Confessions of a Precocious Reader

I grew up in a home with many bookshelves that were constantly being stuffed with new releases. But there was one bookcase that remained unchanged. My mother had been an English major in college in the mid 50s and there was a bookcase in our home dedicated to all the novels she had been assigned or picked up on her own as a coed. Married less than a year after college, her books were the dowry she brought to her marriage. The solid spines tended to be dull black and blue-grey, sometimes burgundy, the pages slightly yellowed on the edges, the titles on the spines gilded and faded, no book jackets. The bookcase was low, only three foot tall but long--eight feet or more. The books gathered dust because they remained untouched, and if you were to draw one from the shelf and open it you would surely get a whiff of something that incited a sneeze.

By the time I hit adolescence however, I was ravaging that bookcase—dust be damned. I would like to claim I was a precocious reader, and indeed that was how my family saw me. But in truth, I was ripping through those shelves for the sex. Yes, you heard me. The sex.

In pursuit of the salacious, I could have devoted more time to the contemporary racy novels of the 70s—Love Story by-Erich Segal, Puzo’s The Godfather, Happy Hooker by Xavier Hollander, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and eventually I did. They were all on the household shelves and all available to me. But while there was some delightful shock value in their explicitness, the hunt for smut in those pages was too easy. I preferred that which was alluded to, the inuendo, the way they often (but not always) lacked the concrete details. Take, for example, this scene from Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. . . . I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.

OMG—what was happening here? My preteen brain sizzled. All I knew was that once I’d seen it, it couldn’t be unseen.

This foray into my mother’s classics had begun when I was about twelve and my teacher assigned the ”General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales. Not the entire collection, only a smeary mimeographed copy of the original prologue with heavy footnotes. It was to be a brief look at Middle English and most of the class muddled through unenthusiastically. I, on the other hand, was intrigued. What is this? What is it really saying? I was drawn to it like a codebreaker.

That was when my mother went to her shelf, slipped out her chunky college-days copy of The Canterbury Tales, and handed it to me. It included her barely legible notes in the margins and so, to be fair, some of the work was done for me, but I am certain I spent weeks adding my own notes as I decoded, spending an inordinate amount of time on “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Afterall, I was actually the perfect age—an adolescent still drawn to bathroom humor and dirty jokes. Especially the kind of dirty humor that was only accessible to those in the know—IYKYK. (I mean, admit it, farts are always funny). When I finally finished it, I was back at that dusty bookshelf to find what else was hidden in the books I had never taken stock of. From there I recall finding the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and e. e. cummings (so steamy), DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (my mother had smuggled an unabridged copy home with her from England), and of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula—who knew?

In time, I found myself less enthused by the hunt for sex scenes and more engaged by the ideas buried in the pages. There were taboos explored in literature that I had never taken stock of: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—divorce; Kate Chopin’s The Awakening—adultery; Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—homosexuality; Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”—abortion; and injustices my young mind had only begun to grasp like the racism in Harriette Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most ended on an obviously tragic note—a moral conclusion that was often at odds with my own. But, holy hell, I was hooked. And I was thinking…

Because my exploration of these novels was a solo gig, I drew my own conclusions, often finding myself angered by what was implied and at odds with authorial voices. Take The Scarlet Letter—what the hell was that about and what was Hester thinking—letting a man off the hook like that? I was enraged. She had played right into the hands of the patriarchy (though I’m sure I had no concept of patriarchy at the time—only a sense of something not quite right). A few years later when the novel was assigned in high school I vehemently counter-argued the teacher’s “teaching.” Hester was the worst kind of martyr in my mind, and a classmate’s suggestion that “she did it for love” was, as I saw it at the time—stupid. My views were not popular, to be sure. And I doubt I expressed myself well. But the book had fanned a flame years earlier and then combusted in that classroom. My critical thinking skills were ignited. Sure, I had a long way to go in sharpening them, needed to learn to articulate better ways of expressing myself, needed to be more open to the ideas of others, (needed to refrain from calling classmates stupid). But I was a work in progress.

My mother’s bookcase was a portal to my own critical thinking precisely because I read in a kind of vacuum—no reading partner, no teacher or professor, no book club, untainted by the traditional understanding of most of these novels. In many cases, these novels called out injustices that society had not fully taken stock of when they were written. (Think: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, exposing the meatpacking industry and the plight of those who worked in it, or once more—Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Reading in this way meant that what was on the page washed over me in a kind of wave that splashed me—awake. (See what I did there? Sorry—not sorry) I was filled with impressions rather than hunting for meaning with a highlighter in my hand.

My mother’s bookcase is still there, in the corner of the living room in my father’s home. But it has thinned over the years. I’m a bit of a kleptomaniac when it comes to books, and I have tucked many of her books into my own shelves. I admit to a certain satisfaction when I see these jewels on my shelves and can recall what is between the pages.

And sometimes I can’t help but imagine their dusty spines lined up endlessly, forming

my own.