June 11, 2007
Monday

Always books in your room, Margaret:
the feeling I had . . . was that we shared,
though silently, in countless lives
across the world and down the years.
                    — Pat Boran, b. 1963
                        Irish writer

My life as a reader began where many such lives do, at my mother’s elbow. I am told that she would read to me while she nursed my baby sister, three and a half years younger. Chances are she read to me before that, because my inability to remember a time when I was not a reader is probably tied to my being unable to remember a time when books and magazines and other printed matter were not part of my environment. I was born before the presence of a television set was the norm in American homes and grew up when only three channels at most were available. (Until I was twelve my family got only one channel, NBC Channel 8 out of Lancaster. Thus I knew Fury, The Story of a Horse and the Boy Who Loves Him but not The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, a real gap in my schoolyard cultural knowledge.)

When I was in third grade my parents gave me a red pencil box that looked like a book, with “Knowledge is Power” stamped in gold on the lid. I kept lists of books I’d read and ones I wanted to read in it, and ideas for stories, mostly about a girl who lived on a horse ranch in Wyoming and solved mysteries after school with her twin brother. It was, I suppose, my first journal.

Since then I have used books and reading for information, for pleasure, and for escape. When I joined Library Thing I knew I had to get a paid membership right away, because I’d used up the 200 titles you can have in a free membership before I’d finished listing just the books in my study. There are books in every room of this house, and despite the fact that there are about 500 square feet of bookshelf space (including 18 linear feet floor-to-ceiling in one room alone), books are stacked on tables and on the floor, in baskets and in boxes, and in the trunk of my car

My reading can be haphazard. It is also, I think, slow. I read only thirty pages an hour, no matter what the nature of the material. In 2004 I analyzed my reading habits based on notations in my calendar and journal, concluding that I was not reading as much as I would like to, nor was I reading enough of the kinds of things that would help me develop as a fiction writer.

At the beginning of June I decided to get intentional, once again, about my reading. I had just under ten weeks until I left for Bread Loaf, so I drew up a plan for the reading and writing I wanted to accomplish by then (when all new work halts for the duration of the conference). I decided to try for ten books, and I chose four fiction titles and six memoir titles. The list, compiled as I read because I already changed the original selections) can be viewed at Ten Weeks, Ten Books, as yet unannotated. So far I’ve completed one nonfiction title and am into a fiction selection. I’m a little behind on my plan because with both books I’ve had to stop to copy out passages that strike me as thought-provoking or beautifully-written, or both, and in some instances the passages have sent me down the labyrinths of my memory and set me to writing pages of recollections of my own.

But isn’t that what reading is supposed to do?