Reading is both a superpower and a subversive act. It grants license to flee time and place, go anywhere with anybody and do things that would never be permitted in real life all while remaining in situ. Look at Max in Where the Wild Things Are who travels the world for almost a year, rumpuses with monsters, yet returns to his still hot dinner and none-the-wiser mother. My immigrant mother was absurdly strict. When I was reading, she considered me safe and not doing anything dangerous. Reading quietly within her sight, I might even learn something useful, like English. She encouraged my budding addiction and allowed me to read whatever I chose. We’d arrived in Manhattan as stateless refugees in 1955 with not just the proverbial clothes on our backs but also the massive suitcase of my mother’s books we’d lugged through seven countries on four continents over three years. All the books she’d ordered from the Book of the Month Club in New York between 1940 and 1952 when she lived in Egypt had returned whence they’d come. Her books were her most prized possessions and it pleased her that I was a reader. I read them all.
My favorite books as a little kid were Five Children and It and The Borrowers. When I was 10 my father bought me a biography of the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann called The Walls of Windy Troy and I discovered not only archaeology and mythology, but that some stories and legends have roots in historical reality. I loved the Time-Life science books for kids like The World We Live In and anything dinosaur. The Troy book taught me such fascinating scientific pursuits existed; Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa showed me how it was done. These early passions were eventually fulfilled when I went to college at 57 and studied archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology.
The Catcher in the Rye changed me forever. I found it under my father’s hat in the coat closet which was peculiar since my parents had an extensively illustrated book on Chinese erotic art in plain sight. Someone told my mother Catcher wasn’t appropriate reading for a child and she’d hidden it from me. Holden and I were equally miserable and misunderstood; I knew Salinger had written the book for me. Holden was my first love and just the way I wanted him, all newness, electricity, and wild intoxication. The thrill of turning the page, the excitement of tracking an unfinished sentence to its conclusion on the next. The ducks. The last paragraph. I was breathless reading the book in the same places he’d been…The Central Park Zoo, on the bus, by the Biltmore clock, in Grand Central. For years I checked for the lost fencing equipment before getting off the subway. Catcher was my first crossing of the fiction/reality barrier. After finishing it the first time, I locked myself in the bathroom and examined my face in the mirror. I was concerned that I was visibly changed, that my mother would know I’d read the forbidden book. The other time I did that was after I lost my virginity.
I started reading Gone with the Wind, my mother’s favorite book, one weekend in 7th grade and couldn’t put it down. On Monday morning I claimed a headache and heated the thermometer by applying the glass bulb to my bedside lamp. I was sick! Stayed home and finished the book. Realizing my mother would enable me by zipping to Womrath’s Bookstore to buy me any books I wanted—Ian Fleming! Herman Hesse! Ayn Rand!—whenever I was bedridden, I became an invalid like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and even managed to contract TB. My abuse became extensive. Eventually I was subjected to spinal taps to identify my chronic idiopathic headaches and low grade fevers.
Later I read methodically, consuming, say, most of Henry James in order of writing and finishing every book I’d begun. For a very long time I only read dead authors but expanded my horizons after I felt I had a solid enough literary cushion beneath me. At alumnae reunions, our ancient librarians fought to sit with me. When I entered college in 2008, I also studied writing, my other passion, and was crazy lucky to have teachers like Ben Anastas, Rivka Galchen, Sam Lipsyte, Jenny Offill, and Margo Jefferson turn me on to dozens of contemporary writers I’d never read before but sure do now. Eye-opening stuff. I don’t have a single favorite author, but some that rise like cream include Austen, Wharton, Dickens, Nabokov, Bellow, Martin Amis, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster, Lawrence, George Eliot, Shaw, Tolstoy, Morrison, Muriel Spark, Salinger, Penelope Lively, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis. My favorite science writers are Atul Gawande, Frans de Waal, Carl Zimmer, Gerald Durrell, and Stephen Jay Gould. I love mysteries: Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Amanda Cross/Carolyn Heilbrun, Dorothy Sayers. And food writing by MFK Fisher, AJ Liebling, Gael Greene, Ruth Reichl, and Anthony Bourdain.
I’ve spent a lot of COVID time sorting and organizing bookshelves. My addiction is deep. Despite having upgraded my favorites with hardbound editions over the years, I cannot part with many books that are no longer legible—50+ year-old paperbacks don’t age well—because I remember where and when I read the particular volume. This is true of the two volume Penguin Classics War and Peace I devoured in Mallorca when I was 13, an abridged Moby Dick (no try-pots) the first book I ever bought with my first 50 cent allowance, and natch, The Catcher in the Rye. I found 5 paperback copies of Catcher—not sure I’ve ever seen it in hardbound—which suits Holden because he’s young and always will be. I ended up keeping three copies because they were different editions. The volume with the red carousel horse and yellow title priced at 75 cents is the very one I found beneath my dad’s hat.
