Bookshelf of the Month, March 2018
I have been staring at the two bookshelves in my bedroom with a major case of writer’s block since I received the invitation to represent the “Bookshelf of the Month”. I see my past through spines of the books and remember the times that I have sat curled up reading them but who would be interested in reading about my Harry Potter collection? Or my sappy romance novels? I guess it is not so much the titles of the stories but how these books have changed so much of my outlook on life. The books on my shelves have saved my life by giving me life.
I am the baby of my family and the frequent victim of the “when you were a kid you used to…” stories. Some of them are too embarrassing to write about (yet) but most of them include books. My cousin Cissy is the author of most of the stories about me grabbing her hand and making her listen to me read from one of my books. The only thing that really surprises me about the stories is when she tells me that I began reading books such as A Home for a Bunny and The Poky Little Puppy to her before I was even four years old. From this young age my bookshelf began to grow.
Growing up I was a very active child but my books were my solace; my calm time curling up in the bottom of my closet for hours. No matter how things were going in my “real” life, my books could always carry me off to new adventures in magical realms inside my mind. I was never very picky about the books that I read as a child but I always drifted to the “scary” books in my library. I spent most of my elementary school days entranced by the stories of R. L. Stein from his first round of best sellers, Goosebumps to his more “big kid” stories in Fear Street. I loved these stories because they included kids my age. Even though they were scared out of their minds in most of the stories they had something that I felt was missing from my life at the time: awesome adventures to go on with my friends. These books were my first window into the world of fantasy and scary (albeit mildly scary) stories. I was officially the creepy kid who liked the weird books. I had the entire collective works of Stein and proudly displayed them on the bookshelves of my childhood as shrines to my creepy taste in scary stories and most importantly these books planted the seed of imaginative writing deep in my mind.
My next love with books was through the writings of Christopher Pike. I found his series, The Last Vampire by chance as I was walking around the library of my school waiting for my parents to pick me up. My previous history with Goosebumps had begun my addiction to monster stories and vampires were the next logical step for a growing girl, right? Engrossing myself into these stories gave me an escape from the real world horrors of sickness and the passing of my mom. Reading helped me cope with my mother’s illness by giving my mind somewhere to be as well as entertaining my mom by reading to her. (Her favorite author was Stephen King but I was a little too young at this time to be reading his stories.) This series of vampire stories saved me from myself when my mother passed away and reading has been kind of a coping mechanism and a way to be with my mom ever since.
Unfortunately, these wonderful series have long since disappeared from my shelves to be replaced with more “grown up” book series such as……Harry Potter! I am a complete nerd when it comes to this series and I don’t care if I am well past the target age demographic. These books will never disappear from my bookshelves with the exception of when one of my kids want to read one. (Currently my oldest son has read them twice and my 8 year old daughter has finally started the series! Ten points to Hufflepuff!) J. K. Rowling was my hero when I discovered the series when I was a senior in high school. Don’t judge! I even spent my Senior Ditch Day at the theater watching the movie…twice. I could relate to how Harry felt and I continued reading the series to see if he ended up with a happy ending to give myself hope of a happy ending. The more I read the books the more I began to see hidden messages within the pages. My favorite was the words of Professor Snape when he first met Harry Potter. “What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?” What? Snape wasn’t just trying to call Harry out for not paying attention? AMAZING! This was the first series that I actually “studied” and synthesized the hidden meanings behind the stories. I fell in love with these hidden gems that Rowling had so cleverly hidden behind her text. The seeds of inquisitive reading were planted by the wonderful J.K. Rowling.
Now I want to share with you my most active and recent bookshelf. These books are found on top of and always within arm’s reach of my desk and have been collected during my time as student at PNW. The books don’t really spend a lot of time in one place on these shelves because they are constantly coming down for research and studying because it is impossible to master the contents of any book by reading or perusing it only once or twice. There are little nuggets of information in all of these books that can have offer that inspirational “aha” that we all yearn for and this is especially true for not only my students but for me too. No one book carries all of the information that I want to share with my students so I mesh them all together to produce the most effective class that I can.
That being said, the most important books on this shelf are those written by writers on their views of how to write such as Anne Lamott and Stephen King. From the inspiration of a fellow teacher at the university I opened my class with a quote from Stephen King to show my students the realistic opinion of a writer on writing. Many students dread their required class of Composition One and my intention is to show them that writing is not what they think it is by hopefully showing them the humanistic imperfections of writing.
“This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do — not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less bullshit.”
Stephen King
You can tell a lot about somebody through the looking-glass of their bookshelf. My bookshelves are constantly growing as I evolve and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My collection grows as I find new interesting pieces to add resulting in the growth and expansion of my own writing. If I were to give up my books and stop collecting the wonderful stories encompassed within their covers, I would also be giving up my ability to write and that is just not an option.
