Ours for the Reading
Remembering my parents’ excellent library
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Many of my earliest memories revolve around books: The stately history books and hardbound Modern Library collection housed inside my father’s secretary; my mom taking my little brother and me to the library every Saturday, each of us checking out the maximum number of books, then walking the seven city blocks back home, unbothered about having to carry them in our arms, only thrilled to have new books to read; the too-good-to-be-trueness of a building full of books that were ours for the borrowing, the intoxicating smell of that place, and my fervent love of the quiet because it meant that reading was happening there. I also recall the impossibly tiny used-book shop on Brighton Beach Avenue that somehow contained every book ever published, and how my mom allowed me one book and one comic book every time we went there. There are memories of books arriving in the mail from book clubs and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But mostly, I remember my parents reading, always reading, and always reading to us.
My parents were New York City schoolteachers with little disposable income, but in our home, books were a necessity, like toothpaste, or milk. Each book, from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts Treasury, was venerated, beloved, and deserving of the precious space it occupied in our small Brooklyn apartment. Books were thoughtfully piled on dressers and nightstands and carefully stacked in hallways and closets. As a young child, if I didn’t see books in other people’s homes, I wondered where they were hiding them. The possibility that they didn’t have any never occurred to me.
When I was 11 years old, we moved into a larger apartment. The former tenants had installed built-in bookshelves on one entire wall in the living room. Suddenly, we had 100 glorious feet of shelf space and all of the books that had been scattered throughout our previous apartment could now reside, happily, comfortably, in one place. Suddenly, we had our own personal library.
I spent countless hours of my childhood and teen years admiring, examining, and reading many of the hundreds of books in my parents’ library. It was there that I was introduced to the peasants and bureaucrats of 19th-century Russia as depicted in the writings of Chekhov and Dostoevsky; where I learned what life was like in a village in China in the early 20th century as described by Pearl S. Buck in The Good Earth; and where I found out what life might be like anywhere in the year 1984, according to the imagination of George Orwell. I discovered that words on a page could utterly surprise me through the artistry of Maupassant and O. Henry, and completely terrify me through the macabre minds of Mary Shelley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Benchley, and Stephen King. I found out that books could make me laugh out loud, but that the best books would make me weep. Even as a kid, I knew how lucky I was to have this kind of access to so many masterpieces. I eagerly read gems of the American literary canon by authors such as Steinbeck, Hemingway, Twain, Emerson, Wharton, Hughes, and Fitzgerald. I discovered the edgy voice of Philip Roth; got a taste of the vast history of British literature, and became aware of the fields of philosophy and psychology. After listening one day from my bedroom window to Bella Abzug, a leader in the women’s movement, speaking through a megaphone on the street below, I borrowed my mother’s copies of The Feminine Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves, wanting to better understand what Abzug had said. Sometimes, I would revisit cherished children’s books, which had their own section on our shelves because in our family, you didn’t outgrow or tire of any good book. I never stopped taking delight in Miss Suzy, tucked into her cozy bed at the tip, tip, top of the tall oak tree, or Max’s journey across the ocean to where the wild things are, or the angels Peter made on that snowy day.
My parents did not exclude controversial books from our home. Ideas were to be discussed and debated, embraced or spurned, endorsed or reprehended, but never banned or burned. The current organized political movement to ban or restrict books in public schools and libraries is undemocratic, and it’s escalating, despite the fact that a large majority of voters and parents oppose book bans. American Library Association (ALA) President Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada said, “The unprecedented number of challenges we’re seeing already this year reflects coordinated, national efforts to silence marginalized or historically underrepresented voices and deprive all of us — young people, in particular — of the chance to explore a world beyond the confines of personal experience.” Restricting access to books that present a diversity of cultures and viewpoints poses a threat to the development of critical thinking, reading comprehension, and empathy in students, according to experts in such fields as literacy, education, and child development. This research is cited in the paper, “Empowered by Reading: The Benefits of Giving Youth Access to a Wide Variety of Reading Materials,” an initiative of the ALA and several dozen national partners. As a naive 12-year-old reading Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time, I couldn’t imagine that a totalitarian society could exist in America. Censorship is a tool used by those who seek to instill fear and control thought, and one of the hallmarks of the nightmarish dystopian state that Orwell warned us about.
While I have always advocated for access to information, I must admit that I did not have much affection for the set of World Book Encyclopedias that my parents bought. I was, however, grateful for them whenever I had to write a report for school. Many of you over the age of 30 will understand what I mean. Many of you under the age of 30 will have never heard the word “encyclopedia.”
After I grew up and left home, I visited my parents frequently. I’m not sure if they realized that I was also visiting their books. The reassuring familiarity of those books was one of the things I enjoyed most about returning home. At the same time, I was creating a library of my own. Because I knew that my kids would be growing up in the Internet Age, I wanted to surround them with physical books. I wanted them to appreciate the aesthetic quality of books, to feel the paper, to turn the pages, to write in the margins, to save their place with a bookmark or a dog ear. I wanted to provide them with a diverse collection of books that would expose them to a wide range of voices, stories, thoughts, opinions, ideas, points of view, knowledge, and dreams. I wanted them to be comforted, inspired, and transported by the printed word. I wanted them to know what it means to have the companionship of a book, to feel the freedom that comes from reading a book, and to experience the simple joy of holding a book in their hands.
When my first child was born, my parents shipped my childhood books to their first grandchild to become part of the library that I was building. There is no greater joy than reading a beloved book from your childhood to your own child. By that time, many of those aging books had suffered from oxidization and acid deterioration, rendering the pages yellow and brittle. In some cases, I was able to buy newly printed copies, allowing a new generation to be shaped by those same transformative stories and illustrations. I acquired my own copies of many of the other books I had read in my parents’ home, rereading them in college or later. While it often seemed that those books had changed, it is, of course, my perspective that had changed.
My personal library has evolved and shifted as my life has evolved and shifted. Unlike my parents, who stayed married for life and never moved from that apartment with the built-in shelves, I have experienced several moves into progressively larger homes followed by divorce followed by moves into progressively smaller homes. Through the years, I have donated many books to libraries and charitable organizations. I can’t say that it was easy for me, but it was rewarding to give back to my community in this way, knowing that the books would find a new audience and perhaps a new home. Even my parents eventually removed those bookshelves and donated most of their books.
I’ve held on to my core collection, even if I’ve had to store much of it in boxes, or, at times, in a storage facility. I’ve saved some of my books from college because looking at them reminds me of the excitement that I felt at the beginning of every semester, knowing that each one contained a bit of the world that I was seeking to understand. I’ve also saved some favorites from my childhood, as well as my kids’ favorites from their childhoods and school-age years. They’re on their own now, making their way in the world. But it brings me joy to keep these books so that when they visit me, no matter where I am living, they know that they are home.
