Top 5 Summer Book Pick: Shelf Discovery

Shelf Discovery is a collection of personal essays about how books have changed the authors' lives.

I was the kind of girl who felt true physical pain when asked to put down a book at the dinner table.

I felt ravenous toward each book, like a vampire desperate to clamp my fangs into the foreign body until it was drained in its entirety, lifeless on the floor. I was, in my tastes, completely indiscriminate. If it was my brother's collection of sea stories, complete with a many-armed kraken on the cover; if it was my mother's old copy of The Fixer; if it was my grandmother's Nicholas and Alexandra—it didn't matter. It was on the shelf, and I could follow at least 35 percent of the action? I gave it a try. By age ten, I had developed a taste for Erma Bombeck, William Least Heat-Moon, the Monkey Wrench Gang, and Sonia Levitin.

I was very fond of Terms of Endearment.

There was a Richard Bach stage—I'm not ashamed, although, if you must know, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is his weakest work—and, pressed by my mother, a dalliance with Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

The conventional wisdom is that a precocious reader is a child in possession of a preternatural grasp of both the facts and features of the adult world. This was not true of me. My reading list didn't grant me access to the particulars of adult life but to the dark web of complex feeling that apparently suffused life after grade school. I was consumed with the music of the words, not the circumstances surrounding Little Miss Muffet and her actual tuffet. (Can you, even now, confidently define tuffet?) Let's take The Good Earth. I knew nothing about rice farming, mistresses, dynasties, or opium—I couldn't have pointed out China on a map—but still, I understood Wang Lung in all his lust, kindness, weakness, and rage, and O-lan in her sorrow and strength. The former slave who, freed, keeps two pearls hanging between her breasts! Which her husband takes from her, for his mistress! Which he thinks of still, miserably, after her death!

Gah—who cared exactly where China was?

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SHELF DISCOVERY: THE TEEN CLASSICS WE NEVER STOPPED READING BY LIZZIE SKURNICK (AVON/HARPERCOLLINS)

From Reader's Digest - August 2009

Originally in Shelf Discovery

 

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• Top 5 Summer Book Pick: King of Heists
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