With reading time curtailed, page-turners become a form of punishment. What was once a delicious abandonment to plot, a desperation to finish yet at the same time a rationing to prolong the ecstasy, to please not let it end quite yet, has become something else entirely: a nightmare. A masochistic thrumming of simultaneous desire and deprivation involving late nights and little sleep, ignored and resentful children, furtive retreats into the bathroom to secretly flip the pages. Like cheating.
That was The Hunger Games, a joy and pain. And the way of all top-tier genre—quasi-vampires and spy novels and plot-twisty, mind-sucking domestic thrillers that have to be finished right now without interruption—even when your entire life is interruption. Trilogies or series of any kind, life destroying. Reading is transformed from life’s central act to a secret second (or even third) life that your real life isn’t allowed to know about. Books become compartmentalized rather than integral.
These days I fit reading in on a catch-as-catch-can basis, even as I’ve exorcised most other distractions from my cultural diet. I read about TV more than I watch it. My movie viewing is nearly all animated. Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.
CHAPTER 19
A Wrinkle in Time
Reading with Children
Certain periods of your life become inextricably linked with certain books. For me, even as I continued to read books for myself, the early child-rearing years were about children’s books, both my kids’ and my own. This was a time of revisiting and rereading and reliving the stories that had remained with me, if in the back of my brain, since my first days as a reader. Those simple yet oddly indelible story lines and the intense emotions they elicit: Leo Lionni’s Little Blue and Little Yellow, which makes you realize even as a child that a relationship can compromise your identity, even make you unrecognizable. Or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which alerts you to the power of your own anger, capable of sending you reeling into another world, one from which you’d have to find your way back. To witness feelings you’ve only experienced within reflected in the pages of a book is a revelation. The sense memory of those initial reading experiences resurge in a visceral way and, for an odd time-suspended moment, you can actually see what the pages looked like through your six-year-old eyes, a feeling Spalding Gray called “a complicated present”—one in which you are both in the present and in the past at the same time.
Those early books become imprinted on us like a cherished stuffed animal or maternal embrace. They become part of us, belong to us in a way they don’t belong to anyone else. “Even now, simply thinking about Long John Silver or the waves on Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text,” J. G. Ballard once said. “I suspect that these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.”
That is the awesome power of children’s literature, and children are in power here. Teachers may be able to tell you what to do in school and parents can control what you do at home, whether you get to watch TV and whether you can play at Jenny’s house two days in a row. You may not be allowed to see a PG movie or use the phone after ten o’clock at night. But books are different. From a very young age, most children get to select the books they read or acquiesce to listening to while read by another. Even before you fully learn to read on your own, you are the one who decides which stories to let in.
Most kids weigh this decision by parsing the freighted cues of cover, illustration, title, and endorsements. It’s what makes book jackets so essential during childhood, when in choosing a book outside the purview of the parent or the teacher or the librarian, the prospective reader has little else to go on. Go on the Internet and search for the covers of your childhood favorites; you’ll recognize “your” covers immediately, each one like a personalized invitation. Is it intimidating or inviting? Are the characters aspirational or relatable? Are you going to entrust this book, this author, with your time? When you pick up a book, Doris Lessing once said, “you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself.” That requires consideration.
It is no small decision. You, young reader, determine location. You pick your company. You elect which world you enter and what knowledge you procure there. While subject to the author’s whims should you continue reading, you can also reject them and put the book down.
In my Book of Books, I can see the way these choices line up and read the signs along the way that reveal those decisions. Here, a novel selected with deliberation; the next, a matter of circumstance. This one was assigned, but that one a book I was dying to read. My mother-in-law gave me that book. This other one was found in the common room of a New England bed-and-breakfast. All of those choices.
Choosing a book is so gratifying, it’s worth dragging out the process, starting even before finishing the current one. As the final chapters approach, you can pile up the possibilities like a stack of travel brochures. You can lay out three books and let them linger overnight before making a final decision in the morning. You can Google the reviews; ask other people if they’ve read it, collect information. The choice may ultimately depend on the mood and the moment. “You have to read a book at the right time for you,” Lessing also said, “and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.”
And so, the eager new parent thinks, we can pass on that enjoyment to our children. Every night, read-aloud time becomes an extension of the reader’s power. We not only get to pick our own books, we get to pick our children’s books as well. We point them to the good ones. We instruct them in how to read clues on the jacket. We show them how it’s done. They will be good readers, lucky them and lucky us: the culture now values children who read.
I spent a lifetime planning for this. I even had a head start, having begun collecting books for my kids before they were born. I started by stashing away a few key titles while working at Scholastic when I was 100 percent single. My children would never want for books. I’d pass by a bookstore and pick up a few Dr. Seusses on sale figuring, One day, I’m going to need these. I’d find a copy of a beloved childhood favorite in a used bookstore, Miss Suzy or The Story of Ferdinand or Richard Scarry’s Busy Town, and purchase it for my nonexistent children.