I would not be who I am without books. I have been a loving and devoted reader since the age of six. Books have shown me who I could be, whose lives paralleled mine, and whose paths did not. Some of my early favorites included Black Beauty and Heidi, as well as books by Louisa May Alcott, Rumer Godden, Elizabeth Goudge. Nancy Drews, Jessamyn West’s Cress Delahanty series, Anne of Green Gables—all of it.
I stopped reading for awhile as a teenager, and when I resumed the books that were around me were all by men: Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, for example, which I loved and provided another kind of model of who to be in the world. The first teacher whom I ever trusted was in college. She introduced me to Virginia Woolf, the first writer of my adult years who provided a thrilling inspiration as a writer and a citizen. The Waves, which we read when I was l8, influenced me the rest of my life.
Today I have daytime and nighttime reading. I read about political topics on the web or by lying outside with the Women’s Review of Books or The Nation: because of my declining eyesight, I can’t read indoors. I listen to the sound of a reader’s voice on tape and thus have devoured some of my most profound recent pleasures: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Blind Assassin. Sarah Waters and Val McDermid: Stories that are deep and dark and polished and never cutesy and corny and cozy. Lately my interests in history and biography have been satisfied by Nuala O’Faiolan’s brilliant unearthing of The Story of Chicago May and Susan Vreeland’s astonishing The Forest Lover.
I didn’t discover Jane Austen or George Eliot until I was left only with recorded books and it has been spectacular. It occurs to me that Austen’s sense of what is moral and just has been expressed in my taste for mystery in all the meanings of that word, of justice denied or delayed (PD James, Ruth Rendell, EM Forster or in biographies like those suggested by Carolyn Heilbron in her brilliant Writing a Woman’s Life. I have cherished the mysteries of Amanda Cross as well as other mysteries set in academic life, strewn with a sense of the absurdity and desperation of that world (Richard Russo’s Straight Man and Jane Smiley’s Moo). I have been fascinated by time travel and shapeshifting novels including most recently The Book of the Dead by Kevin Brookheiser. Kashio Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake.
In teaching children’s literature, I turned back to my favorite authors: Marjory Sharp’s Miss Bianca series. E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It. Hugh Lofting’s Dr Doolittle. PL Travers Mary Poppins. Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. Michael Ende’s The Never-Ending Story and Momo. Children’s literature like these are as finely wrought, as deeply felt, and as consoling as the best writing for adults.
On the night table next to my bed is my tape recorder and whatever story I am wandering through, in thrall to my night narrator. I read with my ears now, and it’s as necessary as dreaming: it is where I reconstruct and deconstruct the narrative of my own life’s experiences. Thought-provoking, fatalistic, at home with despair and disappointment, forthright, and unsentimental, my chosen books are all of these. They are dense with the ideas that have been fought through with fingers from neurons, knitted with the twine of experience, that unforgiving editor.
Lauren Coodley’s poems appear today in Litbreak Magazine
