborhood, but before we moved in, I didn’t realize just how wonderful it would be. It wasn’t until many years later
that I appreciated what a special place we’d stumbled upon. I didn’t perceive, until years later when we moved away, how the nearness of the library shaped the rhythms of our lives.

  I quickly learned it was easy to pop next door. Since the library was so close, I started using it more. I was young and poor, and books occupied a tiny sliver of my careful monthly budget. But the request system could deliver any book in my city’s collection to within a hundred yards of my front door with just a few keystrokes, for free—and with a smile and hello when I picked it up. If I needed a new book to read, no problem. There were fifty thousand books next door. My reading life was soon full of instant gratification.

  Things shifted abruptly when our first child was born. Desperate for adult interaction and still carrying an extra twenty pounds, I walked to the library every day of my postpartum recovery. In the early days, the library was a manageable distance to walk to stretch my out-of-shape legs. But then it became my destination for a quick trip to get away by myself when the opportunity arose, if only for five minutes. It was no big deal to run next door, so I did—sometimes multiple times a day.

  As my kids grew, the library became part of their daily lives as well. We were there so often the librarians joked about making me a name tag. We never missed a special event or a story time. The kids were young; I didn’t mind if they ran inside wearing only bathing suits and cover-ups. We went through a long stage when my toddler refused to wear pants, and so he went to the library without pants. I never would have let him get in the car with no pants on, but the library was just next door. We were barely out of our driveway (I told myself). No big deal.

  As a family with young children, sometimes we just needed to get out of the house, even in the rain or rare deep snow. The library was our obvious destination. There was always (and I mean always) a reason to go there. Maybe to pick up a reserve item that had come in or drop off a book we’d finished. (We ran out of shelf space fast in a small house with multiple readers.) Decluttering didn’t feel complete without a trip next door to complete the cycle, donating our already-read magazines to the community basket or dropping off unwanted books for the sale table.