From Brooklyn To Louisiana

There are very few things in life that I love more than books.  Well, my cats.  And my family.  And—oh, yes!—my husband.  I do love books, though.  I love their smell, their covers, their titles, and, of course, their contents.  And I love that once you’ve read a book—a really, truly great book—it becomes a part of you.  You mark certain passages.  You identify with the characters.  You reread it and love it even more the second and third time you read it.

I think what I love most about my favorite books is the memories that are intertwined with them.  Looking through my bookshelves is like literary time travel–I see a book on my shelf and I know where I was when I read it, how old I was, and the scenes I loved.  Mom and I were talking about this yesterday.  She was remembering the summer when she was a teenager, and her family had just moved to Logan, Kansas.   In new surroundings, during a very hot summer without the neighborhood pool that she was used to, she started going to the library, and she found “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”  She remembers getting through the loneliness and stifling heat of that summer, partly while lying on her bed reading “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

It’s very hard for me to narrow it down, but I can think of two books, that, like “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” for Mom, are inextricably tied to a particular time in my life.  The first is “The Velvet Room,” a young adult novel about a girl who finds a diary and, in reading it, discovers a whole new world.  (Ever since I read this book, I’ve wanted to find someone’s old diary and become involved in a fascinating mystery.)  It was a library book, so it had a crinkly plastic cover—and I loved books that had that kind of cover because it made a scholarly type of sound when I turned the pages.  I read that book when I was in third grade—and I remember thinking about it all day at school and practically running home to read it.  I would sit at my little wooden desk, turn on my desk lamp, and read.  The next thing I knew, Mom would be calling us for supper, and the only light would be my lamp, as the winter night had fallen.  I remember having to reorient myself to my surroundings because “The Velvet Room” took place in California in a hot, dusty summer, and there were scenes in it of peaches so ripe that their juice dripped everywhere.  My fingers almost felt sticky from the peaches, yet it was snowing outside.

The other book that I have intense memories of is “Deep Summer” by Gwen Bristow.  I was in junior high when I found it in Mom’s book case.  I thought the title was apropos, as it was summertime when I read it.  My sisters and brother played outside all day long, but I laid on the couch in the cool of the basement reading that book.  It completely transported me to a different time and place—the late 1700s in Louisiana.  There’s a scene in the book where a young woman goes into labor—and is IN labor for hours and hours.  There are no doctors or even people for miles around, so she has only her husband to help her.  They live in a cabin, and they can’t keep the mosquitoes or the heat out.  The poor girl goes through hours of agonizing labor before finally giving birth—and all the while, mosquitoes chew at her and the humidity lays on her like a blanket.  This scene felt so real to me that I expected my own sensitive-to-humidity hair to swell into an enormous curly mop—and it would not have surprised me at all to have found mosquito bites all over me after reading that scene.  The book is one of a trilogy and is so, so good—but I’m giving you fair warning—you may not want to have children after you read it.  I do not have children.  Coincidence?

Do you have a book like these that marks a time in your personal history?  One that may or may not be a favorite book of yours but because of the memories associated with it has become a part of you?   If so, I’d love to hear about it.  And I’ll probably read it.  Because (I don’t know if I mentioned it or not) I love books.