by Annie Spence
But my oldest big sister, Michelle, was the true bookworm. She had three qualities that were integral to my becoming a reader: a job at a bookstore, disposable income, and the ability to inspire fear and/or awe in me at her discretion.
She was a pop culture trendsetter in our household, which could fall largely in your favor (Beauty and the Beast on VHS!) or far outside it (her Michael Bolton phase). She’d come home with a new book and a direct order, “Read this.” When the next Boxcar Children in the series was permanently marked “lost” at the school library, a fresh new copy appeared on my bed. She’d slip me five bucks at the used-book sale to fill up a paper sack of my own. John Jakes sagas for Mom; demented horror books for Kristin; a history of baseball for Dad. Even after Michelle moved out and wasn’t working at the bookstore, we benefited from her insatiable reading appetite because she’d send over boxes of books she no longer had room for—all in pristine condition because she never breaks the binding or dog-ears pages.
Even now, when Michelle tells me to read a book, I do it, because you have to do what your big sister says. She was the first to tell me to read Bridget Jones’s Diary, Devil in the White City, Gone Girl, and The Martian. She turned me on to John Steinbeck and Rainbow Rowell. My big sister was and remains my original librarian. Even though she could never be an actual librarian because her love for books is only matched by her disdain for the general public.
I know what you’re thinking, Mockingbird: “What the hell does this have to do with me?” But don’t you know, already? You’re the one who started it all. You’re the book that turned my sister into a capital-R Reader. You’re the uplifting story she goes back to after she reads something shitty and has the bad book blues. Atticus is her blueprint for a good man. She quotes you when she leaves clues for hidden Easter baskets.1 You’re the one I have to thank for all the books I’ve loved since the first time she got her hands on you.
So even though you never hit me with a literary lightning bolt—the way you have for so many—you’re still one of my favorite books. I don’t even think I remember what you’re about, to be honest. A tomboy and a guy named Boo and a court trial, right? Courage, I know you’re about that. It’s been so long. I read you in high school. No, I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school. The morning English class read you. Maybe college? OH MY GOD I’VE NEVER READ YOU.
All right, enough with the pleasantries. Let’s get to reading. I’ve got to finish you before the next time she calls. There’s FaceTime now, and she knows what I look like when I lie.
Godspeed,
BOOKS—Prohibited, Lost, Imaginary
—Stoner’s Delight
Dear Books I Imagine My Upstairs Neighbor Reads,
I wonder about you. It’s a sort of game I play on, say, a Tuesday at 4 A.M. when I’m lying in bed listening to the last of my neighbor’s party guests amble down the stairs, very likely forgetting to lock our mutual back door; when the music and what my ears perceive to be angry line dancing have ended and the microwave has stopped beeping and the phone placed on the glass-top table has been taken off the vibrate setting. Right before the last puff of dank weed smoke trails downstairs, underneath the door, into my bedroom, and the contact buzz finally allows me to relax and drift off to sleep. That’s when I wonder if on that top floor, tucked into his bed with his reheated Thai food and his girlfriend with the coat Kate Hudson wore in Almost Famous, the dude upstairs is unwinding with a good book.
What sort of reading material might this dude have? The only other possessions I can confirm he owns are a leather jacket, a van, and an endless supply of, from the smell of my stairwell, some pretty good shit. What kind of book collection could you be? Are you the perfect stoner library?
I like to imagine a large living room coffee table, low and square, made of dark wood and covered in a tasteful, distinct selection of books, used as conversation starters among Tuesday-night rabble-rousers or the daytime visitors who double-park and leave their flashers on outside while they bound upstairs to buy pot. In my head, everyone is required to wear a forest-green smoking jacket with black-velvet lapels, except the girlfriend with the Almost Famous coat, who sits in the corner, sulkily reading Superminds: An Enquiry Into the Paranormal. A My So-Called Life–era Jared Leto is there as well, tucking his hair behind his ears in a come-hither manner.
Everyone lingers around you, the book table, and you are: first, a small pile of thought-provoking reads intended to spark debates and epiphanies, like some Ta-Nehisi Coates, Susan Sontag, and The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen, about a guy named Suelo who gives up all his money and lives in a cave, eating watermelon from abandoned melon fields and figuring out life’s mysteries.
You are poetry books and quotation collections and brittle ironic guides from the sixties on how to be manly, placed purposefully on top of a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. You’re also the grandly artful graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware; the work of Nate Powell; and Here by Richard McGuire, which is brilliant and trippy enough when you’re not high.
Your Eccentric Fiction section at the table’s corner: Murakami; Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon; Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips, where shit with the faceless bureaucrat who has halitosis gets real bizarre in the best way. Then that piece by Gertrude Stein that people assumed they were too dim to understand, but turns out Gertrude’s lover was jealous of a woman named May and made her change every instance of “may” to “can,” rendering it kind of gibberish. But is it gibberish? Maybe it actually does make sense. Like, even more sense.
The room is filled with smoke and conversation. Everyone surrounds you, gazes at you, carefully choosing which of your books to pick up. (Also, from down here, it sounds like maybe they consistently drag your table to one side of the room, pick you up, and drop you and laugh.) Sometimes, your collection inspires an open mic night of sorts, each person taking turns standing up to read their favorite poem, Dorothy Parker quote, or short fiction by Raymond Carver. Other times, you prompt philosophical arguments of the polite but livid variety so familiar to book clubs and Facebook comment threads. Often, the discussions become so heated that Leto has to come out from the kitchen, where he’s been cooking Stoner’s Delight for the group and contemplating if it’s possible to enjoy Hemingway as a feminist, to break it up.
I don’t know. Maybe this is all my imagination, or the result of my bedroom being hot-boxed right now. Maybe you don’t even exist. You might be a single Maxim on the floor next to the toilet. One tattered Hunter S. Thompson. A creepy, extensive collection of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland editions. Those Magic Eye books that you see different pictures in when you look at them with dead eyes. You could be anything. I will likely never know because I mean-mugged Almost Famous Coat once when she blocked my car in, thus branding myself Bitchy Cat Lady and severing my chances of being invited to the ongoing party.
But I love the you that could be. Even if you’re just a dirty magazine and a Dan Brown paperback nobody’s claiming; with time and luck, you’ll grow. And if you mysteriously acquire a copy of The Tao of the Dude, you’ll know who it’s from.
Keep on Keepin’ On (but also, could you keep it down?),
Bitchy Cat Lady
SOCIAL PROBLEMS—POLICE—James, Stuart H., Paul E. Kish, and T. Paulette Sutton
—For Life, Scarred
—Recovering, Never
Dear Principles of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis,
Get the fuck out of here. Bwa-boogity-boogity (that’s me shivering with disgust).
I don’t know who put you on hold, or why. If it’s the guy who offered to paint my likeness on the back of his bomber jacket, I’m going to flip my shit. Actually, if it’s anyone but Gary Sinise from CSI or someone else with the trimmings of a qualified detective (trench coat, tiny pocket notepad, evil noir dame hanging limply from arm), it’s gonna be super awkward. I’m not making eye contact.
Shit, what if it’s some poor old lady who’s mist
aken you for a new Nora Roberts series? You could seriously give an unsuspecting person a heart attack. I know what you are and you still gave me what my nephew likes to call the Hot Burps. Bwug.
We need to get you out of here. None of the staff can stop reading you. We keep yelling “Oh my God!” and it’s a library and we’re supposed to be quiet. We’re all in a circle around you, holding our hands up in the air every time someone turns the page, looking away with grimaces on our faces. It looks like a religious testimony in here. Or like Adele is singing to us.
Don’t make us look anymore! Especially the head lacerations. ESPECIALLY all the blood-spattered toilets. You just gotta go. Blurk. Bwa.
You can come back when whoever put you on hold is done with you and we will gladly send you back to the library you came from. Just don’t return with anything from your insides on your outsides. You know what I’m saying.
Bwuughck,
MEMOIR—YOUNG LOVE—Barber, Lynn
—Skeezeballs, Avoiding
Dear An Education,
It is with great sorrow and a bit of trepidation, actually, that I feel I must send you away.
I’m trying to sound British, how’m I doin’?
You and I have a lot in common. Youthful zest and an eagerness to be unleashed into the big bustling world; ill-fated romances with untrustworthy men; and we both use the term “tremendous fun” often. Because, let’s be real, we are tremendous fun.
It’s because I see so much of myself in you that I have to give you up—to someone else I see myself in: my darling, innocent, eighteen-year-old niece. She needs a no-nonsense talk about the nonsense of early womanhood. My hope is that you’ll confess to her stories of your tryst with Slimy Older Man and she will find it so frankly described that she will not feel the need to repeat it. We’re in the Midwest, you see, not London, so while your older beau introduced your heroine to highfalutin restaurants and posh hotels, the equivalent in our area is, like, a Coney Island restaurant and a Holiday Inn with a pool. I would prefer if her education came from you and not someone who won a free night’s stay in a Jacuzzi room at the casino.
Tell her what you said about the importance of school, especially the stuff about learning to be kind and good and meeting kind and good men. But, you know, the actual learning part too. Your elegance and wit are just what this young woman needs to begin her new independent life. That and some mace. And a copy of Reality Bites. And laundry quarters. And some Taco Bell gift cards.
I trust you. Now go forth and provide, An Education.
Cheers,
DIARIES—World War II—Frank, Anne
—Girls, Brave
Dear Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,
Your author wrote down a wish to “go on living even after my death,” and, through her tragedy, she got it. So maybe that means your wishes will be heard if you write them down. Here are mine for her:
That she could have seen her name in print.
That she could have had a long stretch.
That she could have hugged her mother tighter, and that she never had a moment’s guilt about whatever their last words were.
That she could have marched with the feminists.
That she could have had grandchildren who rolled their eyes at each other when she spoke of the war.
That she could have fallen in love with a handsome man who one day plucked a whisker from her chin, to which she could have responded, “It’s hell getting old.”
And I wish they could have had a good laugh about that.
With Appreciation and Love,
JUVENILE FICTION—Silverstein, Shel
—Apples, Bitter
Dear The Giving Tree,
You broke my heart. It started out so sweet with you. I thought you were about being, you know, giving, and how generosity fills us all up with happiness. It was all little children skipping around in the woods—for a while.
In high school even, I loved you so much I gave you to a boy I also loved. Do you want to guess how that went, Giving Tree? Want to guess who was the tired old stump at the end of that book?
We didn’t cross paths again until someone gave you to me for my baby shower. I arranged you on the shelf without much thought and didn’t get around to rereading you until I found myself awake at 2 A.M. with another human literally sucking the life out of me. I’ve got to say, the glow of the crib-side lamp does not cast you in the most favorable light.
This tree you talk about keeps giving and giving and GIVING and you say she’s happy, but I don’t know. The little boy brands her with his initials, takes everything she has, and leaves. And she’s happy about it? The End? Maybe it was just the sleepless nights or the hormones, but WTF?
Tree was not happy. My girl was suffering. First off, she is the only tree in that goddamn forest. No other trees to commiserate with or advise her against all that giving. Then that punk comes and takes all her leaves and apples. In the end, I think we’re dealing with a severe case of low self-esteem and an unreliable narrator.
I’m leaving this relationship with unanswered questions. Is the tree supposed to be a mother figure who enjoys sitting alone and waiting for people to ask her for stuff? Or is she, like, the Environment? Were you written so that future politicians could use you to illustrate points about using up natural resources?
I don’t care. You took from me, Giving Tree. You took and you took and you took. And I’m still giving, but now I’m giving you up.
How Do You Like Them Apples?
FICTION—Nin, Anaïs
—Psst
—Dirty Stuff
Dear Delta of Venus,
Two words: Summer. Thrillz. Beach sex without the sand burns. I’m talking about you, Anaïs Nin erotica.
I don’t think they ever explained the difference between romance and erotica in library school. But now I know! Romance is: read thirty chapters of bickering and almost-kisses, and then watch the main characters do it. The end. Erotica is: pick any page—filthiest thing you’ve ever read.
You, Venus, somehow manage to be the dirtiest and the classiest of them all, and that’s why, this summer, you’re my shoreside secret. Just a plain beige paperback. No one could ever guess the astrologer exhibitionists, nude models, and masked woodland strangers that are getting it on in between your pages.
Here at the beach, I look like the unassuming reader in the one-piece, cloaked in multiple layers of SPF 70 and a big brimmed hat. A volleyball guy who jogged over to retrieve his ball just told me to smile and look like I’m enjoying myself. What a fool. I said nothing, just glared and violently snapped you back open in front of my face. But in my head I was telling him, “Yah, have fun hoping someone’s top falls off during a serve. I’m reading about an orgy in an opium den. And I’ll never wrinkle. Hate me cause you ain’t me.”
Anyway, thanks for your discretion. And for always referring to female genitalia as “her sex.” That’s some classy shit.
Enthusiastically,
HOBBIES—Allen, Joseph
—Appalachian Weaving
—Squandered Lives
Dear The Leisure Alternatives Catalog, 1979,
I dig you. I enjoy thinking about a time when being leisurely wasn’t “Nnnhhhnnh. Must. Binge on. Netflix. Must. Read. One more article telling me why I’m a terrible parent.”
You’re an eccentric and seriously thorough book. You’ve thought of everything! Sports, nature, enlightenment, the arts! And you have wacky headings like “Give Yourself the Business” and “Canadian Sunburn” that are so intriguing. I really think a weaving class in Appalachia sounds chock-full of charm!
I would love to spend some downtime making kaleidoscopes and learning Polynesian dance. Or canning pickles and traveling in search of the Loch Ness monster. But the truth is, while writing this note, I’ve been interrupted five times to help my son load the couch cushions into his dump truck. I’ve answered two e-mails and read a list of things every ’90s girl remembers. I could look into you la
ter tonight, but I’m probably going to watch an episode of Roseanne that I’ve already seen thirty times.
Now I remember why I don’t pick you up very often. It goes downhill fast with you, and I’m not talking about your suggestion to join an all-girl ski club.
Just looking at you makes me feel like I’m squandering my life. You remind me of those people I run into on Saturday afternoons who talk about all the shit they’ve already gotten done that day. And when I say that, I mean people that post their to-do lists on Facebook. That’s “running into” now. I know it’s pathetic, but what’s to be done? We can’t all be art-cinema buffs and sailing experts like you. God, if you had an Instagram, I’d have blocked your ass a long time ago.
There’s really nothing left to say here. You keep doing you, and I’ll do the me that doesn’t fully live up to my potential, and we’ll meet up next time I convince myself I want to start a consciousness-raising group. Which is, give or take, every six years.
Bye for Now,
CARICATURES AND CARTOONS—COMICS—Clowes, Daniel
—First Times
Dear Ghost World,
I don’t know a more couth-ly way to say this. You popped my graphic novel cherry.
I was curious, but I thought comics and graphic novels were all about burly superheroes and epic battles. I like my reads evenly paced with lots of character exploration and subtext. The only thing I could think of that’s worse than having to watch a bunch of action scenes is having to read them.
And then you came around, a book with goddamn GIRLS talking about perfecting their look, and Don Knotts–lookalike astrologists, and which boys they secretly like.
