by Annie Spence
You are my Back Pocket Body in the Library. My Anytime At Bertram’s Hotel. My Pocket Full of Reading Pleasure. I got The Thirteen Problems and a disgruntled library patron ain’t one. They’ll always choose you. Even the dudes. Even the ladies that are mad at me because the Jodi Picoult book they want is still checked out and they are making me pick out other, not-as-good books for them as punishment.
Who would have thought a gossipy spinster from St. Mary Mead could bring us all together? Sometimes, I wonder if the library could get by on a collection that was just you, A Child Called It, The Five Love Languages, and some Rick Steve travel DVDs. Honestly, I think we’d make it at least a week before someone complained. But you’re my favorite, Miss M. My good-time gal.
Props,
FICTION—Sparks, Nicholas
—Horses, Definitely
—Angels, Maybe
Dear Dear John,
You’re on my shelves because a relative who shall remain nameless recommended you on three separate occasions, and I didn’t want to seem judgy. Hey, turns out I’m judgy.
You’ve got horses on your original cover. That’s cool. I came into my compulsory Girls Love Horses stage in adulthood, and I’m still riding it out—pun intended.
That’s about all we have in common.
I read (most of) your prologue, and I just can’t see this reader-book thing continuing between us. I’m pretty sure your main character got dumped while he was away in the army, so I just want to be up front with you and save you more heartache. You don’t need any more heartache. For SURE.
It’s not that I don’t want to be romanced. But I need more. It sounds kind of obvious to say this because you’re a book, but I want to be moved by your words. In the prologue you say, “Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end.” No shit, John. That’s how that works. Give me something that I’ve never heard. Describe something I’m familiar with but never thought of as beautiful before. Or at least throw in some more equestrian scenes.
Anyway, not to beat an underutilized horse, but I’m donating you to my doctor’s office. I don’t know what I’m going to make up to say to my relative when she asks if I read you. I’m just guessing, given your author, that one character turns out to be an angel? I’m gonna hedge my bets and lead with that at the Christmas party.
So Long, Pardner,
FICTION—Niffenegger, Audrey
—Time Travel, in Literature
—Time Travel, for Real Though
Dear The Time Traveler’s Wife,
I knew that I loved you, but I didn’t remember the reasons. In public, when you came up in conversation, I spoke affectionately of you. But at home I ignored you. It had been too long since I’d read you, and we’d become more like acquaintances than reader and book. But then something you’d said once popped into my head, for some reason: “It’s the reality that I want.” So I picked you up, walked you over to the couch, and really looked at you again. I stared straight into your insides. And I fell in love all over.
You first piqued my interest in 2007 because your main character, Henry (sweet, busted-up Henry), was employed at the same library I was working for: the Newberry Library in Chicago. I was already geeked that one of my first library jobs was so prestigious: a 120-year-old research library with visiting scholars from across the world and six centuries of material in its collection is cool on its own; but when your book job is cited in a book? That shit is meta.
I loved reading you “on my break” at work and then visiting all of the spots you mention. I wandered around those same freezing-cold stacks and sometimes got lost, just like Henry. Well, not naked, though I thought about it.
Reading you brought out the romance and mystery of working at the Newberry: the velvet pads we placed under delicate books, the chaotic and genius scholars, the book rumored to be covered in human skin (touched it). For the first time, when I told people I was becoming a librarian, the response I got was “Oh, like that book!” instead of the too common “Hey little lady, your job is going to be obsolete. E-books. Home computers. Blah blah mansplain blah.”
Also, I thought Henry and Clare were sexy. I was similar to twentysomething Henry when I was twenty-three, minus the involuntary time traveling, the opiates, and the punk music (which is everything interesting about Henry, I realize). And I identified with Clare’s constant craving for her beau while she waited for him to come back from time traveling. Her longing looked to me like the pining that many of us romanticize when we’re young, our idea of big love before we encounter it in the flesh, with all its pocks and scars.
Back then, I speed-read through your passages about Clare’s art and the ways she sacrificed one passion in favor of her fervor for Henry. I think I thought something similar to “Who cares about your papier-mâché? You are independently wealthy with a hunky brilliant husband who time-travel visits you at different ages.” If hashtags had been popular then, I would have just thought, “#richgirlproblems,” but you really had to reflect in complete sentences in those days. Anyway, I was in the infatuation stage with you. I was in it for the stirrings and the promise of love.
But recently I read you again. This time I am married with a child, just as Henry and Clare find themselves when they have Alba. And you wrecked my shit. At twenty-three, you were a fantasy. At thirty-two, you’re a mirror.
The time travel in real marriages is way less sexy. It’s night meetings and laundry and aging parents, and running errands together counting as a date. It’s binge-watching a show on Netflix when the other is gone and feeling guilty for not feeling guilty. And pining for your lover not when he’s naked somewhere in the time continuum, maybe beating up your old high school boyfriend or whatever the hell teenage Henry was doing with/to himself in his room here, but pining for him when you’ve shaved your legs and put on decent underwear but then right as you’re ready to get the bidness on, your kid has a night terror, or someone texts one of you a hilarious video, or you actually just want to finish your goddamn book.
And it’s knowing that after surviving all of that shit and still liking each other, our “time travel” inevitably becomes cancer, car accidents, strokes, and senility if we’re lucky enough to hold on to one another that long. There’s more literary drama when Clare hopes that Henry doesn’t time travel during their wedding ceremony or the birth of their child, but the emotion it evokes is the very sincere and honest worry of even the most mundane non-sci-fi marriage: Don’t leave me. Please don’t ever go away.
My second time through, I’m weeping for Henry each time he holds his daughter for maybe the last time. When he sees Clare before all the worry and stress of their life together wore her down, I cry for the ways a marriage and children can fill you to bursting and at the same time deplete you. And then when Henry sees Clare again when she’s old, in her little painting shed with her sad but regal old-lady braid, I realize that Clare’s art is what grounded her while Henry kept her up in the clouds, and you need both. You need both!
Then suddenly I’m shaking my husband, Michael, and saying, “I fucking love you. Don’t ever travel to different years!” And he’s like, “I’m just trying to watch this 2009 Blur live concert for the six hundredth time,” which is the only nerdy little version of time travel he’ll ever accomplish, and I love him even more for it, so I just sob on the floor until he asks if maybe getting some chicken shawarma would cheer me up. He really gets me, you know?
And so do you, TTW. From my heady young librarian-about-town days to now. I promise not to forget again. One day, when I’m an old lady with my own sad braid and a book shed that my son locks me in during the day because I’ve started confusing real life with novel plots, you’ll travel back to me. I’ll be journaling in my spare time, hallucinating that I’m Anne Frank or Bridget Jones, and my vigorous scribbling will shake the table enough that you’ll fall from some swollen pile and the thump will wake me from my delusion. I’ll remember you. And I can’t wait to see what you’ll mean to
me then.
See You Soonish,
PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
—Pronunciation, Proper
Dear Pulitzer Prize–Winning Books,
Is it PULL-itzer or PEW-litzer? I never know. I hope it’s not the latter. It’s hard not to sound like a dick when you say it like that.
Don’t Judge Me,
FICTION—James, E L
—No Means No
—Erotica, Sort Of
Dear Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian,
Whhhhyyyyy do people keep asking me if I’ve read you? Aren’t you the same book as the last one of you I said I didn’t want to read?
But nobody cares! They can’t get enough of you. They read your first version. They’ll read you. And in between they will have no desire to read anything else. It’s like, without you, they would just rather be illiterate. It makes me want to shake readers and scream: YOU’RE SURROUNDED BY GREAT LITERATURE AND THIS SHIT ISN’T EVEN THAT DIRTY! I want to clothe Pablo Neruda poetry with your jacket and hand that out to patrons. And I don’t care what you think, Greeeey. Your silk tie–anal bead sweet talk, or whatever it is you’re saying to get on top of people’s nightstands, isn’t going to work on me.
Today yet another person asked me about you: “Have you heard of a book called Grey? It’s like Fifty Shades of Grey, but from a Christian’s perspective?”
So on top of having to politely smile when people say to me, “You’re bookish, I’ve got one you’ll love!,” now I have to explain to a little old lady who only reads Karen Kingsbury novels what erotica is and watch her pretend to put it back and then pick it up again when I’m pretending not to look.
You made me say “erotica” to an old lady, Grey! I’m going to hate you forever for that.
I’m putting you out on the curb where you belong, and I hope someone drops you in the bubble bath they are sitting in when they read you.
You Nasty,
FICTION—Trigiani, Adriana
—Lovable Characters
—Needy Reader
Dear Big Stone Gap Series,
Where’ve you been all my life? In the hands of other readers is where, and I’ve helped put you there. I’ve sung your praises to patrons checking out Loretta Lynn music and Lorna Landvik books and other artists who don’t even have double Ls in their names.
You’re a series with a strong and lovable heroine named Ave Maria. You take place in Appalachia in the 1970s, so people who like historical fiction will enjoy your cultural details, but people who aren’t that into history will still find you palatable. You’re a good balance of funny and sad. All of this I knew from other librarians and patrons who enjoyed you, but I’d never read you myself.
Then last month, I saw someone looking at your first of four—Big Stone Gap. She was crouched on a stool next to your shelf. She had obviously been browsing and been so taken with you she couldn’t stop reading. I knew because she had The Look on her face: the look people get when their brains are so engrossed that they don’t care about their outward appearance. Because they’re not out in public anymore, they’re in whatever world they’re reading about. It’s beautiful. This is not to be confused with That Look, which is the look on people’s faces when they’re browsing the Internet and are not in control of their outward appearance. If you think I’m making this up, visit any space where there are more than five computers in a row. It will dismantle your faith in humankind. It looks like a tribute to Daniel Stern’s facial expressions from Home Alone.
Anyway, I saw The Look and I wanted it. So I put BSG on hold, and when you came in last week, my own world stopped. I mean, whomp! I fell into your small mining town and didn’t surface again until Jack and Baby Etta were sitting on the porch, gazing at the moon. You said that when we get what we want, time stops, and you were right.
I fell in love with Ave Maria: a book lover and a daydreamer. Her character is more realistic than I had expected; the everyday loneliness she feels as the town “spinster” is palpable. And your other characters are just as lovable. Normally I resent oversexed librarians in literature—it’s overdone—but I found Iva Lou’s hunger for life endearing. And Theodore and Fleeta and Pearl—I wanted them to be my friends! Then Jack Mac, what a man.
I was surprised at the originality of your story. It’s not just: a lady that’s “gettin’ up there” finds a man. Ave finds her secret self first, the woman she always wanted to be. She finds family and friendship. And she sleeps for seven days at one point, which, honestly, as the mother of a toddler, was more arousing to me than the romantic parts.
Now that I’m hooked, I’ve got to read the other three in the series. So I have to ask, are you in it for the long haul? Am I going to ruin this experience by going further?
When I pick up Big Cherry Holler, will Jack and Ave still be in love? I worry about those strong and silent men—they’re not always silent because they’re thinking. What if he’s just dumb? What about Italy and Ave’s father? Did Pearl go to college? Can Iva Lou’s marriage last? Part of me wants to know, but part of me wants to preserve them the way they are, right there in Big Stone Gap.
I came over here to tell you guys, please don’t let me down. We’re in it together now.
Sally Forth,
FICTION—King, Stephen
—Are You Okay?, Annie
Dear Misery,
Jesus. Phew! We’ve been through the shit, eh?
Shit, man.
Shit.
Let me recover for a minute. I need a drink or a sedative or something. I’m a regular Paul Sheldon.
Okay, so until you there’s only been one other book that I read wherein the whole time I was reading I kept my hand over my heart. That is a book of Robert F. Kennedy speeches. For you, I did the same. Totally different reasons, obviously. RFK filled me with hope and pride; with you, I was just clutching at my body to make sure my hand didn’t get sucked into the page and hacked off.
Shit, man.
You are … disconcerting. Something ain’t right with you. A writer held prisoner in the home of his number-one fan. I thought I could handle it. And, at points, when you were dishing out the wise writerly insights, I could. But, my God, what about Annie? How did you house a character as quietly, explosively crazy as Annie Wilkes without shriveling up? I can smell her. I can feel her ruddy cheek brush mine.
Not to mention that, just to freak my ass out more, you gave her my name. At first I was happy about this. Usually characters named Annie are dead but longed-for high school sweethearts or sassy red-haired foils for Kevin Costner in baseball movies. I was eager to see an Annie with a little more grit and girth. But hearing a character plead to me while he was getting his parts sawed off and cauterized was unnerving. I was like, I can’t help you, dude. I’m just as scared as you. That bitch is crazy! Quit saying my name!!!
Worse than the amputations though, Misery? The rat squeezing. You know when you get so scared that for some reason your butt can’t be touching your seat anymore? When your ass cheeks fold up into your thighs? That was me with the rat squeezing. And the licking. You know what I’m talking about. “Too much!” I screamed, to no one in particular. “Africaaaaaa!”
Then when that first trooper comes? Another buttclencher. I knew it. I knew when you said he was so young that Annie was gonna get him. But you couldn’t just leave it at that, could you? I’ve got to think about him every time I mow the lawn now. Shit.
I’m sorry I threw you across the room at the end there. But you’re too intense! I was turning your pages as fast and fearfully as Paul when he finds the oogy murder scrapbook. And I kept hearing my name. Then there were more rats. Then her fucking fingers were moving under the door! Get out, you dirty bird, she’s coming!!!
You’re a great book, but I gotta give you back to my sister. There’s only room for one Annie in this house, and it’s the one who’s going to tuck her thumbs into her armpits every time she sees an electric knife for the rest of her life.
Shanks for the Memories,
A. Spence
BOOKS—Various
—Me, Well Excuuuuuse
Dear Fancy Bookshelf at a Party I Wasn’t Technically Invited To,
8:00 P.M.
Hey. I’m just going to stand here and look at you for—forever, probably, because I don’t know anyone here except the friend I tagged along with, and I don’t want to cock-block her. Are you familiar with the phrase “cock-block”? I see you have a leather-bound copy of Pride and Prejudice—it’s like Mr. Darcy.
I’m sort of a bookshelf flower anyway, so I don’t mind. You’re so glamorous, with your art books and color blocking and your decorative sea-conch accessories. You’ve probably got more to say than anyone else here. For instance, from your Pride and dainty shelf accoutrements, I can tell you lean more toward Austen than the Brontë sisters. I’m a Brontë girl myself. I like to brood. Next to bookshelves. Which brings us full circle.
Waaaiiit, this shit is catered?!?!
8:15 P.M.
Alright, alright, alright. Drinks ’n’ snacks. Anyway, I’m just saying you’re very well put together. My shelf at home is such a mess. Annie Dillard next to Autobiography of Malcolm X next to The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, which is not a weird sex manual, FYI. I just felt like I needed to make that clear.
My husband buys series in mass-market paperbacks. And our books don’t really “go” together. If someone were to judge who lives in our house based on our bookshelf, they would probably guess we were socialist botanists, equally obsessed with the Beatles and the best clothes for our body types, a couple who collects classic novels from Dumpsters and owns a dog that occasionally gnaws the corners of our already-shabby collection. And that’s simply not true. We have a cat.