In my first months of reading, I had always picked my own books, with a gift or two from my mother to add to the bookshelf. Now I had friends—and more friends—offering up books. Handing them over to me with the words, “Read this. I loved it, and I know you will, too.”
But what if I didn’t love the book? What if I hated it? In the past few months, there had been one or two books, chosen by me, that I’d started and then stopped reading because it had been so clear to me that I didn’t like the book and that the book wasn’t going to get any better anytime soon. With books given by friends, I didn’t have that out. The book was a gift, and gifts were to be read. That is a rule of friendship. And all books read were to be reviewed: that was a rule of my book-a-day year. Therein lay my dilemma. I couldn’t just acknowledge the gifted book with a few words, “It was interesting” or “Loved the landscape.” I had to write a full and true review.
People share books they love. They want to spread to friends and family the goodness that they felt when reading the book or the ideas they found in the pages. In sharing a loved book, a reader is trying to share the same excitement, pleasure, chills, and thrills of reading that they themselves experienced. Why else share? Sharing a love of books and of one particular book is a good thing. But it is also a tricky maneuver, for both sides. The giver of the book is not exactly ripping open her soul for a free look, but when she hands over the book with the comment that it is one of her favorites, such an admission is very close to the baring of the soul. We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.
On the other side of the offered book is the taker. If she is at all a sensitive being, she knows that the soul of the offering friend has been laid wide open and that she, the taker, had better not spit on her friend’s soul. I am not exaggerating. Sixteen years ago a friend at work lent me The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. I read the book in one night, and when I discussed it with Mary, I made some comments about how I found the book to be manipulative and unrealistic.
“Sure, I stayed up way too late reading it—I wanted to know if they ever found each other again—but really, that book has nothing to do with how real people carry on. It was romantic nonsense.”
Mary told me I’d missed the point entirely, and she stopped coming by my desk or calling me up for office gossip. By calling her book foolish, I had called her a fool. I would not make that mistake again. But how was I to review a book I didn’t like when a friend whom I really liked had given it to me in the first place?
My sisters and I always shared books, from our earliest days as readers through our teens and into adulthood. Natasha and I, horse fanatics both, passed Marguerite Henry books back and forth. My favorite was Black Gold and hers was Misty of Chincoteague, and we both loved Born to Trot. When I turned thirteen, Anne-Marie gave me my own copy of Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (she knew I’d take her copy from her room and preempted my theft with a gift). I looked through the table of contents. I was interested in all the free stuff, but I was freaked out by references to free abortions and treatment of diseases. What kind of diseases? I had no interest in growing my own marijuana or living in a commune. But the book was a symbol. I closed it and laid it casually on my desk for friends to see when they came over. I had been invited into the world of adults by my older sister. No longer was I the little kid sister; I was moving up.
Anne-Marie gave me my first Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, when I was in law school, thereby beginning an ongoing obsession with him that has never abated in my heart or soul. She also tried to hook me on Anthony Trollope, but I could not get into him or his Barsetshire. When I was laid up in bed for two weeks after a knee operation, she brought me The Quincunx by Charles Palliser, a faux Victorian novel complete with a fatherless child, coincidental meetings of great importance, absurd (and wonderful) surnames, and a riveting plot that kept me glued to the book from page 1 through page 781.
The giving of books between sisters offers much less risk of exposure or rejection than between friends. There is both less to hide and less to lose. For one thing, a sister’s soul has been bared a few million times before, willingly or not (I did, after all, read Anne-Marie’s diary), and for another, my family is always there, come hell or high water. For a friend to offer up a book, much more has been laid on the line. A book offered is an open hand outstretched, taking the chance that it might not be taken, that it might in fact be slapped down. A book offered and a book rejected: Could that ruin a friendship? It had once, with Mary at work, and I didn’t want it to happen again.
My friends knew about my book-a-day project, although I tried hard not to talk about it all the time. I didn’t want to be the one rhapsodizing through dinner parties about books. I tried not to monopolize all conversations, turning them into book lectures for the benefit of my poor cornered acquaintances. It was bad enough that I was the one singing, “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful book.” I was lucky to have more than one chum willing to give me a book and say, “Hey, try this one.” I realized that in writing my reviews of such books I could be honest, but I must also be grateful. Grateful for the sharing, for the open soul, and for the friendship.
“Love is blind and that goes for love of books as well,” I wrote in my review of Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos. Then I quoted a Flemish expression often used by my mother: Ieder diertje zijn pleziertje. It literally translates as “Each animal has his pleasure” and means, basically, “To each his own.” Love Walked In had been a gift, and although the words within the book failed to move me, the giving of the book did move me, profoundly. I knew I was loved with that gift, and that made me feel good. I returned the love with a gift of my own, the lending of The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman, a book I’d just read and enjoyed. Did my friend like the lent book? She told me she did, when she returned it a few weeks later.
There are book lovers who never lend out books, for fear of losing their treasures forever. (An old Arab proverb advises, “He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot.”) I have always been a big lender, following Henry Miller’s advice: “Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum—of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.” I would make friends with the taking and giving of books, not lose them. If I could not bear parting with a book, especially one in which I’d written notes along the margins and the back pages, I bought an extra copy and handed the new one over.
I came to realize that my acts of reading and sharing, along with my friends’ acts of reading and sharing, were being multiplied by readers around the world, as friends and sisters and mothers and sons around the world found books they loved, and shared what they had found with people they loved. The lesson was brought home to me not by the gift of a book but by e-mails. The mother of a good friend e-mailed me from Florida to recommend Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain. A friend in California sent me an e-mail recommending The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga: “My book group just read it and some loved it, some hated it. No middle ground.” Then a woman from Austria wrote to me to tell me that she’d loved my review of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.
“Have you read Atonement?” she wrote. “I read it and gave it to everyone I know. Much better than the movie.”
My sister-in-law sent me her copy of Hoffman’s Third Angel. I read it and loved it. It was an easy review to write: “The third angel is when love is unbounded, for just a moment, and that moment is enough to change someone, comfort someone, help someone, save someone. The third angel is what happens when a sunset or a
field of heather or a puppy is enough, when love is enough, when just knowing that life’s possibilities exist is enough.” Or maybe the third angel is when one friend gives a book to another, heart and soul exposed.
I received an e-mail from a man in New York City who had been doing research for a book club meeting and happened upon my review of The Sin Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis. Over the next few months he would become a regular correspondent, recommending books like The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy and Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. He and I, complete strangers, made a connection through our love of books. A reader reached out from Germany, the sister of a friend wrote from Brazil with recommendations of Brazilian writers, a woman wrote from Singapore, and I had a whole slew of British book lovers writing in with recommendations. There was a world of voracious readers out there, and they all had “must read” and “loved this” books for me.
There was more to my year of reading than I had first anticipated. Not only was I recovering memories of my own, I was sharing memories of one of life’s greatest pleasures, reading, with an ever-larger group of friends and strangers, readers and writers both.
Around the world, on any given day, hundreds, even thousands, of readers might pick up and read the very same book. There are organized events of shared reading, like the yearly town-wide read led by my local library. One year we read The Giver by Lois Lowry; this year we’d be reading The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. But even without any planning, a woman in California may decide to reread The Great Gatsby on the same day a young man in Delhi decides it is time to see if the book beats out the movie, at the same time that a retiree in Warsaw finds a good translation—Wielki Gatsby—at a book stall and decides to buy it and begin reading that day.
What do these readers have in common? They might have nothing in common other than knowing how to read and using the skill to enjoy books. I read Deaf Sentence by David Lodge in January, and so did many other people, all around the world. I received an e-mail from a woman who lived “in Devon [England] in splendid isolation” who went to hear Lodge do a reading from the novel: it was “fascinating.” A woman in Australia wrote to me after reading Paasilinna’s Howling Miller and later finding my review of it. She suggested I read Bi Feiyu’s Moon Opera. I lived in suburban Connecticut, she lived outside Melbourne, Paasilinna lived in Finland, and Feiyu lived in China. Around the globe with a book and back again. Each of us brought our own experiences to how we interpreted the book (which in part accounts for the differences in taste in books), but the words we read were the same. We were sharing with each other and with the author.
The benefits of sharing books are “threefold,” as Henry Miller promised: a multitude of books to read, a world of new authors to know, and the universe of readers with whom to share the reading experience. The interloper I had feared—books shared from the heart—had instead become a benefit of my year of reading, a bounty to keep me well supplied with new authors, new books, new ideas, and new friends. As old Aunt Elinor states in Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, “Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn’t ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. Love, truth, beauty, wisdom and consolation against death. Who had said that? Someone else who loved books.” It is this shared love of books and the shared understanding of what they have to offer that holds the world of readers and writers together.
Both sides of the book-lending equation, the giver and the taker, experience fear. How brave we are to overcome that fear to share love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation against death! The threads of friendships entwine over the shared enjoyment of a book. If later a book is shared that is not so mutually enjoyed, the friendship survives. Another day will bring another book, and perhaps another joint experience of connection and satisfaction. I wish I had returned Mary’s Bridges of Madison County not with a sneer but with a smile, and with another book in hand. Mary had lent me the book around the time I was reading a lot of Laurie Colwin. I could have given her my favorite, Goodbye Without Leaving, and said, “Read this. You just might love it.”
Friendship saved and book shared.
Chapter 10
Hearing Words I’d Missed Before
Have you ever been heartbroken to finish a book? Has a writer kept whispering in your ear long after the last page is turned?
ELIZABETH MAGUIRE,
The Open Door
IN THE SPRING OF ANNE-MARIE’S ILLNESS, I SPENT A SATURDAY afternoon with her in her study, at her apartment on East Ninety-sixth Street. She and Marvin had renovated the room years before, turning a small extra bedroom into an enclosure of warmth, a cozy office where Anne-Marie could work. A wide board, the size of a door and painted deep beige, rested on two short file cabinets in one corner, by a window overlooking Ninety-sixth and Madison. This was Anne-Marie’s desk, adorned that Saturday with stacks of papers, piles of books, and her laptop, closed now. She hadn’t been working in those last weeks; the pain medication kept her off-kilter, and she was too tired, all the time. Photos of Marvin were in frames along the edges of the desk, beside photos of my boys at various ages. Pictures they had drawn for her were lined up on the wall, resting alongside postcards and Polaroids of places Anne-Marie had been. Paris. Los Angeles. Fiesole. Pienza. Udaipur. Fire Island.
The wall opposite the desk housed floor-to-ceiling bookcases, enclosed at the bottom and open on top. The shelves were jammed with books—art history and philosophy, novels and poetry, and her collection of Tintin books. The wall between shelves and desk was lined with three windows, northern exposure with muted sunlight. A William Morris print in green and gray papered over the remaining wall space, its vines and flowers overlapping and spreading toward the ceiling.
In the center of the room was a brown couch, fronted by a low coffee table, covered now in books, magazines, and Netflix envelopes. A new addition to the apartment, a television and DVD player, a gift from my parents, faced the couch. Anne-Marie and Marvin had been watching movies at night, waiting for the medication to finally knock my sister out and allow her some hours of sleep before pain and discomfort woke her up again.
Anne-Marie had another visitor that Saturday, a friend from graduate school who taught at Williams College. Liz had come down for a quick visit and left soon after I arrived. She smelled good, a soft perfume of fresh, damp leaves. After she left, her sweet smell lingered, along with the palatable flavor of kindness and concern that now seasoned all visits to my sister. I moved to sit next to Anne-Marie when we were alone, ready to make my usual—and hopefully amusing—report on my “life among the savages.” Anne-Marie and I had both loved Shirley Jackson’s book of the same name, her hysterically funny account of life in the suburbs with young kids.
But Anne-Marie didn’t want to hear about the boys. She turned to me and grabbed hold of me, her skinny arms drawing tight across my back. I buried my face in her hair and listened while she spoke.
“It’s not fair,” she said.
“I love you,” was all I could respond. I burrowed my nose into Anne-Marie’s gray sweater and inhaled deeply. It wasn’t Liz who had smelled so good. It was Anne-Marie. Of course. I knew that scent. Mitsouko. Anne-Marie’s favorite perfume. I breathed in deep, again and again. I hugged Anne-Marie closer to my rising and lowering chest. I wanted to restore health to her. I wanted to bring back a long life to her future. I could no longer hear what she said to me; I was too close, buried in her hair and sweater.
I have kept the gray sweater. I’m wearing it often these days, feeling the February cold through the windows of my music room, as I sit reading in my purple chair. Upstairs in my closet I keep a half-filled bottle of Mitsouko on a shelf, and when I can bear to, I open it up and breathe in. Sometimes I wonder what words I missed that afternoon, cowering against her shoulder. What wisdom did I fail to hear, or reach for?
In early February, I found words of wisdom in the story of another woman who had died too you
ng. The Open Door by Elizabeth Maguire is a fictionalized biography of the nineteenth-century author Constance Fenimore Woolson. The novel begins with a young Woolson rowing out on her own along Mackinac Island in northern Michigan. Woolson is breathing hard as she rows, but she knows it and she likes it, for it is “the gasp of health.” She is determined to never get married and suffer the illnesses brought on by childbearing: “It wasn’t fair to blame marriage for the deaths of her two sisters, but she wasn’t going to risk it. Give up her life for a man? Not her. She had too much to do.”
And as Maguire tells the story, Woolson does a lot. She becomes a writer to support herself and her mother, writing short stories, travel pieces, and longer works. She journeys up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and moves her mother south to Florida for her health. She is a voracious reader of all the newest books, and when her mother dies, Woolson heads off to Europe, defying the conventions of mourning, because she is determined to meet one of her literary heroes, Henry James. She and James end up forming a deep and lasting friendship. Woolson never does marry, as she prophesied. She remains independent, relying on romantic interludes with a longtime lover and on friendships such as the one she has with James for companionship.
As I read through The Open Door, I found myself liking Woolson more and more. She is enthusiastic about life, strong-willed when it comes to getting what she wants, and she loves books. I underlined again and again the words Maguire puts into Woolson’s mouth about the wonder of reading: “Have you ever been heartbroken to finish a book? Has a writer kept whispering in your ear long after the last page is turned?” Yes, yes!
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 10