My parents were big readers and so were we. My dad who was an abusive brute, did one good thing. he introduced me to H. P. Lovecraft and Poe and when the nasty librarian told me I couldn't pick out books from the adult section, he went to her and said, "Oh yes, she can." We had only one place for books. in my home now, we have books in every room, in no order, so it's always a lovely surprise to see a book I hadn't thought of in a while and take it out and read it! when we had Max, our home away from home was the bookstore. Max knew he could sprawl out and read as many books as he wanted, and we would BUY HIM as many books as he wanted. He still is a huge reader, too, so I feel like we did our job!
Nancy Drew, that ace sleuth, was on my childhood bookshelves; along with the complete set of Dickens on my parents bookshelves; in youth, I was consumed with Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD: I found writing lessons in that book as I was trying to write; today: both Joan Didion and Eve Babitz; THE SCARLET LETTER by Hawthorne; everything Patti Smith; everything Alice Hoffman; everything Edna St Vincent Millay and Yeats - and Margaret Atwood: I dreamed about her last night
Oh wow. I will never forget reading In Cold Blood. I have read all of Dickens and reread him often. May father used to read us those. I've read David Copperfield many times. I think I've read all of Alice Hoffman too. I have to admit that Margaret Atwood depressed me so I read only one. She was brilliant but I didn't want to go to that dark side. Joan Didion appealed to me.
None that I can remember, but I somehow managed to be a vociferous reader and then my mother got onboard . Would never be on my own nightstand, but my mother read the Catholic version of the Bible three times! 🤷🏼♀️
That said, with a verified 52% of white wonen voting for the convicted felon, I “gifted” my two sisters with each their own copy of Hunter professor Jessie Daniels’s “Nice White Ladies,” and added that we should plan our own little book club to talk about it! One’s a Trumper and the other’s husband banned me from their home because I told her that he grabbed my butt. Chaos ensued. Merry and Happy to all!! 🎅🎄🥂💅🏻👑
My sister had a boyfriend that grabbed me one holiday. Being the collegiate tennis player I was, I swung around so fast and backhanded him across the face. He cried out and I said don’t ever drink that much and run into the wall Ever Again! He nodded. I never saw him again. Knowing my sister she would’ve blamed me for him groping me so… hey a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.
My parents never recommended any books, they were divorced, my mom worked full time and we saw my dad on Sundays for one hour.
I however was very interested in books. I read every book on the list of books that are being removed from libraries in places like Florida. I loved them all. “ to kill a mocking bird” one of the best. Gone with the wind, the Scarlet Letter and on and on. No regrets. It would be a crime to withhold these books from anyone.
I have a Harper Lee quote tattooed on my back that reads, "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." That sums up books for me.
Remember the color-coded reading programs in elementary school? I devoured those things. And Scholastic Book Fair at school was my favorite day! My parents subscribed to the Columbia Book Club, and no reading material was off limits in our home. We had a set of children's encyclopedias that I pored over, endlessly. Each volume was color-coded. I always read way above my grade level thanks to my parents' love of reading. They didn't read to us, but reading material was always around. I just spent 4 hours today going through my books and deciding what to store in the basement in my down-sized house. One of the benefits of aging is that so many books are new again, because you've forgotten them! lol
I grew up in the middle of nowhere and there weren't bookstores within driving distance. So the books were mostly my parents' college textbooks, or ones they'd bought while living in more metro areas. But somehow there was a copy of I'm OK, You're OK, a massive collection of James Michener, and a copy of Jaws (the cover terrified a 7-year-old me). Over time, I've migrated their copies of the classics to my own library (lots of Dostoyevsky, volumes from The Anchor Bible).
The books in my childhood room were mostly either library books or Scholastic Books that we had to fill out a form to buy. I think I checked out Frances Hodgson Burnett books a million times by the time I hit adolescence. And then of course the multi-volume sets that we got secondhand - the Andrew Lang fairy books, Childcraft, Young Folks' Shelf of Books (my favorite).
By early adolescence I'd graduated to Marilyn Sachs, Paula Danziger, Judy Blume, Constance C. Greene, Elizabeth Enright - I've started buying a lot of those back on my Kindle.
I have a great photo of my mother reading Five Little Peppers and How They Grew to the three of us all piled on her lap and shoulders in an armchair. And another of my dad reading a Dr. Seuss book to me and my sister (and our baby brother crawling away out of the frame). Dad really loved Dr. Seuss.
I worked in the public library in high school (and finally got my MLIS during COVID), so I have my books arranged very specifically. Fiction and trade nonfiction are alphabetical by author. Special interest - religion, software development, reference, children's books - get their own shelves. And I have an entire bookcase devoted to cookbooks.
There are, everywhere, the piles of to-be-reads. That's what coffee tables are for. Currently those include books on the English Civil War (for a fiction project), Talia Lavin's Wild Faith, and right now I'm in the middle of Lord Beaverbrook's account of Edward VIII's abdication (which I'm kind of hate-reading because he was sympathetic to Germany and kind of Rupert Murdoch-like in using his newspapers against people he didn't like).
I got in trouble once at school for reading "Brothers Karamazov" in study hall instead of the English homework that I'd been ignoring ... which is how I ended up in study hall, lol!
OMG, I love this. I got hauled in front of the class in 4th grade for smuggling Peanuts books under my desk (my whole family has always adored Peanuts, from the 1960s onward). "You think you're smarter than everyone here, and you don't have to listen?!!!" the teacher screamed at me. And...well, yeah, kinda. Charles Schulz and Dostoyevsky are not that far apart, honestly.
The one book that stands out in my mind was a hardback edition of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It was a larger format thathan most hardback books in order to feature the exquisite wood cut engravings by Fritz Eichenberg.
I wish I could upload photos of the engravings here. They are a lovely and some are quite spooky. The best I can do is link to this article in Publishers Weekly, which features several of them.
As a kid I was fascinated by the engravings, but I didn't actually read the book until one boring summer during my high school years. I fell in love with the story and have read it nearly every year since then. The book's binding is now beginning to fall apart, so now I keep it carefully stored in a place where it can't be disturbed.
Growing up, our house lacked books. We had the Bible and the National Enquirer. Plus a dictionary. But I had a library card, and I often read those borrowed books in one hand and the dictionary in the other to learn new words while I read.
My husband and I are big readers, and we have books in every room of the house. Most are in bookshelves, but I have a massive TBR pile, a tower really, and several bankers boxes of already read books to donate to the library when they open up for their used book sale in the spring.
We didn't own a lot of books, but one of my favorite memories was going to the beautiful public library in North Hollywood California with my mother to check out as many as I could carry. The word "display" doesn't describe how books are arranged in my home. Like so many others here, the words "tower" and "covering every horizontal space" describe it better. In every room but the bathroom, which I find indelicate.
My parents were not big readers. We had a cheap set of encyclopedia that I adored. I read the school textbooks of my 3 older siblings. I was always at the library. I recall scaring the hell out of myself reading a book about the Boston Strangler that someone left lying around the house when I was in the 7th grade.
1. The Bible (didn’t read cover to cover); 2. The Little Engine That Could; 3. Don’t remember bedtime stories; 4. We have 5 large bookshelves, plus the headboard of the bed (an old book there is yours about Gonzo).
As were many Irish-Americans of their generation, my parents were like Swifties, only for the Kennedys. They were so enamored of JFK, as grad students in Boston on the day he was elected, they went out to his polling place in Boston early that morning to watch him and Jackie enter to vote, then come out and wave at whoever was there. It was truly a highlight of their lives.
Our house was really a shrine to the Kennedy family, with more photos of them on the walls than of our own relatives. The bookshelves were biographies of all the Kennedys, plus members of his administration who wrote books. I actually got to meet historian Arthur J. Schlesinger at the National Arts Club when he was an old man and I was in my thirties, and because I had encountered him in my parents’ Kennedy book collection and shrine to Camelot, I was more than a little star struck.
I told him, “Mr. Schlesinger, my mother owned every one of your books and considered you a great genius!”
He laughed and said, “well, young lady, your mother was a woman of exceptionally good taste.”
I’m still star struck. I teach some of his work when I teach the Declaration of Independence (which I do in my American lit class).
So as a child, I read books with titles like, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.”
To their credit, my parents neither attempted to guide my reading nor to censor it in any way. As a result, I read Shakespeare when I was eight, with nobody to tell me it was too complicated for a girl my age, and I checked out so many books from the library every week that I still have a scar on my left shoulder, an indent caused by the nearly constant weight of my book bag. I read every nation’s folktales, allowing me to competently write later in life an opera’s libretto with a narrative based on Chinese folktale tropes. I read the LIttle House books. I read all of Judy Blume and Ursula LeGuin. I read Mark Twain.
Today, my collection of books is large, with a good deal of medieval literature, a boatload of contemporary poetry, history books, a lot of books on history, thanks in part for my family’s taste in Camelot — I favor stories of plucky and intrepid women.
To my great satisfaction, I see my books on the shelves as well, not the books I own — the books I have written and had published. Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than the fact that this has been part of my life, to join the vast conversation of men and women of letters from all time.
For the first seven years of my life, I was able to walk to the Shawnee Branch library on South Wayne Ave. Sometimes a trip to Ed Schmidt's pharmacy was included. I loved having the Childcraft Series at home and Little Golden Books like Mister Dog, Scuffy the Tugboat, and Home for a Bunny were favorites. Mother Goose rhymes were wonderful too. As I grew older I favored the Nancy Drew books, which I traded back and forth with with my friends. At the library, I checked out all the Earle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books and convinced myself I could be a lawyer. My daughters love to read too. My older daughter teaches reading to seventh graders in Boston. She always has a book in her hand.
At my lake cottage on Wawasee, I have a little free library, which was a gift from my younger daughter for Mother's Day in 2022.
Almost none, except a complete set of Sherlock Holmes given to my father by his mother. In my room in grade school, the Golden Book Encyclopedia. Later, whatever I brought home from the library and then, in high school, joy of joys, boxes of classics I hauled from the annual used book sale fundraiser run by the American Association of University Women. Now, books everywhere.
My mother loved to read and she read aloud to me—Grimm’s Fairy Tales! (I still have her copy and in the Table of Contents there are little pencil X’s next to a half a dozen— the grisliest I suppose—and little pencil check marks next to all the others.) Then she read Heidi to me, and my whole life changed. I decided that in order for Heidi to be really “mine” I had to read it myself so I learned to read as fast as I could and sat on the edge of my bed reading Heidi and when I finished, I closed the cover and opened it to start again from the beginning. I read Heidi over and over until I was given Alice in Wonderland and read that over and over until I was given Little Women. Somewhere along the line I got a library card and took out as they let me and returned them every two weeks. I loved going to the library but the books I owned were more precious to me than anything in the world.
My parents were big readers and so were we. My dad who was an abusive brute, did one good thing. he introduced me to H. P. Lovecraft and Poe and when the nasty librarian told me I couldn't pick out books from the adult section, he went to her and said, "Oh yes, she can." We had only one place for books. in my home now, we have books in every room, in no order, so it's always a lovely surprise to see a book I hadn't thought of in a while and take it out and read it! when we had Max, our home away from home was the bookstore. Max knew he could sprawl out and read as many books as he wanted, and we would BUY HIM as many books as he wanted. He still is a huge reader, too, so I feel like we did our job!
You did your job, BIG TIME, CAROLINE! Plus giving all your readers great pleasure with YOUR books!
Amazing tale!😊
How cool you were introduced to Lovecraft so young.
I found Lovecraft when I was about 12 and read everything he wrote!
Bible... I think of Noah's Ark as a "Love Craft" (heh).
Nancy Drew, that ace sleuth, was on my childhood bookshelves; along with the complete set of Dickens on my parents bookshelves; in youth, I was consumed with Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD: I found writing lessons in that book as I was trying to write; today: both Joan Didion and Eve Babitz; THE SCARLET LETTER by Hawthorne; everything Patti Smith; everything Alice Hoffman; everything Edna St Vincent Millay and Yeats - and Margaret Atwood: I dreamed about her last night
Nancy Drew, me too!
Yes. My oldest sister introduced us to Nancy Drew! I thought he was a real person!
Nancy, OF COURSE, Nancy Drew!
And do you know there is a book out just this week about Didion and Babitz.....called weirdly....DIDION AND BABITZ, by Lili Anolik?
Yes! Getting the book to devour over the weekend! What a story - or, many many LA stories!
I looooove The Scarlet Letter! And my daughter had a full set of Nancy Drew books, though I also liked them when I was younger.
THE SCARLET LETTER rules!
I was going to say Nancy Drew too!
Nancy Drew forever!
Oh wow. I will never forget reading In Cold Blood. I have read all of Dickens and reread him often. May father used to read us those. I've read David Copperfield many times. I think I've read all of Alice Hoffman too. I have to admit that Margaret Atwood depressed me so I read only one. She was brilliant but I didn't want to go to that dark side. Joan Didion appealed to me.
Nora: great minds think alike! Love that we love the same writers
None that I can remember, but I somehow managed to be a vociferous reader and then my mother got onboard . Would never be on my own nightstand, but my mother read the Catholic version of the Bible three times! 🤷🏼♀️
That said, with a verified 52% of white wonen voting for the convicted felon, I “gifted” my two sisters with each their own copy of Hunter professor Jessie Daniels’s “Nice White Ladies,” and added that we should plan our own little book club to talk about it! One’s a Trumper and the other’s husband banned me from their home because I told her that he grabbed my butt. Chaos ensued. Merry and Happy to all!! 🎅🎄🥂💅🏻👑
Diane! I like how unruly you are!
Next, your Substack for Christmas!!! 🎄❤️
My sister had a boyfriend that grabbed me one holiday. Being the collegiate tennis player I was, I swung around so fast and backhanded him across the face. He cried out and I said don’t ever drink that much and run into the wall Ever Again! He nodded. I never saw him again. Knowing my sister she would’ve blamed me for him groping me so… hey a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.
I LOVE IT, PAULINA!!!!!!!!!
Salute!
Good for you! My sister, drunk that she is, blamed me calling me a slut. She’s my twin sister, too.
Right on! Good for you, Diane!
My parents never recommended any books, they were divorced, my mom worked full time and we saw my dad on Sundays for one hour.
I however was very interested in books. I read every book on the list of books that are being removed from libraries in places like Florida. I loved them all. “ to kill a mocking bird” one of the best. Gone with the wind, the Scarlet Letter and on and on. No regrets. It would be a crime to withhold these books from anyone.
I have a Harper Lee quote tattooed on my back that reads, "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." That sums up books for me.
Remember the color-coded reading programs in elementary school? I devoured those things. And Scholastic Book Fair at school was my favorite day! My parents subscribed to the Columbia Book Club, and no reading material was off limits in our home. We had a set of children's encyclopedias that I pored over, endlessly. Each volume was color-coded. I always read way above my grade level thanks to my parents' love of reading. They didn't read to us, but reading material was always around. I just spent 4 hours today going through my books and deciding what to store in the basement in my down-sized house. One of the benefits of aging is that so many books are new again, because you've forgotten them! lol
Wow! YOU ARE STRONG FOR BOOKS, TRACY!!
Such a great series of questions!
I grew up in the middle of nowhere and there weren't bookstores within driving distance. So the books were mostly my parents' college textbooks, or ones they'd bought while living in more metro areas. But somehow there was a copy of I'm OK, You're OK, a massive collection of James Michener, and a copy of Jaws (the cover terrified a 7-year-old me). Over time, I've migrated their copies of the classics to my own library (lots of Dostoyevsky, volumes from The Anchor Bible).
The books in my childhood room were mostly either library books or Scholastic Books that we had to fill out a form to buy. I think I checked out Frances Hodgson Burnett books a million times by the time I hit adolescence. And then of course the multi-volume sets that we got secondhand - the Andrew Lang fairy books, Childcraft, Young Folks' Shelf of Books (my favorite).
By early adolescence I'd graduated to Marilyn Sachs, Paula Danziger, Judy Blume, Constance C. Greene, Elizabeth Enright - I've started buying a lot of those back on my Kindle.
I have a great photo of my mother reading Five Little Peppers and How They Grew to the three of us all piled on her lap and shoulders in an armchair. And another of my dad reading a Dr. Seuss book to me and my sister (and our baby brother crawling away out of the frame). Dad really loved Dr. Seuss.
I worked in the public library in high school (and finally got my MLIS during COVID), so I have my books arranged very specifically. Fiction and trade nonfiction are alphabetical by author. Special interest - religion, software development, reference, children's books - get their own shelves. And I have an entire bookcase devoted to cookbooks.
There are, everywhere, the piles of to-be-reads. That's what coffee tables are for. Currently those include books on the English Civil War (for a fiction project), Talia Lavin's Wild Faith, and right now I'm in the middle of Lord Beaverbrook's account of Edward VIII's abdication (which I'm kind of hate-reading because he was sympathetic to Germany and kind of Rupert Murdoch-like in using his newspapers against people he didn't like).
I got in trouble once at school for reading "Brothers Karamazov" in study hall instead of the English homework that I'd been ignoring ... which is how I ended up in study hall, lol!
OMG, I love this. I got hauled in front of the class in 4th grade for smuggling Peanuts books under my desk (my whole family has always adored Peanuts, from the 1960s onward). "You think you're smarter than everyone here, and you don't have to listen?!!!" the teacher screamed at me. And...well, yeah, kinda. Charles Schulz and Dostoyevsky are not that far apart, honestly.
The one book that stands out in my mind was a hardback edition of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It was a larger format thathan most hardback books in order to feature the exquisite wood cut engravings by Fritz Eichenberg.
I wish I could upload photos of the engravings here. They are a lovely and some are quite spooky. The best I can do is link to this article in Publishers Weekly, which features several of them.
https://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/shelftalker/?p=16
As a kid I was fascinated by the engravings, but I didn't actually read the book until one boring summer during my high school years. I fell in love with the story and have read it nearly every year since then. The book's binding is now beginning to fall apart, so now I keep it carefully stored in a place where it can't be disturbed.
I'm rereading Jane Eyre in book club right now. Have loved it in different ways over so many years.
Such a wonderful novel---never, never ages!
Really great book!
I've written a film script called "Air Jane" -- I'm not even kidding!
Growing up, our house lacked books. We had the Bible and the National Enquirer. Plus a dictionary. But I had a library card, and I often read those borrowed books in one hand and the dictionary in the other to learn new words while I read.
My husband and I are big readers, and we have books in every room of the house. Most are in bookshelves, but I have a massive TBR pile, a tower really, and several bankers boxes of already read books to donate to the library when they open up for their used book sale in the spring.
The library card is everything!
Me too!
We didn't own a lot of books, but one of my favorite memories was going to the beautiful public library in North Hollywood California with my mother to check out as many as I could carry. The word "display" doesn't describe how books are arranged in my home. Like so many others here, the words "tower" and "covering every horizontal space" describe it better. In every room but the bathroom, which I find indelicate.
My parents were not big readers. We had a cheap set of encyclopedia that I adored. I read the school textbooks of my 3 older siblings. I was always at the library. I recall scaring the hell out of myself reading a book about the Boston Strangler that someone left lying around the house when I was in the 7th grade.
1. The Bible (didn’t read cover to cover); 2. The Little Engine That Could; 3. Don’t remember bedtime stories; 4. We have 5 large bookshelves, plus the headboard of the bed (an old book there is yours about Gonzo).
I am honored, Tome!!
*Tom!
Dearest E. Jean,
As were many Irish-Americans of their generation, my parents were like Swifties, only for the Kennedys. They were so enamored of JFK, as grad students in Boston on the day he was elected, they went out to his polling place in Boston early that morning to watch him and Jackie enter to vote, then come out and wave at whoever was there. It was truly a highlight of their lives.
Our house was really a shrine to the Kennedy family, with more photos of them on the walls than of our own relatives. The bookshelves were biographies of all the Kennedys, plus members of his administration who wrote books. I actually got to meet historian Arthur J. Schlesinger at the National Arts Club when he was an old man and I was in my thirties, and because I had encountered him in my parents’ Kennedy book collection and shrine to Camelot, I was more than a little star struck.
I told him, “Mr. Schlesinger, my mother owned every one of your books and considered you a great genius!”
He laughed and said, “well, young lady, your mother was a woman of exceptionally good taste.”
I’m still star struck. I teach some of his work when I teach the Declaration of Independence (which I do in my American lit class).
So as a child, I read books with titles like, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.”
To their credit, my parents neither attempted to guide my reading nor to censor it in any way. As a result, I read Shakespeare when I was eight, with nobody to tell me it was too complicated for a girl my age, and I checked out so many books from the library every week that I still have a scar on my left shoulder, an indent caused by the nearly constant weight of my book bag. I read every nation’s folktales, allowing me to competently write later in life an opera’s libretto with a narrative based on Chinese folktale tropes. I read the LIttle House books. I read all of Judy Blume and Ursula LeGuin. I read Mark Twain.
Today, my collection of books is large, with a good deal of medieval literature, a boatload of contemporary poetry, history books, a lot of books on history, thanks in part for my family’s taste in Camelot — I favor stories of plucky and intrepid women.
To my great satisfaction, I see my books on the shelves as well, not the books I own — the books I have written and had published. Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than the fact that this has been part of my life, to join the vast conversation of men and women of letters from all time.
For the first seven years of my life, I was able to walk to the Shawnee Branch library on South Wayne Ave. Sometimes a trip to Ed Schmidt's pharmacy was included. I loved having the Childcraft Series at home and Little Golden Books like Mister Dog, Scuffy the Tugboat, and Home for a Bunny were favorites. Mother Goose rhymes were wonderful too. As I grew older I favored the Nancy Drew books, which I traded back and forth with with my friends. At the library, I checked out all the Earle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books and convinced myself I could be a lawyer. My daughters love to read too. My older daughter teaches reading to seventh graders in Boston. She always has a book in her hand.
At my lake cottage on Wawasee, I have a little free library, which was a gift from my younger daughter for Mother's Day in 2022.
Black's Law Dictionary
Death Be Not Proud
Death And Dying
The Bourne Supremacy
The Bourne Ultimatum
It
The Exorcist
Manchild In The Promised Land
My books are strategically placed throughout the home in messy piles in case of an emergency of a dire lack of knowledge in the world.
Almost none, except a complete set of Sherlock Holmes given to my father by his mother. In my room in grade school, the Golden Book Encyclopedia. Later, whatever I brought home from the library and then, in high school, joy of joys, boxes of classics I hauled from the annual used book sale fundraiser run by the American Association of University Women. Now, books everywhere.
My mother loved to read and she read aloud to me—Grimm’s Fairy Tales! (I still have her copy and in the Table of Contents there are little pencil X’s next to a half a dozen— the grisliest I suppose—and little pencil check marks next to all the others.) Then she read Heidi to me, and my whole life changed. I decided that in order for Heidi to be really “mine” I had to read it myself so I learned to read as fast as I could and sat on the edge of my bed reading Heidi and when I finished, I closed the cover and opened it to start again from the beginning. I read Heidi over and over until I was given Alice in Wonderland and read that over and over until I was given Little Women. Somewhere along the line I got a library card and took out as they let me and returned them every two weeks. I loved going to the library but the books I owned were more precious to me than anything in the world.