I overhear a salesclerk in the mall bookstore, ”I don’t read fiction, so I’m not really the best person to help you.”
I’m browsing the fiction shelves and have a half-dozen titles scribbled on a notepad I keep in my purse for later Amazon purchases and library reserves. Twice in a week I hear someone say they don’t read fiction and I am stunned; by the admission and the underlying tone that fiction is not worthy of their time.
Books, mostly fiction or the non-fiction research they always seem to lead to, have defined my life. Each period, each decade, is represented by the library cards, book purchases, and the reading and the location of those stolen hours of pleasure.
The secret thrill of that first library card and the ritual of handing it to the librarian in the bookmobile that visited the rows of red brick apartment buildings during the summer when I turned 9 is still with me. The very idea that I could have those books and those adventures for free felt just like the time I ran barefoot through the parking lot that sparkled with broken glass to catch the ice cream truck as I clutched two stolen dimes in my sweating, dirt creased hands. I walked slowly back home licking the melting vanilla soft serve, savoring and smelling the dirt and sweaty metallic scent from my hands on the soggy cone . The books I brought home and the reading of them that summer made me feel the same way. Like I had stolen something. The musty smell and that first satisfying sneeze when I inhaled the book dust in the bookmobile became part of the ritual of each library visit whether an old, small town library or a newly built structures, they housed the books that held the adventures and I had their card within weeks of moving to a new city.
Back then it was Nancy Drew and my favorite Noel Streatfield book, The Magic Summer. Whether it was solving a mystery with Nancy or following the adventures of siblings in a ramshackle house in Ireland with an eccentric aunt and mysterious stranger, I was transported from the stench of rotting garbage in dumpsters between apartment buildings and the monthly spraying for the never-ending roach population that dwelled alongside us. Climbing the steps into the bookmobile was like being transported to worlds where English children lived on tea, toast and boiled eggs and where Nancy drove her blue convertible in pretty clothes and had her housekeeper, Hannah, baking cookies when she got home.
I can’t ever forget the day my third grade teacher started reading Little House in the Big Woods and I was transported to another time and a place where there were two parents and a magical home with Ma and Pa. I live in the woods and homeschooled my two children while trying to re-create that life in the 1990s. I spent several years and 40 hours a week in a historical village wearing 1850s skirts and pretending I was in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book.
By junior high I had moved on to the school library and Gone with the Wind changed my life. Bitten by the history bug, I searched out more historical fiction and the more doorstop-like the book the better. Size did matter in those sweeping historical novels and series that still beckon today. I went to college and got a history degree because of that one week in 7th grade spent with Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Of course, with a mother who loved Michener(she even named the dog that) and who read every Leon Uris bestseller, I really had no chance. She also read cookbooks like novels and I seem to have inherited that gene, too.
In college, it didn’t matter what the topic was in a history class, there was always a novel to find from the same period. English monarchs paraded through my life in the Jean Plaidy series. John Jakes chronicled American and Allan Eckert took me through Ohio history and Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear took me through pre-history. Alex Halley and Roots left an impression that has had me chasing my roots and pestering the elders since the 1980s. Mary Stewart’s Arthurian series came out when I was in high school and I spent hours reading them and my love for Arthurian legends and Merlin myths was born.
When I look at bestseller lists for the past 40 years, I am struck by the observation that the titles I read are the histories, mysteries, cookbooks and diet books. Seems I’ve spent most of my life cooking, eating, prowling libraries and book stores, sneaking off to read big thick novels and then working off the resulting pounds.
As I was ordering a double tall latte from the Starbucks inside my neighborhood Kroger, the barista asked if that wasn't too strong with an extra shot in it.
"I don't drink coffee, though, so it seems awful strong to me."
What is it with bookstore clerks who don't read fiction and baristas who don't drink coffee? I think I feel another rant coming on.
