My mother loved books, though not necessarily reading them. She thought they were beautiful.
So do I.
One of my favorite activities is looking at other people’s bookshelves. They’re infinitely more interesting than wallpaper, or even the framed art on the walls. They deepen our relationship with our hosts: like the windows that show us their outside neighborhoods, the books let us look inside for a glimpse at their interior lives. Are the books used, leather, kinky, kooky, murky? One glance at a shelf can open a hundred conversations. The Kindle will never be able to do that.
A New York Times article said that in the age of the iPhone, YouTube and video, the very idea of the book is becoming increasingly elastic. Well, not for me.
My mother, Kathleen McDonald, belonged to the Book of the Month Club; she was the perfect candidate for membership. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she and my father — Harry Meinke, the son of German immigrants — were salt-of-the-earth Americans rising from blue to white collar. Up and down our block in Brooklyn the fractured notes of Chopin’s mazurkas wobbled out of the windows as restless children practiced the piano, striving to move upward into the cultured middle class. (One of the books on our shelves is Masterpieces of Piano Music, held together by torn blue tape around its battered spine. I stare at it with mixed emotions.)
The Book of the Month Club began in 1926, in the middle of the Depression, and by the 1940s its enrollment had soared to over half a million subscribers. Its aim was to help new readers enter the world of books by guiding their choices: Americans have always loved the idea of Experts, now called Gurus. Cultural connoisseurs made fun of the Club as “vulgarized” and “middle-brow,” but I think it worked pretty well. I remember All Quiet on the Western Front and The Good Earth on the shelves, though intellectuals made fun of that, too, even though Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize. What the connoisseurs didn’t realize is that those books got innumerable young people seriously reading.
I can’t be alone in this: once I learned to read, I couldn’t stop. I’d read anything. My younger sisters’ Nancy Drew books, the whole Bulldog Drummond series, newspapers, comics, dictionaries, the Illustrated Bible — everything except my school homework (I had my standards). And each month I’d wait for my mother’s book-of-the-month to arrive. I remember the green nubby cloth cover of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I devoured scores of romances and novels long forgotten.
One day I picked up a book by a writer I’d never heard of, Christopher La Farge’s Each to the Other. I really don’t know if it was a good book or not, but as I read it I began to feel dizzy. It was a novel — intrigue, humor, sex! — in verse. Perhaps it spoke to me because it was about an unhappy couple and I was sensing the strains in my parents’ marriage, which would end in divorce some time later. But the idea that poetry was so flexible was a new one to me. I still remember “…each verb a piece of me, / Each noun an echo…” I didn’t know what it meant, but wrote it down in a little notebook I had started keeping.
For all these book-loving reasons, the St. Petersburg Times and the University of South Florida should be congratulated for continuing their annual celebration of books, next Saturday’s Festival of Reading. It began 17 years ago, in 1993, on the campus of Eckerd College, as a two-day bash, filled with books and their authors, with wand’ring minstrels and actors made up as famous writers strolling about. Traffic jams on 54th Avenue were a problem. But the transfer to a one-day festival on USF’s downtown campus has been a complete success. It’s a delightful party, with books piling everywhere.
Speaking of which, the festival always throws a fine bash at the Vinoy for the arriving writers. Wandering through those handsome rooms, we feel like bedouins after a long dry trek through the desert — making our way by inner or outer stars — to reach this welcoming oasis.
Though the big things happen outside of books
books too are vital: our best words & thoughts
pooling on paper oases in a
desert of dying verbs granting our parched
selves this rare chance: Drink
—from “The Teacher” by Peter Meinke, in Zinc Fingers (2000)
—Peter Meinke will read from his most recent work, Lines from Neuchâtel — illustrated by Jeanne — at the Festival of Reading at 11:45 a.m., Oct. 24th.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.
