Over the years, Bob has become an even more personal record than a diary might have been, not about my quotidian existence but about what lay at its foundations—what drove my interests and shaped my ideas. There’s where I was physically, sitting in the cat-wallpapered room I’d ambitiously decorated in the second grade or at a leftover table in the high school cafeteria—and then there was where I lived in my mind, surrounded by my chosen people, conversing with aplomb in carefully appointed drawing rooms or roaming in picturesque fashion across windswept English landscapes.
Today my life is engulfed in books. Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.
The books don’t stop there. They gather on a coffee table in front of that sofa, and in my home office, where they mount according to intended destination—books to donate to my kids’ school, books to give to the local library, books meant for my husband, my mother, my in-laws in California, one of my three children. They fill up totebags that loiter by the staircase, ready to be hauled onto the train, commuting back and forth, some making the return trip, others staying on.
In my office at the New York Times Book Review, they are greeted by like-minded company. Books of interest, books with a purpose, books that are there for a reason. A shelf in front of my desk contains books I may want to refer to someday, by authors who’ve piqued my interest, or who are worth considering as potential reviewers for our pages, or whose work has already been praised. Books to be read, books to be read, books to be read. Books that may one day make their way into Bob.
When I come home and look back through my Book of Books I see a personal narrative I didn’t recognize at the time. I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read.
The prospect of losing Bob has become more vexing as he and I have gotten older. I no longer take him on trips. Now he stays safely at home and I tend to his pages as soon as I unpack, logging in the books read on planes and trains and between meetings. With each entry, I grow more guarded about his contents. I feel as protective of Bob as I do of myself.
Though I thought he’d have long been filled by now and succeeded by a second book, there is still only one of him. He is less than half full, almost exactly mirroring my place in expected life span. He still has so much work to do, so many pages to fill. Yet after nearly three decades, Bob is showing his age. I am sometimes careless with him, which I then feel guilty about. A decade ago I unthinkingly repeated a full one-hundred sequence in error; much scratching out followed. I write entries hurriedly, while standing up, underlining the titles in wavy, discordant lines. His pages betray a certain amount of misuse. At some point, I spilled coffee on him; the cover is mottled and discolored, the binding has split, one corner is woody and bare. He sits on a special shelf, right over my desk, the anonymity of his unappealingly frayed spine ensuring our privacy.
Without Bob, something feels worryingly missing—missing from my life and from the accounting of my life. A book is somehow not quite read, and my own story doesn’t quite make sense, the two inextricably linked. I don’t know where I’d be without Bob and where I’d have been if he hadn’t been there. Bob may be a record of other people’s stories, but he’s mine. If there’s any book that tells me my own story, it’s this one.
CHAPTER 1
Brave New World
You Shouldn’t Be Reading That
When you’re a child, reading is full of rules. Books that are appropriate and books that are not, books that grown-ups will smile at you approvingly for cradling in your arms and those that will cause grimaces when they spy you tearing through their pages. There are books you’re not supposed to be reading, at least not just yet. There is a time and a place.
But for me it felt like there was never enough time, and the place was elusive. Bringing a book of your own to school was a no-no, and not to recess either, where you were supposed to be getting balls thrown at your head. Carrying a book was practically against the law at summer camp, where downtime was for forced mass song. Children were meant to be running around, engaged in active, healthy play with other hardy boys and girls.
I hated running around.
Before every elementary school classroom had a “Drop Everything and Read” period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination.
While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear, and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous “Go play outside.”
Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn’t occur to me to think otherwise.