My Life of Books

I grew up in a small town. There were no stoplights but there was a post office, a couple of churches, a bar, a gas station, a country store - and a library. I spent my summers at the library. It was small, but I always found books that appealed to me.

The Boxcar Children
The House With a Clock in Its Walls
Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack

When I was a little older, I would spend my time browsing the shelves at an independent bookstore, The Book Tree. It was adjacent to the store where my mother did her grocery shopping. While mom stocked up for the week, I would carefully read the back of countless young adult titles before selecting the one book that I could afford to purchase with my weekly allowance.

I Know What You Did Last Summer
Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones
Forever

I was fortunate to grow up in a household full of books. One room of our house, which we called the dining room, contained floor to ceiling shelves - and no dining room table. The shelves were filled with book club titles and Readers Digest Condensed Books, of which my father was a subscriber. Our TV provided limited viewing options so books were my main source of entertainment. From these shelves I discovered Daphne du Maurier and Herman Wouk. I plowed through books by bestselling authors like Mary Higgins Clark, Ira Levin and Robin Cook. I devoured abbreviated versions of acclaimed books.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
A Town Like Alice
To Sir, With Love

But, it was while I was taking a class in my senior year of high school that my love of literature exploded. We read novels and short stories as a class and independently. We wrote papers and participated in discussions, forming and expressing opinions and ideas about what we read.

The Chosen
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
To Kill a Mockingbird

During that class, Bernice Bobs her Hair launched my love affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I spent that summer reading more Fitzgerald and becoming acquainted with other classics.

The Great Gatsby
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre

It was the summer of 1984 -the year that the Detroit Tigers would win the World Series. My reading time was diminished by the hours that I spent watching the Tigers on the TV and listening to them on the radio.

I left for college that Fall. Not surprisingly, I selected English as my major. I struggled through Moby Dick and couldn’t get enough of Jane Austen. I argued, after reading The Blithdale Romance, that Zenobia was a coward not a heroine. But, I empathized with Daisy Miller. I wrote a passionate paper on the sea plays of Eugene O’Neill and I botched an exam on The Sorrows of Young Werther. I loved Joyce and Wilde, Eudora Welty and Marianne Moore.

Not long after graduation, I took a job as a part time bookseller. Doubleday Bookshop was opening in Woodland Mall and I could think of no job more suited to my passions. The other booksellers were also passionate about books. They expanded my reading tastes.

Tourist Season
Love in the Time of the Cholera
Cat's Eye

The bookstore at which I worked had a small bay of computer books – none of which contained the word Internet. We used microfiche and hardbound copies of Books in Print to look up titles for customers. Ann Landers had more bookselling power than Oprah. It was circa 1989 - 1992 (to the best of my recollection) and books were in demand. Grisham, who had been selling copies of A Time to Kill out of the trunk of his car, hit the big time with The Firm. A small format hardcover, The Bridges of Madison County, became a blockbuster bestseller. The Way Things Ought to Be, by media personality Rush Limbaugh was hard to keep on the shelves. Salman Rushdie received death threats for writing the Satanic Verses. And, Madonna published her foil-wrapped, spiral bound book – Sex (which everybody wanted to look at, but not as many wanted to buy).

My bookselling job was meant to supplement my income as a social worker. Instead, I spent most of my paycheck building my library. My employee discount afforded me the opportunity to purchase books that had eluded me before. I bought books on art and photography, an atlas of the world and cookbooks.

I also began to expand my library with books on another topic – baseball. My love of baseball was (still is) akin to my love of the written word. I began to accumulate anthologies of baseball writings. They contained poems and essays that are still among my favorites in literature.

These are the saddest of possible words: “Tinkers, to Evers to Chance.”

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

The breathtaking parabola of your blooper ball never more tantalizing or bizarrely elongated.

I also began read (and stock my book shelves with) baseball novels.

Bang the Drum Slowly
The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
The Great American Novel

I moved to Pennsylvania. I was broke, so I frequented the local library and curbed my spending on books. I returned to Michigan less than a year later and became a full-time bookseller turned assistant bookstore manager. I thought of this period in my life as a “career transition” - the jobs I would hold until I knew what I wanted to become. My much beloved District Manager, Dave Carpenter, was attempting to lure me up the bookselling career ladder. I was contemplating going back to school. He offered me a job and I expressed my uncertainty. He said, “Sleep on it – but in your heart, I think you already know the answer.” I slept on it. Then I accepted his offer.

I packed up my belongings and headed to the other side of the state, taking a job with Borders. After one year working in the Dearborn, Michigan location I accepted a position at Borders’ headquarters in Ann Arbor as a national event specialist. It was there that I met my future husband. He sat in a cube near mine, spoke kindly to his grandmother on the telephone, and loved books (he didn’t really love baseball – but he was a sports fan, so I figured…all in due time).

John and I were married in October of 1999. The reading at our wedding was from a poem by Linda Kittell - What Baseball Tells Us About Love. Three books (neatly stacked and tied with a cream-colored ribbon) were placed as centerpieces on each table at the reception. On our honeymoon, we listened to The Poisonwood Bible on audio as we drove to places like Traverse City, Toronto, Niagara Falls and Cooperstown, New York.

My job afforded me the opportunity to work closely with books, publishers and authors. I met many of these authors – some wrote books for a living and some wrote books about how they made their living.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
David McCullough
Ken Burns
Madeline Albright
Caroline Kennedy
Cal Ripken, Jr.
Stephen King

I met them at events, over lunch and during dinner. Some were charming, some were reserved and some were not so nice. But all of them were memorable.

Meeting John Updike prior to an event in Boston, then sitting in the front row listening to him read a selection from “Rabbit At Rest.”

An encounter with Michael Moore – which altered my opinion of him and of his work.

Chatting with Russell Banks about baseball, while enjoying lunch at Gratzi.

Bookselling was changing. Technology and the Internet were impacting the industry and Borders was struggling. I witnessed rounds of lay-offs. The numbers varied. A few people lost their jobs or a few hundred people lost their jobs. At times, I was responsible for laying people off. Other times I just watched it happen. And in June of 2008, I experienced it first hand when I became one of nearly 300 people who lost their jobs in yet another round of lay-offs.

It sucked!

My life, to that moment could be recalled in books. What I was reading when I was pregnant with our first child. The book I read in an effort to impress a guy (John). The book I read just before losing my job.

The Corrections
Last Orders
Water for Elephants

Books were not going away because I no longer worked at Borders. True. But my life with books was going to be different. Advanced Reader Copies. Dinners with authors. Pre-publication information. My life with books changed.

Another thing changed. I had not realized how much of my social life was connected to my job. Suddenly I was home, looking for a new job, and lacking conversation with friends. I joined Facebook. This was a good thing. I was social again – albeit online.

Fast forward a couple of years. I am again happily employed. But, I haven’t withdrawn from Facebook. I spend way too much of my free time reading status updates and not enough of it reading books. This realization makes me sad.

Just last week, Borders filed for Chapter 11. This also makes me sad. A lot of people are talking about the mistakes Borders made. And sure, they made mistakes. But, it is more than that. The landscape of books has changed. And, a book lover like me is part of the reason why. I am spending more time on Facebook and the Internet than I do reading books. I am reading less and buying fewer books. I am not sure how this happened.

I am not ready to break up with books. Maybe it is just the "44-year ache" and I need to recommit myself to the relationship. But, I am not willing to give Facebook the boot either. I guess I need to learn how to balance my free time better. I need to read more books. Not just for me…but for my kids. I want my blossoming book-lovers to have a life-long love affair with books too.

We read together. We always have. We read favorites from my childhood and we discover new favorites.

Horton Hatches the Egg
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
The Circus Ship

But, they need to see me reading more and “being connected” less. So, excuse me while I grab a book and set a better example for my kids.