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We all picked up our first book somewhere.
In "The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading", 57 noted writers, including Ursula Hegi, Scott Spencer, and Nicholson Baker, reflect on their early experiences with books. The stories they tell are marvelous, and will remind every reader of their own extraordinary moment when books became friends.
For Howard Norman, author of the acclaimed novels "The Northern Lights" and "The Bird Artist," it all began on a bookmobile in Grand Rapids, Michigan. During the summer of 1959, the dilapidated bus was a ten year old's respite from the heat and a difficult family. This excerpt is from his essay, "Bus Problems":
"What's that mummy on your finger, there?" Mr. Oler [the mobile librarian] said, pointing to the layered white bandage. "What the hell happened to you?"
"I don't wanna talk about it, okay?"
"Suit yourself," he said.
I went to the back, got out a book on planets, I think, and sat down, brooding and paging through.
I saw Mr. Oler adjust the rearview, catching me in it.
He let a few moments go by, then said, "You know by now, I don't open up my Sabatini collection to just anybody. But you've put your hours in this summer, haven't you, so if you want to read one of them -- I'd suggest 'Captain Blood' first. Are your hands clean? I don't want fingerprints. Don't tell anybody I gave you this special treatment, got it?"
"I won't." I was pretty much taken aback by his offer.
"Captain Blood" was a little advanced for me, but I slowly worked through it. We were parked near the Fulton Pharmacy. After an hour or so, Mr. Oler said, "Pretty good, don't you think?" I just nodded and went back to reading, which I meant as a way to show that I was entranced. I struggled with the vocabulary, but the story was great, a real exotic adventure. "It's called a swashbuckler," Mr. Oler said. "It's an old-fashioned word, but there's still use for it." Then Mr. Oler took a nap.
It was a novel replete with vivid incidents of revenge, the emotional dimensions of a great Italian opera, uncanny heroics, highly inventive despicable cowardice -- and I applied every page of it to my own life. I read deeply, hoping not only to get lost in the story, but to locate some ethical strategy, some instruction as to how to revenge my father for his extended, unexplained absences, his ambushing temper, his "accidental" breaking of my finger, his -- yet again -- new set of luggage. But by page two hundred, I forgot all about that, and was fully resident in the novel itself. The new qualities and possibilities of life I cared about were being played out in an earlier century, and nobody was in a rush to beckon or force me out of it. It was only about twelve-thirty. I did not want a lunch break. The pharmacist walked in, browsed a moment, picked a book, signed it out, and left, not waking Mr. Oler. I had till maybe four o'clock. Time was opening as slowly as I chose to turn the pages. That summer on the bookmobile I became a reader because of what I read to flee from, and what I read to enter into.
From "Bus Problems" © 1997 by Howard Norman, in "The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading." Published by Milkweed Editions. Reprinted by permission.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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