When I was somewhere in that too-big, too-small space between age 10 and 12, I found a faded copy of Julie of the Wolves on my grandmother’s bookshelf. I still can still feel the brittle cover flap in my hands. And the sound of the pages crinkling, blinking in light they hadn’t seen for decades probably. My grandmother said that it had been my aunt’s book. And then she said something about how I probably shouldn’t be reading it. So of course, I hurried to a hidden corner in my grandparents’ big, silent farmhouse as soon as possible. As I read about a Native Alaskan teenager facing a bitter-cold adolescence, my eyes darted under the bed in a long-unused guest room in Florida. I was afraid to mess up the comforter if I sat on the bed, and afraid of what might crawl out from under it if I sat beside it. But reason got the better of me. I knew that not a speck of dust fell to the ground without my grandmother knowing it. She’d have paid someone to scrub and spray for spiders faster than I could imagine them. So I settled into the fluffy beige carpet and read my mysterious, disapproved book. The first thing that really struck me – maybe because I was used to stories about survival and frigid wildlands – was that Miyax had her period. And the author just wrote it, right there on the page. My parents, and everyone that I knew really, avoided mentioning periods like my grandmother avoided the concept of dust. My dad would change the channel when Tampex commercials came on. And my mom would furtively ask if I needed to change anything “down there.” I had my first period when I was 10, before all my friends. I’d never read a book that included periods as a part of a character’s story that was worth-mentioning, or even mentionable. Now the book was even more interesting. When I got to the part about the sexual abuse, I had no idea that the book was banned because of that. I only knew it was another thing my family would never talk about. I was horrified for Miyax but I felt some kind of warmth knowing that at least here, on these pages, we could say these things aloud. Real things – things I had like periods, and things, thank God, I’d never experienced. But it all belonged. Seeing it all there so exposed like the tundra helped me think that it all deserved to be spoken. Little did I know then that in a few years I’d move to Alaska – Miyax’s land - with my family and my well-hidden stash of pads. I can still feel the squishy, concealed bulge in my bag. Long before we moved, my aunt took back her book from me. But I’d read it already, and I knew that even my periods belonged. I already had what I needed, courage like Miyax.

I’m inspired by what is, quite controversially, my favorite book of all time: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. My literary hero is Hermione Granger, who is both an exceptional intellectual and super-savvy communicator. In Order, Hermione teaches her peers about democratic leadership by simply starting a conversation. During the first meeting of a secret student Defense Against the Dark Arts group, Hermione suggests that they all “ought to elect a leader” and “ought to vote on it properly.” Harry Potter may have been the ideal, presumed selection, but Hermione insisted on a vote to manifest consensus. She used plain language to encourage their participation, leaning into proven decision-making methods like inclusive polling to “make it formal” and “establish authority.” Reading this scene at the early age of eleven, it became clear I wanted to be that kind of leader: a person who would speak with great wisdom but communicate using common sense.

Hermione had a certain knack for making good decisions, a fact which points to certain insight, yet she kept her mind sharp by not bending to the ‘fragrant guesswork’ of the divining arts. She was a known rule-enforcer, an ally to proper procedure (as am I), but Hermione Jean’s record of rule-breaking is directly correlated to the numerous courageous decisions made in the face of crisis, danger, and emergent peril. She’s a good egg, hard to crack; she can be trusted. In Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione appealed to the leadership at Hogwarts School at age thirteen to expand her magical studies and was presented with a “Time-Turner,” a magical device which allowed her to take more classes, even when the lessons were scheduled for precisely the same window of time. Her thirst for knowledge matches mine, and her bravery stands as a pillar of magical realism I lean on when I’m in a tough spot. I trusted Hermione to the very end because she said things like, “I also think we ought to have a name. It would promote a feeling of team spirit and unity, don’t you think?” I read, I remembered, I gleaned. Words are power, just ask Dumbledore’s Army (Rowling, 391).

* * * * *

/ n o t a r e

Rowling, J K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Scholastic Press, First American Edition, July 2003. Print.

Rowling, J K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Press, 1999. First Scholastic trade paperback printing, 2001. Print.

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@bykaileyann

HEDERAREADS.COM

When I first read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I didn’t get it. The forgetting, I mean. Not the laughter. The scene at the funeral, with the hat? Classic. But the struggle of memory against forgetting under an oppressive regime? I was American. The stories and history grounding my people were so strong I couldn’t conceive of them being erased. Hell, they were viral before viral was a thing. The whole world wanted in.

Cold War kids, right?

Ten, fifteen years later, I get into a writers’ workshop. Intensive six-week residence. One of seventeen others is this shy black Adonis named Kai Ashante Wilson. Guy’s a genius. We all know it. A few years later Kai publishes The Devil in America, about a black child gifted with power she can’t understand. It runs in the family, but America took their history away, made them forget. Nor is there much to laugh at when the girl makes an unknowing deal with the Devil, and the devil takes his due in the form of a white mob come to lynch and slaughter the whole town. As white mobs did, though my America forgot to tell me that story, and I, blessed innocent, did not think to look.

I was supposed to be one of the good ones.

Reading has taught me all kinds of things: how to think, how to empathize, how to person. For a long time it taught me that character and choice matter, that a person can make a difference, that justice, in some form, will be served. Those are good stories. It’s no wonder they catch on. But there are other stories those stories buried, ones where the best you get at the end isn’t justice but the will to persevere, the strength, somehow, to carry on and try and remember where you came from. Sometimes you don’t even get that. To unbury those stories and bring them into the light changes the ones that so filled younger me with confidence. It’s the struggle of memory against forgetting, and I laugh to think how fooled I was.

https://www.tor.com/2014/04/02/the-devil-in-america-kai-ashante-wilson/

At the risk of immediately disqualifying myself, I’ll admit that I don’t remember the title. Or the author. It was in The Atlantic, around 1994. I was in my mid-twenties, living in Flint, Michigan, working as a newspaper reporter, soon to no longer be a newspaper reporter.

I would have read the story on my rust-colored sectional sofa, or in bed, in the 1920s-era apartment I rented for $450 a month, which included a spot in the garage. My now-husband and I kissed for the first time just outside that garage.

The story was set in an upscale, mid-sized town where—I’ll just give her a name—Amy is a real estate agent. She’s been having an affair with (let’s call him) David, a prominent man who plans to leave his wife, he tells Amy, just as soon as he can. Then David drops dead of a heart attack during a game of squash. Amy doesn’t find out until after the funeral is over. Her lover is simply gone. She can’t talk about it with anyone; their affair had been secret. There is no outlet for her grief. Then, some months after his death, David’s wife contacts Amy—to sell the home they had shared and raised their children in. She’s apparently ready to move on, a resolution Amy has been thoroughly denied.

The climactic scene: Amy, in real estate agent mode, goes to the house. She trails behind as the wife walks around, talking about square footage and half bathrooms. Surrounded by David’s things, seeing the fullness of the life he’d led without her, Amy realizes with crushing certainty the imbalance of their love. He’d been her most important relationship, yet she’d settled for so little from him. Finally, Amy blurts out a detail that reveals their affair. I don’t remember what the detail was, but I’ll never forget the wife’s response: she turns toward Amy and says coolly, “Yes, I thought there was someone.” Amy knows then, and perhaps always knew, that David was never going to leave his wife. That moment marks Amy’s first step out of mourning.

When I read this story, big, undefined changes were rushing at me—some new career, perhaps a new city, potential new love. I was susceptible to the thought that, Whoa, none of this may turn out the way you think. This story mesmerized me because I wanted bracing truths about life’s complications, not useless reassurances. I still do. Even if I have shamefully forgotten its title, this story showed me that great fiction is a place where I could always find that.

Ten years old, playing alone in our backyard, in the midst of a ferocious sword fight as both Sir Lancelot and his archenemy.

Mama called me in.

We sat at our kitchen table, bright yellow Formica with metal trim. A film of summer sweat covered me.

“Your daddy just doesn’t like you all that much,” she said. “Just avoid being around him.”

I looked down at the table and nodded. My finger ran along the crack between the two halves of the tabletop, full of the grime and filth accumulated over years of family meals, waiting in vain to be cleaned.

Seven years passed of strained avoidance. Alone in my bedroom, I picked up my latest copy of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine I subscribed to because Emerson, Stowe, Twain published in its pages.

I read “Shaving,” a story by Leslie Norris, about a boy my age whose father is dying of cancer. The story is set in the UK and my paternal grandparents were English, my dad Canadian, but I considered him English. The boy tenderly cradles his father’s head while he shaves his face. “It was as if he had never known what his father really looked like. He was discovering under his hands the clear bones of the face and head, they became sharp and recognizable under his fingers.”

As soon as I finished reading the story, I read it again.

And again.

My father was not dying, thank God, but we were strangers living in the same house, separated by more than walls. I couldn’t wait for him to be on his deathbed to learn the contours of his face for the first time.

Another seven years passed of trying to know my father. We lived hundreds of miles apart, but I came for visits whenever I could. I’d been writing letters and calling my parents almost every week for years, taking care to close with telling them I loved them. My mother replied in kind; my father, in silence.

Until this one time.

“It’s been great to talk with you, Dad. I love you.”

Pause.

“Me too,” he said. “But in reverse.”

We hung up. I smiled. I couldn't remember ever hearing him say the word “love” before. Not in talking about the weather, the country, the family, me. “But in reverse.” I knew this was as close as he would get in his own voice. Could get.

Just eleven years later, my father passed. Countless phone calls, letters, and visits throughout those years. I kept that phrase in my heart like a cherished line from a treasured story.

“He leaned his head tiredly against the boy’s shoulder. He was without strength, his face was cold and smooth. He had let go all his authority, handed it over. He lay back on his pillow, knowing his weakness and his mortality, and looked at his son with wonder, with a curious humble pride.

“‘I won’t worry then,’ he said. ‘About anything.’”

In the middle of third grade my family moved from a suburb of Detroit to a rural town an hour away. On my first awkward day as The New Girl, I stood in the cafeteria line and stared at a poster, a painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a portrait of a man with a zucchini nose, peas for teeth, and eyelids made of tiny figs. I was horrified. I barely caught the caption, “You Are What You Eat.” Today I understand: every cell in our body is comprised of the food, air, and water we consume, which is distilled into parts and built again into blood, bones, muscle, fat, a beating heart, a stomach that breaks down food to begin the cycle again. Likewise, with reading.

Everything I’ve read—each book, story, poem, essay—has fed my mind and helped shape my perspective of the world. Childhood reading instilled a love of language and books, and provided a portal out of that tiny town. Reading was a key that opened infinite doors. I could enter the lives of other people, some who might look, think, and behave differently than me. Reading taught me to care and understand. Without it, who would I be?

One story that’s changed me is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. In it, a Nigerian college student, Ifemelu, moves to the US and learns what it means to be Black in America. In Nigeria there’s no concept of race; people identify with their ethnic tribe, like Hausa, Igbo, or Yoruba. Throughout the novel, Ifemelu is confronted by America’s racial stereotypes, the distinction some people make between African-Americans and African immigrants who they consider the “good” Blacks, and the ignorant attitudes of even well-intentioned whites.

Reading Americanah, I recognized my behaviors in some characters, like the liberal white folks who don’t understand the difference between their intentions and impact. Or those who say they’re color-blind, ignoring the experiences of People of Color living in a racialized society. And on and on. Stories can snake into the backdoors of our brain in ways nonfiction cannot.

I learned race is a social construct that has been taught. Which means it can be un-taught. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Americanah set me on a path of anti-racist study. For nearly two years, I’ve participated in an anti-racism book group. I’m taking a six-month anti-racism course. I’m reading more fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and attending virtual talks, by writers of color. I’m working to recognize and eliminate my biases.

Science says our cells are constantly growing, dying, and being replaced. Every seven years we have a brand-new body, a replica of the old. More nutritious food builds healthier cells. Likewise, with reading. By feeding our minds a diet of diverse stories, the characters, feelings, and turns of phrases can strengthen our brain’s scaffolding. We can change our thoughts and expand our understanding of others, both people who feel familiar and those from whom we have much to learn and unlearn.

It's a Friday and I got the covid vaccine yesterday. Second dose. I feel like utter shit. I really do. I ache. I'm cold. My head feels like someone hit me with a sledgehammer. I was reading earlier and thought, "I should really underline that but I can't figure out what's most important in that paragraph." I read it aloud and still considered, "what do I underline?" I finally just closed the book and went to sleep, a black tuxedo cat who told me his name was David Bowie curled up on my chest. I liked to think he's concerned but I know I'm just soft and warm and my thumbs can open the can of fancy feast he likes.

My favorite book is Light in August. I can't see a copy in a book store and not buy it. Last count, I had 24 copies (many used) in my house and I try to give them to people who want to read them but Faulkner doesn't have a lot of freshmen students clamoring to read him. It's just a sad universal truth. Faulkner taught me that love of a thing is enough. I'm writing this today because I said I would. I promised myself I would. I showed up. For me, that's a big win.

Lena Grove left her home in Alabama in search of a man who didn't care he'd gotten her pregnant but she had faith that it would work out. As she says, "I'm come a fur piece" and so anytime I want to quit writing I just remember Lena and how what she wants-- to find the father of her baby-- is not what she gets. So, I struggle and I show up. Maybe George Saunders reads my work, but probably not. I'm still counting as a win because I, too, have come a fur piece. I showed up in the chair today. I wrote today. I didn't want to, but I did. That's victory enough.

I remember my 11 year-old self. I sit by the living room window peeking past the splash of an autumn downpour. There’s a clicking in my brain, like the IBM electric on which I’m learning to type. The clicking’s a hammer of too fast and not enough. My favorite book, The Secret Garden, soothes on my lap. I’m rocked by the lull of ten-year-old Mary Lennox’s astonishing discovery. Mary opens the iron door unlocking the walled-in garden for the first time. As she passes the massive stone walls, Mary sees life’s potential burst and shine. The hammer lifts then rests.

I remember my 14 year-old self. I'm cutting 5th period gym. There's a church-hush in the empty auditorium. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is alive in my hands. Francie realizes that the binds of her poor and isolating childhood are not permanent. The tree will grow again. As Francie says goodbye to her younger self, I close the book in slow reverence. This book isn't on my English Lit class list. It came from the shelves in my favorite room at home. My father's den is tucked away in the basement, next to the furnace. The rows of dusty spines beckon. The Iliad, A Clockwork Orange, Of Mice and Men, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. These friends come with me on the bus to dance class, under my covers with a flashlight, to this auditorium and the stark wooden chair-backs. I sink in glory with each spine cracking open.

I remember my 25 year-old self. I'm alone in my New York City apartment. The stink of dog feces rises from the hot sidewalk on St. Mark's Place and 1st Avenue in front of my five floor walkup. My two room apartment has a closet big enough to sit in. I recline on pillows between my platform shoes and Frye boots. I hold my tattered copy of The Secret Garden. It's an original hardcover 1911 edition with color photo plates. The only gift I kept from my mother. I haven't spoken with her in three years. The hammering is intolerable. Real people are not like book people. There is no special key that closes me in or keeps them out. My garden is hollow and dry. I hate Mary Lennox and her smug happily-ever-after. I hate her indulgent attention to the Iris buds. I hate her cloying rosy cheeks. I leave the book on the street on top of a black garbage bag and a chair with three legs.

I remember my 39-year-old self. My son is four years old. The clicking has turned to song. I sit on his miniature tiger couch from Target. He leans into my side.

“Mama, tell me a story.”

“Once upon a time there was a ten-year-old girl named Mary Lennox.”

My son lays his head in my lap. I stroke his baby-smell hair. I recite Mary’s story from start to finish, without turning a page.

A man approaches the reference desk looking guilty, like maybe he stabbed someone in the parking lot.

“Butts?” I ask. There was never a face straighter than mine.

“Yes, ma’am.” David comes into my library and shyly requests this oversized photography book called Butts: A Coffee Table Compendium every few months. We don’t own it, but we can get it via Interlibrary Loan from somewhere in Oklahoma. He smiles – relieved, maybe, by my casual agnosticism – and walks towards the stacks, where he’ll find enough steamy, butt-centric romance paperbacks to hold him over.

As a librarian, I’ve witnessed the private reading habits of thousands of people. And while librarianship is probably not what you think (there are more bodily fluids and Marvel movies), it is a romantic profession. Yes, there is poop on the floor outside the men’s room and yes, there are hours-long conversations with lonely widowers about Ronald Reagan and yes, there is Butts: A Coffee Table Compendium, but beneath the mundanity there is that magic kernel of truth: you’re dealing in stories, and stories change lives.

Books don’t have power over everyone. If you hand a Judy Blume novel to one hundred 11-year-olds, only seven will dog-ear their copy, and only one will decide they are a writer, too. The magic of the written word is kinetic – a certain kind of person is required to activate it. Many people live their entire lives without discovering a sacred personal text.

The handful of readers whose lives change course the moment they meet Blume (or whoever) crave something, and they find that thing in books. I’ve met people whose only friends are the sexy were-leopards in Christine Feehan’s fantasy novels, unhoused people who devour Kurt Vonnegut while wearing gloves so they don’t smudge the pages, miserable teenagers transcending public school offerings and finding their own teachers in Marge Piercy and Mervyn Peake. (Miserable Teenager, you’re going to be SO COOL one day. Please hold on.)

It doesn’t matter which book captures you, it only matters that you are captured.

All these people, regardless of what kind of story resonates with them, or why, are connected to each other by a unique quality that only capital-R Readers have, something that causes them to see the world through a certain imaginative lens, and it is my theory that this added richness supports one through difficult times the way a robust group of friends or a functional, loving family might.

My personal holy book? It’s a tie between Roald Dahl’s Matilda and a surreal picture book called “The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon.” These aren’t the most profound titles I’ve read, but they both suggest that magic is real – a foundational belief I’ve been unable to shake in the intervening decades, and which led me to become a writer and a librarian.

When someone asks for help finding a book, I find equal pleasure in connecting them to Butts as I do Bulgakov. Magic is magic, after all.

The book that has impacted me the most is The Brothers Karamazov, but not for the reasons you may be thinking. I chose the book because it was the first thing that came into my hand when emerging from my feckless, poorly-educated youth into the life I saw in my older brother and wanted for myself, the life of the mind.

Impressed by his raving about the book, I went and bought a tattered, Modern Library hardback at a used bookstore, the Constance Garnett translation. The pages were like tissue paper, the font was 8-point. What I learned from that experience was that reading was fucking hard, but by God, I was going to finish that book.

It was my last year of college in 1989. While student-teaching 6th-graders, I would sneak in moments to read whenever I could—5 minutes here in the staff room, 10 minutes there trying to eat lunch—really finding only enough time to remember where I left off before having to quit. Far from enjoying the book, I was practically weeping with frustration, reading laboriously, out of sheer stubbornness of will.

Prior to that, I had hated reading. We burned our paperback copies of The Mayor of Casterbridge when 11th grade was out for summer. Romeo and Juliet? there was always the movie. The Great Gatsby was forgotten before I closed the cover. Why the hell some friends were taking a class called “Reading for College-bound Seniors”, I couldn’t imagine. They could be seen carrying around some boat anchor called The Fountainhead for Pete's sake.

Reading a thousand-page book (did I even finish?) for my first endeavor may have been a mistake, like an 8-year-old choosing a marathon as his first effort to get physically fit. All the heady concepts in BK were lost on me. What’s the big deal about Father Zossima’s dead body starting to smell? Father and son after the same woman? Gross. And Alyosha is a nice guy but kind of a wimp.

But that experience, while not especially literary, set the course of my life. I knew I was reading something important; the deadness of the page revealed to me the depth of my intellectual poverty. I could see what an uphill journey lay before me. At least I was bewitched by the smell of musty pages, a meager consolation to new initiates. But I began to fill a notebook with a list of new vocabulary definitions. I started paying attention to what books there were and what others were reading. And I could talk with my brother with some familiarity with the story and benefit from his elucidations. I became someone who was never without a book, because you never know when you’ll be stuck somewhere with nothing to do. I still have that old Garnett copy. I have since read BK two more times with much better results, the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. NOW I get it.