I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truthfully, if someone were to ask me what I am currently reading, I may not be able to tell them. In this season of retirement and many, many books, I empathize with Emerson who cannot remember the books he’s read any more than the meals he’s eaten. Even so, they have made me. 

In the car, I listen to a book on Audible. At night when my husband is sleeping–or trying to sleep–I read on my back-lit Kindle. And for all the other times, there are glorious books in print. On the floor beside my bed, on the bookshelf headboard, and blocking my view and reach to my alarm clock are stacks of books. Books arrive via Amazon too often to admit. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry–it’s all good. No, it’s all great.

One of my unspoken talents is that I am above average when it comes to vicarious living. My mom relates that I teared up within a few measures of the opening theme song to the television program Lassie. I anticipated the danger that Timmy would find himself in and the worry that would line the faces of his mother and father. Often, I mouthed the words of television characters, wholly unconscious of the fact that I had left my world and entered another. I cringed at the theme song for I Love Lucy. Intended to be funny, sitcoms threw me into fits of anxiety. Don’t do it, don’t say it, don’t do it, I would mutter under my breath. Immersed in these worlds, my muscles contracted and knotted for 30 agonizing minutes. Yes, I would say that my vicarious living is Oscar-worthy.

 Not only do I live vicariously through the characters in the books I read or listen to, I live vicariously through the imagined lives of their authors. In J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, his protagonist, Holden Caulfield says:

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

Like Holden, the intimacy I feel with the authors of great books makes me want to just call them up. Just to say how wonderful their works are, how these works have made me. Just to hear the voice of those who have birthed such marvelous characters and plots. For weeks after I finished Hillbilly Elegy, I searched for ways to directly contact J. D. Vance. I felt compelled to communicate with him, for his book profoundly moved me, and I genuinely wanted him to know. After reading Lilac Girls, I yearned to call Martha Hall Kelly. We would be friends, I just knew it. Around my kitchen table and over many cups of coffee, we would talk books–those we had read and loved and those we had yet to read.

Driving to and from town (and more times than I admit, sitting in my driveway), I listened to Camron Wright’s The Orphan Keeper and lived through 7-year-old Chellamuthu’s life as he was kidnapped from his small Indian village and then sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. Later adopted by American parents and growing up in Colorado, he longs to find his Indian family, to return to the home he can barely remember. When he is finally able to travel to India to search, I spent agonizing minutes as the car idled in parking lots or in my driveway, convinced that this next chapter would bring an end to his search and answers to his prayers. Ezra Pound writes that Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. In the hours I listened to Chellamuthu’s story, I was intensely alive. In the moments before sleep, I could hear the Indian reader’s voice, a fourth dimension to Wright’s character development. The Orphan Keeper was a ball of light in my hand, a brilliant narrative orb that illuminated the places and people of another world.

My life, like most, is a relatively insulated one. I’ve been blessed to travel some, but the majority of my life has been spent in the Midwest, at home and at work. Generally speaking, my trials have been personal ones, particular to my life and circumstances. And from my insulated, singular perspective, I often fall prey to the kind of self-indulgence that blinds one to the world at large. And then I read a great book that humbles and silences me. American author James Baldwin wrote:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

When you realize that your heartbreak has lived and breathed in 17th century Spain, in the dusty streets of Kabul, through the blizzards of the Nebraskan frontier, through the foot-binding rituals of China, through the poverty of Appalachia or Southern India, through the helplessness of Nazi-occupied France and the sacrifices of the French Resistance, with invisible men and women, with mothers and fathers whose dreams for their children cling to faint breaths of hope, then you know that your loss has connected you with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. Then you turn the last page of that book with reverence, for you feel the weight of each sacred and universal word.

I can still remember the fervor with which I talked books to my high school students. As I was reading a good book, I recounted scenes, shared characters, and read passages of perfectly-crafted dialogue or setting. I sold books with an unabashed passion. I lost myself in this selling and retelling, and occasionally found my students losing themselves as well. Truthfully, there were too many days during which I read when I should have been cooking supper or walking into school. Once, I actually walked into a parked car in the faculty parking lot. It was a particularly good chapter, and I really believed that I could walk and read at the same time.

In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green writes:

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

This is it me exactly. I become filled with this weird evangelical zeal, convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. I babble, I foam at the mouth, I sigh and sing. If only the world would read this book and be healed.

These days, I don’t drive and wave to friends and family who pass by. I’m too busy listening to a good book. Hey, I’ve grown, though. I can now do two things at the same time: drive and listen. But don’t ask me to drive, listen, and wave. Three things at the same time are entirely too much for a reading retiree like me.