Printed text is like the wheel in some ways. It’s one of the first basic inventions, one that millions of others benefit from. Before printed text, reading was reserved for the few who, through luck or wealth, could get their hands on the labor-intensive, hand-printed texts. After Gutenberg, books became accessible to larger and larger pockets of people and more and more information became available because it was printed. Knowledge wasn’t lost after a sheepskin or papyrus disintegrated. Even the internet exists because we were able to amass and share knowledge through printed text. Reading has allowed us to transmit knowledge for a long time but, partly because it works so well, we didn’t really monkey around with the basic delivery system for years. We have now. As a kid, I heard about audiobooks but only as substitute for blind people who hadn’t mastered Braille. It was the 1990’s before I used them. We rented them for long car trips as an alternative to recorded music and conversation. Don’t ask me why but books about ocean disasters always seemed to accompany us on trips to the beach. (It’s probably a mistake to listen to A Perfect Storm or Jaws when…
Sometimes you just get lucky. I believe that. About six months ago I started this column, writing about books I’d come to love dearly and early on, I praised Shirley Jackson, a writer that almost seemed forgotten. My mother had loved her work and introduced me to it at an early age. That was lucky because, in those days, Jackson’s work (with the exception of one story) wasn’t reprinted. At that time, Jackson wasn’t often remembered in literary circles and when she was the discussions were limited to her supernatural or psychologically disturbing tales. The author also wrote a lot of well-crafted stories about family life but these were given less weight because a)they were funny or b) they were “chick lit.” Of all of her works, these looked like they had the least chance of getting back into print. Except, now they are. Ms. Jackson’s books about life with one husband, one sheep dog, four children, 10,000 books and innumerable cats are back in print. Life Among the Savages follows two parents and their two young children from a New York City apartment to an old Vermont house with Pillars in the Front and ends with the arrival of…
I have a condition I think of as “The Book Bug.” Whenever I approach a large collection of books or I get my hands on a new one, my pulse jumps, my heartbeat quickens and I seem to get a slight fever. I’ve had the condition for decades. It hit me as a kid whenever Scholastic Books distributed their lists of new paperbacks and I was allowed to purchase two. (My attempts to increase the order provided early lessons in negotiation and the Bug returned when the books were delivered.) The air around books is rarefied to me and I’ve been known to get a book rush when I enter a big library, a good book store or a list of new book reviews. I’ll probably need a defibrillator if I ever visit the Library of Congress. Up till now, I’ve assumed I’m the only one with this silly malady and I’ve been too embarrassed to admit it. Thanks to My Reading Life, I now know it’s a condition I share with the writer, Pat Conroy. Conroy is, of course, one of the novelists whose stories are a combination of imagination and autobiography and he is the first to admit…
I visited Monroeville, once. In the summer of 1990, I, my husband and a friend were driving home from the beach when one of us spied the interstate exit that leads to the home of Harper Lee. My friend had (finally) read To Kill a Mockingbird, she was still overwhelmed by the power of the story and she wanted to see Miss Lee’s home town. My husband knows how much I care about the book and he thought it would be a treat, so he steered us onto the highway. Once we hit the center of town, the two of them started plying me with questions so they could pick out landmarks from the novel. How far was the Finch house from the school? Was the Radley house on the same or opposite side of the street? My husband suggested (I think he was joking) that, with a bit of research, we’d be able to locate Miss Lee’s new address and he would take us to her door. I began to feel very uncomfortable. Not only do I get tongue tied around famous authors, (I displayed something like Tourette’s syndrome in front of Dr. Seuss) I couldn’t get past the…
No one seems to recognize the name of Betty MacDonald any more. When I was little, her humorous books had a place of honor on my mother’s shelves and her series of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books were staple of kid lit in primary school. She was even responsible for a Hollywood film series. These days only Google and Wikipedia can find her. If you aren’t familiar with mid-20th century pop literature, Betty MacDonald was a phenomenon. Her first book, The Egg and I (Yeah, I bet you thought that name only belonged to a restaurant franchise!) came out the year the war ended and sold a million copies in less than a year. It has the single greatest dedication I have ever read (To my Sister Mary, who always believed I can do anything she puts her mind to) and some seventy years later, it’s still good. Not flawless, but very, very good. The story is simple. Betty Bard is raised in a family of fascinating people and learns her mother’s guiding principle for a good marriage is, “whither thou goest, I will go.” When she was twenty, Betty married Bob, an insurance salesman twelve years older than herself. …