from deviant art
Certain books trigger particular memories in much the same way that scents often do.
The other day, while going through our books to weed them out and take some of them to Goodwill, I ran across The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough’s beautiful novel about a love affair between an Australian woman and a priest, and suddenly, I was in the bookstore in Vero Beach where I had bought this book in 1977. I had never heard of the author or the book before then, but the cover captured me. I remember taking the book to work with me every day and reading it on my lunch hour. I was working as a librarian and Spanish teacher in a prison for juvenile offenders and that story whisked me right out of that world and into the one McCullough wrote about so eloquently.
During this same excursion through our books, I ran across Looking for Carroll Beckwith, the True Stories of a Detective’s Search for His Past. What the title doesn’t tell you is that Beckwith was tracking down one of his own past lives and his story is quite compelling. I came across it the year it was published, in 1999, and remember devouring it at the gym and while waiting in line to pick up Megan after school. When I finished it, I gave it to my dad to read. He was living with us then, my mother was in an Alzheimer’s facility, and I felt it would open him to the possibility of reincarnation. It did.
In 1975, I was teaching Spanish to hormonal middle schoolers – grades 6, 7, 8. One day, a kid named Bryan handed me Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. “Read this, Ms. Trish. You’ll love it. This King guy is really good.”
Bryan was a rabble rouser, so I had my doubts about the book. But Bryan was also an avid reader and knew his books. Turns out he was right about this one. Salem’s Lot was King’s second novel, but the first by him that I’d read. In the years since, I’ve bought just about everything King has written. Because of the association between Bryan and King, I’ve always remembered the rabble rouser!
Somewhere in the early 1980s, right around the time I met Rob, I was in a used bookstore and came across a book by Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake. I had never read anything by her, but the title and the cover were so compelling, I bought it. This book remains one of my favorites, a kind of shamanic quest through a post-nuclear world.
And these are just a handful of books with vivid memories attached to them. I somehow don’t think e-books will ever live up to this kind of thing. I like my Nook, I recognize the value of e-books, I understand that publishing is moving more and more in this direction. But there’s something so intimate and mysterious about holding an actual book, turning the pages, marking the spot where you stop and start reading again. E-books, in their present form, can never be a substitute for that.
On the bookshelf next to my desk I keep certain books that speak to me: Walter Tevis’s Queen’s Gambit, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, one of the Harry Potter books, Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, The Hunger Games, The Shining, Dean Koontz’s Watchers are a among them. They get me through times when I’m blocked in a novel, when things don’t feel right and I’m not sure why, when my characters just aren’t behaving or cooperating. They push me forward.
The non-fiction books remind me that the world is much more mysterious and magnificent than we know. I sometimes rotate these books, depending on what I’m writing. I don’t think e-books will ever serve this same purpose for me. I mean, honestly, how can you rotate e-books? How can e-books display a spine, a title, a cover and pages that I can touch and turn?
I learned to read when I discovered comic books. I saved my comic books, hoarded them, kept them in neat stacks in my closet. When we moved from Caracas to the U.S., my parents tossed out all my comic books. I didn’t realize that until we were in the States, unpacking, and when I discovered what they had done, I was devastated. The comic books, like my books today, also held memories. And, I should add, some of them would bring a tidy sum of money today.
It’s odd, the things that trigger memories. For some people, it’s a certain smell, a view, a place. For me, it’s books. Actual books. The real thing. For me, it’s the title, the art on the cover, the back copy, and then the pages and the story. You dive in. You get lost. And when you surface for air, your world is changed.
