Can one really be too widely read? Of course people who
don’t read think so, but evidently book professionals think so, too.
I’ve spent a lifetime devouring books. I’ve traveled
throughout this world and many others through the magical portals of print. I
love to meander wherever those print paths lead me, between the black and white
of slashes and space to the boundaries of the mind’s grey matter.
Yes, I believe that reading makes one smarter, abler to navigate
through life with leaps and bounds of both perception and faith. I am not only
a voracious reader, but also an omnivore—there’s no one genre that holds my
sole interest. I can’t even be a serial monogamist—I read too quickly, and am
dipping with delight between the covers of the next bright flower that takes my
fancy.
I never really paid attention to the way I read until I was asked to take over a local book club and
then joined Netgalley. With the book club, I pick the titles. I’m limited to
books supplied by the library, so that’s one challenge—but other than choosing
to honor the Omnivorous name of the club by featuring both fiction and
nonfiction, it didn’t change my reading pattern much. Here’s the way I like to
read, branching out and onward, like a Book Tree, a winding journey. It starts
with my first-ever book club pick (I’d been carrying the book around for six
years, not ready to read it, but unable to let it go—can you relate?). I can
see many other book trees in my life, but this is one such journey.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by
Mary Ann Shaffer, led to
My Life in
France, by Julia Child, then to The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain,
which led to
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (actually read it in
high school, but there’s a new edition). Then nostalgia of teen years led to
reading
About Town:
The New Yorker And The World It Made, by Ben Yagoda, and
Genet: A
Biography of Janet Flanner, by Brenda Wineapple. This led to
The Greater
Journey: Americans in Paris, by David McCullough. Then what should
appear but The Bones of Paris, by Laurie R. King. And then I always wanted to
read
Shakespeare
and Company, by Sylvia Beach. A few months later, Lunch in Paris, by
Elizabeth Bard—and now the sequel, Picnic in Provence. And more.
One thing leads to another, and suddenly you know a lot of
stuff about Paris, two World Wars, New York, art, poetry, food…you get the
picture. It’s fun to read for discovery!
In a sense, I’ve always been a professional reader—I’ve
never left the profession of student behind. I was a children’s librarian, and
Poet-in Residence, where “Miss M” was born. And I’m a writer; kinda hafta read.
And I was a bookseller—don’t think
I’ve left that behind either, at least I sure hope you’re buying some of these
books I recommend and supporting your local bookstores, if you’re lucky enough
to have them. I truly love
pointing people towards books that will take them on journeys of discovery—or
just delight them—I’m not a genre snob (just a grammar snob). Booksellers are
evangelists of the words.
But there are two kinds of librarians, I’ve found over the
years. There are those that think the books are for sharing and growing and
leading to more reading and more books, and those who think that books need
protecting in little boxes of buildings and genres, cataloguing not correlating
their discoveries.
Book people, book sites, let’s do the good work. Let there
be Curators of Quirk, Editors-at-Large, Columnists of the Heartlands, Foreign Correspondents, diverse
perspectives of literature and lives. Make new and bigger boxes, if you need
boxes.
I am proud to say I read SFF and mysteries and thrillers and
science and romance and poetry and religion and spiritual and gardening and
cooking and memoirs and history. And cereal boxes.
I always remembered E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up
Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler as a story of overnighting in the New York
Public Library (it’s really the Met), because what could be better than to have
free reign amongst the halls of Heaven?
Read on.
Tracker by C.J. Cherryh
