My Life with Bob Read online

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  To my family of readers, and in memory of my father

  Introduction

  Why Keep Track?

  Like anyone else with a marriage and a home and children and family and work, and more work, I always have something to worry about. And if for some inexplicable reason, I don’t have anything to fret over, I will easily find it. Should it be resolved at 4:16 a.m. one sleepless night, it will swiftly be replaced with something new. I am, alas, a worrier.

  Through practice, I’ve become pretty good at it. I can toggle efficiently among a range of potential threats, even as I blanch or shudder at various imagined catastrophes: the satanic undertow out of nowhere. The chairlift that inexplicably derails. The child who tumbles down the stairs, me careening just a moment too late after. We won’t even mention air travel.

  And of course there’s the old standby, something most of us have pictured at one point or another: The house on fire. Everything bursting into flames. Only moments to decide what to save beyond children, spouse, small animals. Do I grab the birth certificates, the tax backup, the passports—if only to spare myself the paperwork? Do I go with the valuable or with the irreplaceable? My grandmother’s ring, my poorly collected letters, the computer in case the cloud evaporates?

  I wouldn’t bother with any of those things. In my heart, I know that were everything burning to ashes at my feet, I’d leave behind the laptop and the photo albums and even, forgive me, my children’s artwork, because there is one object I’d need to rescue above all else—my true precious, Bob.

  Bob isn’t a pet or a teddy bear, though he does hold sentimental value and has been with me since my school days. Unimaginatively abbreviated, BOB is my Book of Books, a bound record of everything I’ve read or didn’t quite finish reading since the summer of 1988, my junior year in high school. It’s my way of keeping track. Because if I didn’t write it all down, I worry (naturally), I would forget it.

  He’s nothing fancy, this Book of Books of mine. He isn’t hand woven by artisanal craftsmen from a Himalayan village or decoratively embossed. No, he is factory-made, gray and plain, with a charcoal binding and white unlined paper, an inelegant relic from the days before bookstores stocked Moleskine notebooks, before blogging and scrapbooking and “journaling” as a verb. Within his covers lies a running account of authors and titles, which I dutifully enter upon the completion of every book I read. After around twenty books or so, when I remember to put it there, a vague date breaks up the catalog.

  I first wrote about Bob, with no small amount of trepidation, in an essay for the New York Times Book Review in 2012. Further exposing myself, I allowed the text to be accompanied by a photograph of Bob’s first page, displaying to millions of strangers my early stabs at depth and intellectualism, fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations, and all. I had revealed my inner life in a very public way, but at least, I reasoned, I’d done so in a safe place, among fellow readers. As soon as the Book Review’s art director scanned in the appropriate page, I recovered Bob from the seventh-floor art department and spirited him safely back home. He hasn’t left since.

  My Book of Books is still a private place. It’s not a traditional diary, to be sure. It’s about me, and yet it isn’t about me. It’s impersonal and yet deeply personal. And in my case, it has worked better than a “real” diary, that basic prerequisite for anyone who fancies herself a future writer. Bob has lasted a lot longer than any of my abandoned teenage journals—I write in it still—and here’s why: diaries contained all kinds of things I wanted to forget—unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends and angsting over college admissions. Bob contains things I wanted to remember: what I was reading when all that happened.

  Now in his middle age, Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life. How I decided on a certain book. What I’d read previously that had either put me in the mood for more of the same or driven me toward something different. Was I in a Civil War stage or up for a good spy novel? Had I read the author previously and, if so, when? Why had I left him and what drew me back? Bob may not always seal into memory the identities of individual characters—much of that is still lost in the cavern—but he does tell me more about my character.

  Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten lost or blurred with time. Opening Bob, I remember lying in a dormitory in Mauriac, an unspectacular hamlet in central France where I was installed on an American Field Service program, when I wrote my first entry: The Trial, fittingly, an unfinished work. This summons a flood of attendant recollections: seeing Baryshnikov perform in Metamorphosis, on Broadway, which led me to the paperback Kafka I packed with me that summer—an entire swath of Sturm und Drang adolescence reemerges from the fog of those other things I’d rather forget.

  The immediacy of these recollections often startles me. Whereas old diaries later read like transcribed dreams—Who wrote that? Was it really me who got so worked up/wanted that guy/obsessed about X?—book titles easily and accurately manage to evoke an earlier state of mind. Yes, I think, reading over the entries: I remember that. I remember that book jacket, that edition, the feel of those pages. For a girl who often felt like she lived more in the cozy world of books than in the unforgiving world of the playground, a book of books was the richest journal imaginable; it showed a version of myself I recognized and felt represented me.

  Over the years, Bob has become an even more personal record than a diary might have been, not about my quotidian existence but about what lay at its foundations—what drove my interests and shaped my ideas. There’s where I was physically, sitting in the cat-wallpapered room I’d ambitiously decorated in the second grade or at a leftover table in the high school cafeteria—and then there was where I lived in my mind, surrounded by my chosen people, conversing with aplomb in carefully appointed drawing rooms or roaming in picturesque fashion across windswept English landscapes.

  Today my life is engulfed in books. Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.

  The books don’t stop there. They gather on a coffee table in front of that sofa, and in my home office, where they mount according to intended destination—books to donate to my kids’ school, books to give to the local library, books meant for my husband,
my mother, my in-laws in California, one of my three children. They fill up totebags that loiter by the staircase, ready to be hauled onto the train, commuting back and forth, some making the return trip, others staying on.

  In my office at the New York Times Book Review, they are greeted by like-minded company. Books of interest, books with a purpose, books that are there for a reason. A shelf in front of my desk contains books I may want to refer to someday, by authors who’ve piqued my interest, or who are worth considering as potential reviewers for our pages, or whose work has already been praised. Books to be read, books to be read, books to be read. Books that may one day make their way into Bob.

  When I come home and look back through my Book of Books I see a personal narrative I didn’t recognize at the time. I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read.

  The prospect of losing Bob has become more vexing as he and I have gotten older. I no longer take him on trips. Now he stays safely at home and I tend to his pages as soon as I unpack, logging in the books read on planes and trains and between meetings. With each entry, I grow more guarded about his contents. I feel as protective of Bob as I do of myself.

  Though I thought he’d have long been filled by now and succeeded by a second book, there is still only one of him. He is less than half full, almost exactly mirroring my place in expected life span. He still has so much work to do, so many pages to fill. Yet after nearly three decades, Bob is showing his age. I am sometimes careless with him, which I then feel guilty about. A decade ago I unthinkingly repeated a full one-hundred sequence in error; much scratching out followed. I write entries hurriedly, while standing up, underlining the titles in wavy, discordant lines. His pages betray a certain amount of misuse. At some point, I spilled coffee on him; the cover is mottled and discolored, the binding has split, one corner is woody and bare. He sits on a special shelf, right over my desk, the anonymity of his unappealingly frayed spine ensuring our privacy.

  Without Bob, something feels worryingly missing—missing from my life and from the accounting of my life. A book is somehow not quite read, and my own story doesn’t quite make sense, the two inextricably linked. I don’t know where I’d be without Bob and where I’d have been if he hadn’t been there. Bob may be a record of other people’s stories, but he’s mine. If there’s any book that tells me my own story, it’s this one.

  CHAPTER 1

  Brave New World

  You Shouldn’t Be Reading That

  When you’re a child, reading is full of rules. Books that are appropriate and books that are not, books that grown-ups will smile at you approvingly for cradling in your arms and those that will cause grimaces when they spy you tearing through their pages. There are books you’re not supposed to be reading, at least not just yet. There is a time and a place.

  But for me it felt like there was never enough time, and the place was elusive. Bringing a book of your own to school was a no-no, and not to recess either, where you were supposed to be getting balls thrown at your head. Carrying a book was practically against the law at summer camp, where downtime was for forced mass song. Children were meant to be running around, engaged in active, healthy play with other hardy boys and girls.

  I hated running around.

  Before every elementary school classroom had a “Drop Everything and Read” period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination.

  While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear, and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous “Go play outside.”

  Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn’t occur to me to think otherwise.

  People laugh today at Roald Dahl’s idea that Matilda’s father would scream at his daughter to watch TV rather than slink off with a book, but there is a tiny sliver of truth to the satire, where, on the dark side of seventies benign neglect, parents didn’t run around boasting “She’s such a reader!” or try to bribe their kids into summer reading. You were supposed to be well rounded, not bookish. Reading too much hurt your eyes and made you need glasses. So did reading by poor light. My own bedside lamp, my mother pointed out, got especially hot and was a fire hazard. Reading in cars made you throw up. Squinting at too-small letters left you blind.

  There was a shiftiness to kids who secreted themselves in a corner to read God knows what instead of what they should have been doing. Reading when you were supposed to be raking the leaves, reading when you were supposed to be sleeping, reading when you were supposed to be making the bed, not lying in it. I did everything I could to read my way out of doing anything else. It was the one thing I was good at.

  Social skills were not my forte. I was shy as a child, and if my nose was in a book, nobody had to know about this failing. Anything to have fewer adults declare loudly right in front of me, “Oh, she’s shy! Look at her hiding—that’s okay. I didn’t realize she was shy,” as if they’d found out I lacked a key mental faculty. At school, I walked around in a state of perpetual embarrassment, certain others could sniff out something different about me. Any second I might trip and fall in front of everyone or find a peanut butter smear on my pants that had been there since lunch period. Or I might accidentally sit at the wrong table, setting off some kind of social distress signal that every other kid but me could hear.

  Afraid of being left out or singled out, I turned myself into an independent agent, only lightly associated with others. I read alone, I biked alone, I fed the ducks across the street alone, and I played with my cat alone. I was the only girl among seven brothers, and for the most part our interests did not align. “You must have been so spoiled, so cared for!” people say when they learn about my solitary femaleness; nothing could have been further from reality. Anytime I exhibited the merest sign of girlishness it was mocked into oblivion; I grew resentful of any “privilege” that marked me apart. Whenever my brothers were paired off into bedrooms, I felt exiled; I could hear them whispering among themselves through thin walls. At any moment, one of them might wrestle me to the ground, pin me down, and let a gob of saliva dangle threateningly over my face.

  My parents divorced when I was three or four (nobody seems to remember exactly), and my father had moved to a series of small rentals on the Upper West Side and then into his girlfriend’s rent-stabilized middle-income apartment on Columbus Avenue with her two sons. My mother remarried when I was seven, and we moved to an ancient house in a new town with her new husband and his three much older sons. Though her new husband was retired, my mother worked long hours juggling multiple jobs, commuting into the city, where she was an advertising copywriter; then she worked into the night freelance editing a series of trade magazines. My brothers and I largely fended for ourselves, walking to school and returning home on our own. Arguments were to be “worked out” among ourselves. This usually meant threats, slammed doors, and occas
ional outbursts of violence. I tended to miss when I kicked.

  Families seemed better inside books; in All-of-a-Kind Family and Little Women, there were sisters. (All I had was my cousin Kirsten, three years younger and always living somewhere far away—Florida, Germany, Colorado Springs.) Families in books were large and friendly; siblings hugged one another spontaneously and ate scrumptious holiday meals around a table. Nobody sat stonily through servings of boiled spinach and baked potatoes. One day, I resolved, I would have a family like that.

  I had the misfortune of being an exceptionally healthy child, never having an infection or vomiting, with only one or two fevers to show for my entire school career. How I longed to be ill so I could stay home and read. No such luck. My mom could spot a faker and had little patience for anything that wasn’t a sky-high fever. It was a blow to discover that the trick that worked in books—putting a thermometer by the lightbulb—didn’t work in real life.

  Reading time became my time and place, another dimension where events operated by my own set of rules. Nobody else needed to know when you snuck off with your Sweet Valley Highs whether you were a Jessica who wished she were an Elizabeth or vice versa. What you read revealed what you cared about and feared, what you hoped for because you didn’t have it, what questions you wanted answered without publicly unmasking your ignorance. I guarded this information fiercely.

  Like W. H. Auden, who once wrote, “Occasionally, I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only,” I considered certain books mine, and the idea that other people liked them and thought of them as theirs felt like an intrusion. (“Like a jealous lover, I don’t want anybody else to hear of it”—Auden, again.) I wanted to be the only one who knew about a book or at least to be the first one there.