The Care and Keeping of Books

Daina, age 10, reading to Atticus at 3 months old.

If there were a priest of all things literary, I would owe him a couple confessions.

I read and finished exactly one Nicholas Sparks book before throwing it across the room as hard as I could. It was The Notebook, a movie I’d loved and cried over. I’d braced my mind to be blown because the books are always better than the movies. While it’s possible my bar was set too high, it’s also entirely possible that he wasn’t even trying. I think I said that aloud when I got about halfway through the book, “You’re not even trying, are you?” It was just domino line up after domino line up—a suspense machine. We all have our readerly biases, and my criteria for a good read occurs on the sentence level. Ideally, I want to be falling over myself with jealousy for the perfect order and selection of words. Anyone can follow the recipe for apple pie, but if you haven’t picked the right apples, there is really no reason to bother with the pie. Nicholas Sparks is fantastic at following pie recipes, but he’ll put any apple in them, worms and all.

It would be no surprise to me if Nicholas Sparks loved George Bernard Shaw, playwright of Major Barbara, my most hated book of all time. This leads to my second confession: In my younger, edgier years, I finished Major Barbara and promptly tore out every page, singly crumpled up each one, and threw it into the trash can. It was just terrible. Wish it on no one.

These confessions are my full disclosure in the off chance that any of you knows the stories already and wants to call shenanigans on my argument about the care and keeping of books. These were two extreme examples of my violence against the written word, and for these instances, however deserved, I am sorry.

Here are ten book rules we follow in the Price house. For my autumnal assignment today, Daina selected “skeletons.” Because she said the word, and whenever Daina says anything, books come to mind, my thoughts went straight to spines and the eternal question of “To break or not break?” Here are our thoughts on the subject of spines and a few other things.

PRICE BOOK RULES

10. JACKETS

Books wear their jackets. Period.

9. e-BOOKS

No e-book purchases to fill in the gaps in hardback collections.  

8. MOVIE COVERS

            Never buy a book with a picture on the cover from the movie adaptation.

7. ANNOTATIONS

Always write in books. Use a fine-tipped ballpoint pen, never a pencil which will fade or a fountain or felt pen that will bleed.

6. THE FOOT RULE

New books must be stored at least one foot off the ground out of Oscar’s “welcome” range. Oscar was our dog who used to christen everything new in our house. Oscar moved to Michigan, but we still kept the rule.

5. HOARDING
            We’ve found book hoarding to be overlooked by most psychologists as a 
            socially acceptable habit of the literati. And thank God.

4. PINTEREST

No Pinterest crafts that desecrate books for the sake of a half-wit fad may be done in the house. I consider an occasional project with pages of an old, non-literary book acceptable (fanned pages turned into hanging decorations or a L-shaped bracket drilled into an old, non-literary book to create floating bookshelves for less), but my husband cringes at these ideas. They’re quasi-sacred here. We’re like a book sanctuary.

3. DOG-EARS

We don’t dog-ear pages. Anything can be a bookmark, so it’s not possible to be without one. My favorite are Taco Bell receipts, but I’ve used gum wrappers and napkins before. Daina dog-ears books on occasion but believes that it’s only acceptable to do so for a two-day period. I asked her what happens after the two-day period, and her response was that “The Lord of Books will come and eat you.”

2. SPINES

This is the most impassioned debate in our house. I break in a book by breaking the spine, but this makes my husband and daughter cringe. If I really want to cuddle up with it and get close and personal, I bend it right in two so that I can wrap the front around the back and focus on just one page at a time. Based on this sole act, Daina calls me a “book murderer”—the scariest thing of all.  

But here is our most important rule.

1. IF IT’S THERE, IT’S THERE TO SHARE.

The Price Lending Library is open always. See a book? Take a book. 
We can always buy more. And we will. 

Confessions of a Slow Reader

My twelve-year-old daughter is a fast reader. A suspiciously fast reader. She reads so fast that it makes me a suspicious mother: "You couldn't have finished. Did you read the whole thing? Even this paragraph?" I pop quiz her to prove her supposed skimming insufficient, and I can never do it, which leads me to believe that she isn't skimming at all. What would be skimming for me is reading--real, actual, word-for-word reading for her, and she gets it--completely and fully--even the first time. 

She is an anomaly, so I never include the example of her in my class lectures. For one, this one-read approach doesn't work for most, so I teach a cold-read/warm-read approach to my students to encourage at least two passes through a work before commenting on it. And two, I'm jealous of her. 

I am a good reader, but I'm supposed to be. I've been a voracious reader since childhood, and over the course of eleven years of college work, I earned multiple degrees, including a doctorate in literature--ahem, reading. Also, I am a writer, and I've become that by reading and studying all the books a library card can buy. I should be a good reader. I paid good money to other good readers to teach me to become one. Despite this, I will say that my daughter is, hands down and every day of the week, a better reader than I am, and I'll confess that I'm not sure how she does it. 

All the rules we're supposed to teach, she breaks. She can read in a loud and crowded room with no lighting in an uncomfortable chair while hungry and busy, and the book still seems to read itself to her. She can sneak in a page at a time and be able to tell you exactly the scene where she left off--and what she knows will happen next because she's probably read the book five times before. If you ask her what she's reading, she usually says several titles. She's reading them all at once. 

I am a comparatively slow reader. Okay, not comparatively. I'm just a slow reader. I have to work to start and work to finish books. I get distracted, and I get impatient. I even get bored sometimes. It's hard to keep my eyes on the page sometimes, or if my eyes are on the page, my mind won't follow. Other times, my body works with my autopilot mind, and they believe they're reading, and then my fingers follow their cue and begin to turn the page when a third part of me jolts awake wondering when we all paid attention last. As I flip back through the pages, looking for familiar territory, I get more and more frustrated at myself, wondering how it was possible to be present yet so completely unaware of my location. 

For someone like me who is considered to be a literate person, I have too many false starts. I have to read aloud to get started sometimes, at least for a few pages. I need to hear the voice--or I need to hear Morgan Freeman's voice, and so I'll imagine he's reading to me. For some time after I watched Stranger Than Fiction, I heard Emma Thompson reading to me, which was lovely. Who doesn't completely adore Emma Thompson? 

Surely, I'm not alone. Surely, there are others who keep British voices in their heads narrating in a precise formality because their natural inner reader is a gum-smacking, hair-brushing tween who can't be trusted to finish a chapter. And surely, there are some of you whose eyes begin to burn at the sight of ink because a book is about the only thing that won't cry or set the house on fire if you fall asleep instead of keeping watch over it. 

I've developed a "special set of skills" (insert Liam Neeson voice here) to cope with my grandmother-tortoise-covered-in-molasses reading speed. My key is to slow down even more. It sounds counterintuitive, and it is, but it's the same tactic I teach for writing, and it fixes the brain block in so many marvelous ways. 

• When possible, and especially for short passages, read them twice. The cold read happens first to see what the reading is about and what's happening--in general. The warm read is for noticing and making sense of details. The second reading experience is the faster of the two, despite being the deeper of the two, because you have the context for those details.
• Read with a pen in hand. I mark everything of potential import when I read: lines of dialogue, words I don't know that I might need to learn, recurring themes and symbols, and the entrance and exit of characters. My heavy marking habit lends itself to better rereading, as well. I love going back for a second reading to see what I'd thought the first time around. 
• Read aloud sometimes. As much as it is an adult life skill to be able to read silently without moving your lips, there is something very beautiful and engaging about reading aloud, whether to someone or to yourself. I am sure this is the poet in me, but I love the way reading aloud slows me down and forces me to dwell on each phrase and sentence. It keeps me from hurrying, keeps me from drifting, and keeps me present.
• Read sitting up or standing up. I started reading the first book I fell in love with, The Catcher in the Rye, leaning against my bedroom closet door. By the end of the first chapter, I slid down the door and sat on the floor. I didn't get up until I finished the whole thing. I wrote the whole last chapter of my dissertation standing at my kitchen counter with a laptop and the bright florescent lights shining on my notes. Location and movement matter. 
• Stop reading in your leftover time. Give your best to get your best.

These tricks help. They really do. I've gotten to be faster at reading because I've tricked my body and my brain into being more focused, into being more present. I still know I'm not my daughter though. I've learned to tune out my personal bores, like football games and sci-fi movies, but I haven't mastered being able to read in the middle of the night or under the table at a restaurant with a fork in the other hand because I just have to finish a book. 

I haven't gotten into the habit of bringing a backup book light in case my first-string book light breaks or dies, and I don't pack spare batteries for both for a worst case scenario. My purse carries one book at a time, not four, and I don't have another five on the stand by my bed because I'm working on those, too. You are as likely to point out a book on my shelves that I have not read as those you will point out which I have read. Daina's shelves are done: the books have been read, reread, and revered. They look new, but it's because she guards their spines. 

I want to learn from her, but I'm afraid it's something unteachable and tethered to her bones. The cells just keep on blooming and multiplying, and the words keep on calling her name. I want to hear them, but I've learned to stop studying and just marvel at the reader she's become. 

I noticed a few months ago she stopped using bookmarks. "I don't need them anymore," she said. "I just know where I am." 

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys

My husband and I have a few people in the world we absolutely and collectively adore. One of our friend's fathers is such a person. He says things like "He's driving like a cowboy!" which is to say that that the person has a complete and utter disregard for the law and which, naturally, we've adopted into our family-friendly traffic cursings.

I've adored the phrase and its nuances so much that it has become part of my grading vernacular: "He's writing like a cowboy!" 

I don't say this, of course, but I think it with an echoing contempt for what appears to be that complete and utter disregard for the law and an outright refusal to "share the road."

I don't say this, of course, not aloud, because it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between someone who hasn't tried and someone who doesn't know, and I would never want to accuse someone of the former when the latter is true. It would be simpler if these beginners could hang a sign on the back of their paper, like we see affixed on so many Civic bumpers, alerting us of learners' status. Warning, they'd say, Student Writer. Proceed with caution (and a healthy slathering of traveling mercies).

I don't say this, of course, never aloud, because I am busy worrying about how many times they must have seen the words don't, can't, or won't in books and believed the apostrophes to be merely decorative. The gasp echoes again when I see a lonely lowercase I (see, I can't even reproduce it here it's so terrifying) and stop to think of how many first-person books they mustn't have read along the long path to believing that (deep breath) "i" ever appears on its own in nature.

I don't say this, of course, when I see I seen without room for the Holy Spirit and a helping verb left between them. 

And this isn't the only thing I don't say. 

I don't tell them I can spot a reader from across a room, or worse, that I can spot a non-reader from across a parking lot. 

I try to keep quiet that, because I've read so much and so long, I can spot an accidentally italicized period after a book title in a works cited entry. They don't need to know that my eyes have traced and memorized half the fonts in Word so that I can't not see a header in Calibri 11 when it's supposed to be Times New Roman 12. I don't tell them I can spell words I can't pronounce because I've seen more words in print than I've ever heard spoken. 

Instead, I tell them that to be better writers, they must be better readers. What I mean to say, though, is that they must have been better readers, and what I need to give I cannot: a time machine, a lap, a love, and a library card.