I'd Rather Be Reading

by Anne Bogel

  In Lab Girl, Hope Jahren thanks her agent for teaching her “the difference between a bunch of stories and a book.” In Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward thanks her agent, “who believed from the first word.” In Love Walked In, Marisa de los Santos thanks her agent “for her immense sanity and patience.” In The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas thanks her agent (or, more precisely, “superhero agent extraordinaire”), saying he’s her biggest cheerleader and also her psychologist every now and then.

  In Empire Falls (perhaps my favorite acknowledgments ever), Richard Russo thanks his editor, saying, “I’d attempt to describe my gratitude in words, but then he’d have to edit them, and he’s worked too hard already.” In Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman thanks her editor, who edited her essays “with such meticulous expertise that I was sometimes tempted to junk my own words and publish his marginalia.” In A Million Little Ways, Emily P. Freeman especially thanks her editor “for not accepting the first draft of this book.” In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg thanks his editor, saying, “I’d heard from some friends that he had elevated their prose and held their hands so gracefully they almost forgot the touch. But I figured they were exaggerating, since many of them were drinking at the time. Dear reader: it’s all true.”

  In their acknowledgments, authors shower praise on the oft-unsung behind-the-scenes crew. In The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress, Ariel Lawhon credits her copy editor with “the patience of Job and the thoroughness of the IRS.” In Small Victories, Anne Lamott thanks her longtime copy editor, saying, “You have saved me from looking illiterate more times than I can count.” In The Last Ballad, Wiley Cash thanks his publicist, “who always finds the way.” In Gold, Chris Cleave thanks his book’s art director and designer, saying, “If you first picked up this book because it looked good, I owe them one.”

  I’m a reader who always wondered what the writing life was like, and not knowing the details, supplied my own—imagining writers cozied in garret apartments with old-fashioned typewriters and endless cups of tea. But in the acknowledgments, the authors hint at the practicalities of writing books, brass-tacks details that might otherwise never occur to readers. They may casually mention that they were three years behind on their deadline, or that they never could have met that deadline without the assistance of the freezer section at Trader Joe’s. Or that their local Apple Store employee saved their presumed lost manuscript in their hour of need, or that their child’s technological troubleshooting was invaluable.

  In the acknowledgments, authors confess that they couldn’t have written the book were it not for summer vacation, or the rhythms of the school year. Laura Vanderkam, now a mother of four, jokes in I Know How She Does It, “Someday I won’t be asking editors to set deadlines around my due dates.” In Dreamland Burning, Jennifer Latham thanks her kids “for putting up with Deadline Jen and I-Can’t-Right-Now-I’m-Working Mom.” Fredrik Backman closes Beartown with a final word to his children: “Thank you for waiting while I wrote this. NOW we can play Minecraft.”

  In the acknowledgments, authors also thank the people who don’t make the writing happen, or make it better, but make it possible for the writing to happen. They thank the gym community that helped them stay sane while on deadline, or the singers whose soundtracks kept them company while they wrote. In Daily Rituals, Mason Currey thanks the friend “who helped me hang on to my day job and did me the great kindness of constantly asking how the book was coming along.” In Rules of Civility, Manhattanite Amor Towles thanks “all the excellent purveyors of coffee from Canal Street to Union Square” (and also Bob Dylan, “for creating several lifetimes’ worth of inspiration”). In Short Trip to the Edge, Scott Cairns thanks Jackson Browne, “whose songs during the seventies made me want to become a poet.”* In Falling Free, Shannan Martin thanks her local shop The Electric Brew for “the hot Earl Grey, the white noise, the community, and the space.” In Lie to Me, J. T. Ellison thanks her local joint Grays on Main for the people-watching, writing space, and beverages.

  Authors thank their grade-school teachers, their college professors, their fellow students. They thank their favorite childhood bookstores, the librarians who shelved all the books they borrowed for reading and research, or the booksellers who hand-sell their titles to their customers. In The Last Ballad, Wiley Cash thanks “the librarians and booksellers who sustain the creative, intellectual, and civic life of our nation.” In The Almost Sisters, Joshilyn Jackson thanks the “Righteous Handsellers, especially those of you who have pressed my books into the hands of the right readers and said, ‘You are going to love this.’” In the acknowledgments, authors thank their readers, over and over, for reading their work, thus making it possible for them to live the writing life.

  In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd thanks her parents, saying they’re nothing like the oppressive parents in her story. In Drive, Dan Pink tells his reader he’s grateful for his wife, who “read every word I wrote—including many thousands of them aloud while I sat in a red chair cringing at their sound.” (Though my favorite part is when he thanks her “for these small reasons, and many larger ones that are none of your business.”) In Peace Like a River, Leif Enger thanks his mother, “who read us Robert Louis Stevenson before we could talk, and who writes better letters than anyone since the Apostle Paul.” In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg thanks his parents, who “encouraged me from a young age to write, even as I was setting things on fire and giving them reason to figure that future correspondence might be on prison stationery.”

  I especially enjoy stumbling across miscellaneous goodies and oddities, the things an author can’t include anywhere else. In his acknowledgments for The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease thanks his neighbor, “whose enthusiasm for my idea spilled over at a family reunion ten years ago within hearing distance of a fledgling literary agent.” In A Piece of the World, Christina Baker Kline reveals two biographies were so crucial to her work that she called them her “touchstones,” and that both became so tattered she needed to buy multiple copies.

  In What to Say Next, Julie Buxbaum proclaims the greatest indie bookstore in the world is A Great Place for Good Books. In The Things We Wish Were True, Marybeth Whalen promises a friend she’ll name a character for her in her next book. In a chapter of But What If We’re Wrong? Chuck Klosterman tells a story about watching a hedgehog outside his window in Akron. But in his acknowledgments, he explains he’s since discovered his memory can’t be true because hedgehogs aren’t native to North America. (“I have to assume this is not a well-known fact, since I’ve been telling this anecdote for almost two decades and not one person has ever remarked, ‘Hey idiot, don’t you realize there are no hedgehogs in Ohio?’”) And I’m still trying to figure out this thanks from Tana French in The Trespasser: “David Ryan, top with smoked ham, bacon strips, ground beef, mushrooms, and black olives, bake for ten minutes on pizza stone, serve with German Pilsner.”

  Readers, a book may be long, but the acknowledgments are short—and the return on your reading time is enormous. Get yourself to the bookstore or library, or perhaps to your own bookshelves. Pull down some books, open them to the acknowledgments pages, and see what you’ve been missing.

  *This is part of the dedication, not the acknowledgments, but the book doesn’t have acknowledgments, and that Browne bit is too good to pass up.

  14

  A Reader’s Coming of Age

  It’s a truism that early reading shapes the reader you become. We look back wistfully at the readers we were as children, and at the books we read on our parents’ knees, the ones we read under the covers with our flashlights, the ones we giggled over with friends. Then there were the books we read in school, from kindergarten to high school and maybe beyond, under the guidance of other readers who hopefully illuminated the meaning of what we read.

  But then it happens. School is over, classes are done, and we become responsible for our own reading lives. Nobody else is in charge of what we read; those decisions are now all ours. Now
we choose what kind of readers we want to be; we choose which pages will fill our lives.

  We don’t enter adulthood as fully formed adults, nor do we enter adulthood as fully formed readers. When I graduated, I knew I still had a lot of growing up to do, but nobody told me I had to grow up as a reader too.

  Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read. But you, dear reader, moved from being told what to read to choosing for yourself. From reading on assignment, perhaps to please someone else, to reading at your own leisure to please only yourself. When faced with the task of establishing your own reading life, you did it, or maybe you’re still in the middle of doing it.

  Like other kinds of growing up, this doesn’t happen overnight. The transition happens slowly, over time. We make a reading life by reading, and we stumble as we figure it out, learning through trial and error not just what to read for ourselves, but how. Establishing not just that we will be readers, but determining what kind of readers we will be.

  Luckily, I didn’t know all that as a young reader. In my early twenties, I was wholly occupied with establishing my new adult life: I graduated from college, started a new job, got married, and moved into my first house. That was enough adult pressure to deal with; I’m glad I didn’t know then that over the next few years I would set the course for my reading life as well.

  I didn’t feel like a grown-up, because I was still growing up myself, but I couldn’t articulate that then. Yet because I was still very much growing up, the books I chose for myself would both keep me company on the journey and influence the kind of person I’d ultimately grow up to be. Books are powerful like that.

  And what to choose? This is where my story, perhaps like all stories about reading, is intimately tangled up with place. When it comes to our reading lives, place matters, whether metaphorical or literal. I was in a place of transition and in a physical place where good books were easy to come by. And so I read.

  When I think about growing up as a reader, about coming into my own as one and claiming responsibility for my own reading life, the scenes that play out in my head are from this early era. Those formative years in my early to midtwenties left an indelible mark on the person and reader I would become. Those first years are when I laid the foundation I’m building on even now.

  When you’re not sure what you should read for the rest of your life, the library is a good place to start. So I went there, often, sampling widely. I can picture myself, strolling down the shady library path that ran right by our driveway, taking the long way on a beautiful day or the short direct route on a rainy or hot one, arms full to bursting with stacks of books. (So lavish that I was occasionally embarrassed by how I was taxing the library’s resources, although my librarians never complained; instead they congratulated me on my stacks and stacks.) We passed books around our circle of friends, rarely getting together without coming or going with a book in hand—loaning one out, or bringing a new-to-me borrowed title back home. Plus my husband and I each brought our own book collections to our marriage, childhood favorites and other titles we’d picked up along the way that remained unread. It was easy to experiment, to dabble—I was surrounded by good books.

  Scientists say that when it comes to nostalgia, scent trumps all other senses because of its uncanny ability to tap straight into our emotional memories. Catch a whiff of caramelized apples, and you’re suddenly five years old again, safe and warm in your mother’s kitchen. The scent of magnolia reminds you of summer afternoons in your grandmother’s living room, where she floated blossoms in crystal bowls on her coffee table. A hint of printer toner takes you back to sixteen, standing at the copy machine at your first job. The smell of Earl Grey and I’m eighteen, bent over my books while my British roommate prepares yet another cup for a late-night study session.

  Book lovers have strong feeling about bookish scents; some of us get poetic about the distinctive smell of freshly inked paper, or old cloth-covered hardcovers, or a used bookstore. I’ve never cared for the smell of used bookstores myself, but as a devoted reader, I’ve noticed how the books themselves serve as portals to my past, conjuring similarly powerful memories. There’s something about glimpsing, and especially handling, a book from long ago that takes me right back to where I was when I first read it. The book triggers memories of why I picked it up, how it made me feel, what was going on in my life at the time, transporting me so thoroughly that, for a moment, I feel like I’m there once again.

  Even today, certain titles from my early twenties take me right back to my own coming of age as a reader.

  Exhibit A: Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. Age twenty-two. Hardcover, large, black, crinkly polyester wrapper, 456 pages. Library. I’d never heard of it before a friend mentioned over dinner that she’d read it in two days because it was that good. When my library request came in, I was there waiting when the library opened (alas, not till 10:00 a.m.) to check it out. I sprawled across my bed and read four hundred pages in a single day. I didn’t know a book could be that absorbing, especially not one written in 1938.

  Exhibit B: Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman. Age twenty-two. Audiobook, square plastic case, six CDs in sleeves. Library. Will and I were rolling tile-blue paint over the old mint green in the kitchen; it was tedious work, and we needed entertainment. I’d read about it in a magazine, the library had only the audiobook in its collection, and Will was up for something new. We thoroughly enjoyed the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale, so much so that we wanted to keep painting to listen. I didn’t know the fun of experiencing a book with another reader. I didn’t know that was something you could do outside the classroom.

  Exhibit C: David Keirsey’s Please Understand Me II. Age twenty-two. Blue paperback, worn, 350 pages. Library. We’d taken personality tests in premarital counseling; I was intrigued and wanted to know more. Read over a span of cold winter evenings, on a yellow sofa, cup of tea in hand. This book would change my understanding of myself and my marriage, and it planted the seeds of an idea that would, seventeen years later, become my first book.

  Exhibit D: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë. Age twenty-four. Pink Penguin paperback, 434 pages, never opened. Aspirational purchase by my teenage self at a local indie store. I’d never read this book, despite owning it for years, because I hadn’t yet learned that “classic” did not equal “boring.” But it was a Sunday afternoon, the library was closed, and I couldn’t decide what to read next. So I contemplated the contents of my living room bookshelf, spied the pink paperback, and resolved that the time had come to cross a classic I should have read in high school off my To Be Read list. I started reading, tentatively, in the sunny bay window and thought, Why didn’t anybody tell me this book was actually good?

  Exhibit E: The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, Vicki Iovine. Age twenty-four. Red-and-white paperback, new but soon-to-be well-worn, 288 pages. Purchased in desperation at the local bookstore after being scared sleepless one too many times by the ominous What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which expected me to hit every pregnancy milestone a full month before I actually did. I needed alternatives, and I found one in Iovine, who walked me through my pregnancy (all four of them), providing the reassurance that my experience was normal and that it wasn’t time to freak out just yet. But in turning to that book time and again, I was digging grooves and laying habits characteristic of avid readers: turning to books—and actual, physical books at that—for the information I wanted and needed, poring over books about cleaning and cooking and parenting and pregnancy, practical things, things I didn’t know how to do yet. Further evidence: the constant churn of reading-for-information books through our house on cooking, cleaning, gardening, DIY-ing, parenting, and anything else I needed to know.

  Exhibit F: David Copperfield. Age twenty-four. Black Penguin paperback, 718 pages, torn, smelled like old books. Extra-dark, close-set type, the kind that
leaves inky smudges on your fingertips. Library. Jane Eyre changed things. When I was a student, those old books held zero appeal, but now I experienced the freedom to read not out of duty, nor for a grade, but because I wanted to. And because they were good. I got acquainted with my library’s wall of paperback classics (which provided a clear visual on just how many books I should have read in high school), pleasantly pliable paperbacks that were more likely than not to deliver a solid reading experience, and there was never a wait for them. The tables had turned from my childhood years, when I used to read with a flashlight under the covers. Now I’d put my own baby to bed and was terrified to creep out of the room, lest I wake him. But I didn’t even mind because I had my flashlight and Dickens. I was shocked at how much I enjoyed it.

  Exhibit G: Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz. Age twenty-five. Not-quite-right plastic-wrapped hardcover, 352 pages. Confession: an Oprah Book Club selection. Library. By now I loved to read classics, and I loved to read nonfiction for information, but I consistently picked disappointing contemporary novels. This book was greatly important to me, not because I loved it (I didn’t), but because it represented my tentative foray into the world of contemporary fiction. I read it quickly, in my bedroom before I went to sleep, propped against my headboard with a cup of tea. Something about it helped me begin to form my own judgments, state my own opinions, discern my own taste. I waded back into that world, a world I would in later years feel much more at home in, and those seeds started with this book.

  By my midtwenties, I’d made the transition, establishing myself as a reader, coming into my own as one, carving out a space for my own reading life. Today I’m not the reader—or the person—I was at twenty-five; so much has changed in the intervening years, as it should. But it’s then that the foundation was laid, in my fledgling first years of adulthood, when I made my reading life my own.