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Jun. 29th, 2025 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narrownightsI read this book the other day. It wasn't good. It wasn't bad. I had never heard of the author, or the book before. It was a discount book from the bargain table at an Indigo, and it sat on my shelf for six months before I picked it up on a whim and read it in one night. I didn't read the summary. I didn't post it anywhere.
I did a brief workout, plucked it from our shelves without looking at it, laid on my bed, and fell asleep with it in my hands. I woke up at 3a.m and I finished it before drifting back to sleep.
It transported me. Not to another world, but to my own past. We went to the library often I was a child. There were four of us, and my mom took us to the library at least once every two weeks. I had my own library card. The local library was two floors. The top floor held magazines, box computers, and two rows of Adult novels that were very thick and very uninteresting. Downstairs was where it was really at. To the left were picture books for the kids to choose from. The Bernstein Bears, Little Critter, Franklin, and the much coveted Robert Musch were always prominently displayed.
To the right was a single row of middle grade novels that ran perpendicular to the graphic novels and manga followed by two rows of young adult fiction. This was my playground. I would pull books down at random, barely glance at the descriptions, never look for an author name or a review. Ever. I would stack them in a pile so high my mom would desperately try to impose limits of four or five (seven was usually my magic number). She would push the stroller full of books and children back to our house three blocks away and I would disappear upstairs to build a fort with crocheted blankets that let just enough light in through the holes, and devour them as quickly as possible.
They were consumed, loved, and stacked in a trophy pile until we returned to the library, where I promptly forgot all about them. I had no idea what 'good' writing was. Popular books were the ones other kids at school talked about, the ones we fought over in classrooms (Where's Waldo, I Spy, the collection of Beanie Babies).
That was the purest I think reading could ever be. No pretension. No weeping over beautiful prose or trying to find a perfect star rating. No comparison between this story or that story, or looking for sprayed edges or gilded titles. Little me picked the book up, read it all the way through, then put it in a pile and loved the next one. Over and over, tirelessly.
I have reached a point in my life where I can admit to myself that my degree was a mistake. Not only because I dropped out with two semesters to go, not only because it threw me into depression and agoraphobia, or because it created a debt so deep I may never crawl out of it, but because it taught me to be a critic instead of a creator, a reviewer instead of a reader.
But this book, read in one night with my critic brain struggling to keep up in the background, brought me back to that feeling of huddling in my fort with dappled crocheted sunlight spots falling on worn books from the library. And I was happy.
I did a brief workout, plucked it from our shelves without looking at it, laid on my bed, and fell asleep with it in my hands. I woke up at 3a.m and I finished it before drifting back to sleep.
It transported me. Not to another world, but to my own past. We went to the library often I was a child. There were four of us, and my mom took us to the library at least once every two weeks. I had my own library card. The local library was two floors. The top floor held magazines, box computers, and two rows of Adult novels that were very thick and very uninteresting. Downstairs was where it was really at. To the left were picture books for the kids to choose from. The Bernstein Bears, Little Critter, Franklin, and the much coveted Robert Musch were always prominently displayed.
To the right was a single row of middle grade novels that ran perpendicular to the graphic novels and manga followed by two rows of young adult fiction. This was my playground. I would pull books down at random, barely glance at the descriptions, never look for an author name or a review. Ever. I would stack them in a pile so high my mom would desperately try to impose limits of four or five (seven was usually my magic number). She would push the stroller full of books and children back to our house three blocks away and I would disappear upstairs to build a fort with crocheted blankets that let just enough light in through the holes, and devour them as quickly as possible.
They were consumed, loved, and stacked in a trophy pile until we returned to the library, where I promptly forgot all about them. I had no idea what 'good' writing was. Popular books were the ones other kids at school talked about, the ones we fought over in classrooms (Where's Waldo, I Spy, the collection of Beanie Babies).
That was the purest I think reading could ever be. No pretension. No weeping over beautiful prose or trying to find a perfect star rating. No comparison between this story or that story, or looking for sprayed edges or gilded titles. Little me picked the book up, read it all the way through, then put it in a pile and loved the next one. Over and over, tirelessly.
I have reached a point in my life where I can admit to myself that my degree was a mistake. Not only because I dropped out with two semesters to go, not only because it threw me into depression and agoraphobia, or because it created a debt so deep I may never crawl out of it, but because it taught me to be a critic instead of a creator, a reviewer instead of a reader.
But this book, read in one night with my critic brain struggling to keep up in the background, brought me back to that feeling of huddling in my fort with dappled crocheted sunlight spots falling on worn books from the library. And I was happy.
