global warming
or the coming Singularity
or space travel
or tougher sentences for parole violators.
Or world peace.
But I want to talk about something completely personal.
I want to talk about books and what they have meant to me.
Which is everything in the world.
I owe books my vocation, my life, even my family.
I’m not kidding.
You probably don’t know this, but I only got married because of a book.
And, no, I’m not talking about love poems.
And, NO, not Lolita.
I got married because of Lord of the Rings.
To quote Kip Russell in Have Space Suit, Will Travel, “How it happened was this way.”
I was flying out to Connecticut
for the express purpose of breaking up with my boyfriend
and I bought this set of three paperbacks to read on the plane
and by the time I got to New Haven
I was so worried about Frodo and Sam
that I said to my boyfriend, “It’s awful. They’re trying to sneak into
Mordor and the Ringwraiths are after them and I don’t trust Gollum and . . .”
and I completely forgot to break up with him.
And, as of yesterday, we’ve been married thirty-nine years.
I owe my daughter’s name to a book, too. We named her after the good daughter in King Lear
and she has lived up to her name in absolutely every way.
And I owe all the books I’ve written to books.
They taught me how to write.
Agatha Christie taught me plotting
Mary Stewart suspense
Heinlein dialogue
P. G. Wodehouse comedy
Shakespeare irony
and Philip K. Dick how to pull the rug out from under the reader.
Books also gave me all sorts of good advice on how to cope with everything,
from following the rules—
“There are three rules for writing a novel,” W. Somerset Maugham said. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
to the stupid questions people ask writers—
Heavens! [Harriet Vane thought.] Here was that awful woman, Muriel Campshott, coming up to claim acquaintance. Campshott had always simpered. She still simpered . . . She was going to say, “How do you think of all your plots?” She did say it. Curse the woman.
to coping with the pressure to write what your publisher—or your readers—want—
“The only thing you can do,” Dorothy Sayers said, “is write what you want to write and hope for the best.”
to feeling like you’ve made a hideous mistake in your choice of career—
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing,” Robert Benchley told me, “but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was famous.”
They even showed me what to write and how to write it.
When I went to England for the first time,
I remembered that book about the Blitz Mrs. Werner had read out loud when I was in the eighth grade,
and it made me go to St. Paul’s,
where I found the fire watch and Oxford’s time-traveling historians
and my life’s work.
Above all, they taught me what it meant to be a writer.
“Storytellers make us remember what mankind would have been like had not fear, and the failing will, and the laws of nature tripped up its heels,” William Butler Yeats said.
And books—
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let me begin at the beginning.
I loved books from the moment I saw them, from before I could even read.
And as soon as I did learn,
I read everything I could get my grubby little hands on.
You couldn’t get a library card till you were eight years old when I was a kid
(These were dark, benighted times)
and you were only allowed to check out three at a time
(Really dark and benighted times).
So the day I got my library card,
I checked out three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.
Rita Mae Brown says, “When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.”
Mine, too.
I read all three Oz books that night
and took them back the next day
and checked out three more.
And then I checked out all the other Oz books
and all the Maida’s Little Shop books
and all the Elsie Dinsmore books—
possibly the worst books ever written—
and all the Betsy, Tacy, and Tib books
and the Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, and Violet fairy books.
No one else in my family liked to read,
and they were always telling me to “get my nose out of that book
and go outside to play,”
an order which had no apparent effect on me
because I went right ahead and read
all the Anne of Green Gables books
and all the Nancy Drew books
and all the Mushroom Planet books
and Alice in Wonderland
and A Little Princess
and Cress Delahanty
and The Water Babies.
When I was in sixth grade,
I read Little Women
and decided I wanted to be a writer like Jo March.
When I was in seventh grade,
I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and decided to read my way straight through the library
from A to Z
like Francie does in that book.
When I was in eighth grade,
my teacher Mrs. Werner read us
An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden, a book about an orphan who plants a garden in the bombed-out rubble of a church,
and I fell in love with the Blitz.
And then, when I was thirteen,
I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
and it was all over.
How it happened was this way.
I was thirteen
and shelving books in the junior high library,
and I picked up a yellow book—I can still see it—
with a guy in a space suit on the cover.
The title was Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
and I opened it and read:
“You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I want to go to the Moon.’
‘Certainly,’ he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome
K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.
I said, ‘Dad, please! I’m serious!’”
There’s a scene at the end of Star Wars.
The Death Star has cleared the planet
and Luke Skywalker is going in for one last run.
Princess Leia is back at command headquarters,
listening intently to the battle.
All the other fighter pilots are dead or out of action
and Darth Vader has Luke clearly in his sights.
And all of a sudden,
Han Solo comes zooming in from left field
to blast Darth Vader
and says,
“Yahoo! You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing.”
Now, when he does this,
Princess Leia doesn’t look up from the battle map
or even change her expression,
but my daughter, who was eight years old at the time,
leaned over to me and said, “Oh, she’s hooked, Mother.”
And when I opened that yellow book
and read those first lines of Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
I was hooked.
I raced through Have Space Suit and then—
after a brief d
etour to read Three Men in a Boat—
I read Citizen of the Galaxy
and Time for the Stars
and The Star Beast
and Double Star
and Tunnel in the Sky
and The Door into Summer
and everything else Heinlein had ever written.
And then Asimov
and Clarke
and The Martian Chronicles
and A Canticle for Leibowitz
and then, oh my God,
I discovered the Year’s Best short story collections
and the world exploded into dazzling possibilities.
Here, side by side, were the most astonishing short stories
and novelettes
and novellas
and poems
“Vintage Season”
and “Lot”
and “The Man Who Lost the Sea”
and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”
and “Flowers for Algernon”
and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
stories by Kit Reed
and William Tenn
and James Blish
and Fredric Brown
and Zenna Henderson
and Philip K. Dick,
all in one book
nightmarish futures
and high-tech futures
marvelous Shangri-Las
and strange distant planets
aliens
and time travel
and robots
and unicorns
and monsters
tragedies
and adventures
and fantasies
and romances
and comedies
and horrors
“Surface Tension”
“Evening Primrose”
“Day Million”
“Continued on Next Rock”
“When We Went to See the End of the World”
“I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”
and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,”
stories that in only a few pages,
a few thousand words,
could turn reality upside down and inside out
and make you look at the world,
at the universe,
a whole new way,
could make you laugh,
make you think,
break your heart.
I was beyond hooked.
I was stunned.
I was speechless with wonder,
like Kip and Peewee looking at their own Milky Way from the Magellanic Clouds,
like the two hobos in Ray Bradbury’s “A Miracle of Rare Device,”
gazing at the beautiful city in the air.
And I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life reading.
And writing.
I stopped reading my way through the library from A to Z
and started reading all the books I could find
with the little atom and rocketship symbol on their spines.
I had only gotten as far as the Ds on my plan to read my way
through the alphabet when I stopped,
but, as it turned out,
it was a good thing I’d gotten that far.
Because when I was twelve,
my mother died suddenly and shatteringly,
and my world fell apart,
and I had nobody to turn to but books.
They saved my life.
I know what you’re thinking,
that books provided an escape for me.
And it’s certainly true books can offer refuge from worries and despair—
As Leigh Hunt says, “I entrench myself in books equally against sorrow and the weather.”
I remember particularly
a night in the hospital at my five-year-old daughter’s bedside
waiting for tests to show if she had appendicitis
or something worse,
clinging to James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small
like it was a life raft.
During the Blitz,
in the makeshift libraries set up in the tube shelters,
the most popular books were Agatha Christie’s mysteries,
in which the murderer’s always caught and punished,
justice always triumphs,
and the world makes sense.
And when I’m anxious about things, I reread Agatha Christie, too.
And Mary Stewart.
And Lenora Mattingly Weber’s Beany Malone books.
Books can help you get through
long nights and long trips
the wait for the phone call
and the judge’s verdict
and the doctor’s diagnosis
can switch off your squirrel-caging mind,
can make you forget your own troubles in the troubles of
Kip and Peewee
and Frodo
and Viola
and Harry
and Charlie
and Huck.
But it wasn’t escape I needed when my mother died.
It was the truth.
And I couldn’t get anyone to tell it to me.
Instead, they said things like:
“There’s a reason this happened,”
and “You’ll get over this,”
and “God never sends us more than we can bear.”
Lies, all lies.
I remember an aunt saying sagely, “The good die young”—
not exactly a motivation to behave yourself—
and more than one person telling me, “It’s all part of God’s plan.”
I remember thinking, even at age twelve,
What kind of moron is God?
I could come up with a better plan than this.
And the worst lie of all, “It’s for the best.”
Everybody lied—relatives, clergymen, friends.
So it was a good thing I’d reached the Ds because I had
Margery Allingham
and James Agee’s A Death in the Family
and Peter Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place
and Peter De Vries’s The Blood of the Lamb to tell me the truth.
“Time heals nothing,” Peter De Vries said.
And Margery Allingham said, “Mourning is not forgetting. It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied, and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot.”
And when I discovered science fiction a year later,
Robert Sheckley said,
“Never try to explain to yourselves why some things happen and why other things don’t happen. Don’t ask and don’t imagine that an explanation exists. Get it?”
And Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days”
and John Crowley’s “Snow”
and Tom Godwin
taught me everything there is to know about death
and memory
and the cold equations.
But there were also hopeful messages in those books.
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,” Thornton Wilder said, “and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
And Dorothy, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, said, “Never give up. . . . No one ever knows what’s going to happen next.”
“If you look for truth,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and in the end, despair.”
I found what I was looking for,
what I needed,
what I wanted,
what I loved
in books
when I couldn’t find it anywhere else.
Francie and the public library and books saved my life.
And taught me the most important lesson books have to teach.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin says, “
but then you read. It was[books that] taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
And the narrator in the movie Matilda says it even better:
“Matilda read all kinds of books and was nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships onto the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: ‘You are not alone.’”
I told you about falling in love with books
that day I got my library card,
that day I opened Have Space Suit and read that first page,
that day I discovered the Year’s Best collections,
but it wasn’t just that I fell in love with books,
with science fiction.
It wasn’t just that they were there when I needed them.
It was that when I found them,
I also found,
like one of Zenna Henderson’s People,
or the Ugly Duckling
or Anne of Green Gables
or Harry Potter,
my true family,
my “kindred spirits,” as Anne calls them,
my own kind.
And, finding them,
for the first time I knew,
like Ozma released from the witch’s spell,
like Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
like Bethie and Jemmy and Valancy,
who I really was.
I had escaped,
but it was not from the real world.
It was from exile.
I had come home.
Just like in a story.
And I lived happily ever after.
Books are an amazing thing.
Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality
or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play
as merely a distraction
or an amusement
or a waste of time
is dead wrong.
Books are the most important
the most powerful
the most beautiful thing
humans have ever created.
When Kip and Peewee find themselves on trial for earth
and trying to defend it against the charge
that it’s a danger which should be destroyed, Kip says,
“Have you heard our poetry?”
And what better defense of us could you come up with?
Books can reach out across space
and time
and language
and culture
and customs,
gender
and age
and even death
and speak to someone they never met,
to someone who wasn’t even born when they were written
and give them help
and advice
and companionship
and consolation.
In the words of Clarence Day, Jr.,
“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.
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