What I’m Reading — Books Are My Windows to the World

From Richard Scarry to Viktor Frankl to a bookshop in Scotland — a lifetime of reading, what it has given me, and the books I would press into your hands right now.

Books are my windows to the world.

They have been since I was small enough to sit pressed against my brother and my sisters on the sofa while my mother read to us — all of us lined up, leaning in, searching the pages of Richard Scarry for Lowly Worm hiding in his apple car. Finding him was a triumph every single time.

From there it was the library. Every summer, as soon as school let out, we walked back and forth with our loot, as many books as we could carry, which was never quite enough. My parents are both prolific readers. My grandmother was too. I think we came by it honestly, all of us, the way you come by a love of music or a way of moving through the world. It was simply in the air of the house we grew up in.

My first grown-up book was Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. I was probably too young for it. I read it under the covers with a flashlight until the wee hours of the morning and I have never quite recovered. After that there was no going back. Books were not just stories anymore. They were worlds you could disappear into completely, places where the rules of your ordinary life did not apply.

That has not changed. Not in my entire adult life, not in fifty-plus years of reaching for books the way other people reach for the phone. The power of books is something I stopped trying to explain a long time ago. You either feel it or you do not.

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How I Read

I am a two-format reader and each format has its place.

Real books — the kind you hold, mark, fold down a corner of, stack on every surface until Bill raises an eyebrow — those are for bed. At the end of the day I climb in, arrange the dogs around me (all three are particular about where they sleep and none of them involve the floor), and I read until I cannot keep my eyes open. There is nothing better. The weight of a real book in your hands, the smell of books, the physical act of turning pages — these things matter. A Kindle cannot replicate them and I have stopped trying to make it.

The Kindle is for the fireplace. I sit in one chair, two dogs share the other, and whichever one does not believe in sharing sits with me. On weekends my sister sometimes comes over and we sit in opposite chairs and read in companionable silence for hours. Bill and I do the same. Two people, two chairs, two books, no talking. I cannot think of a better evening.

I rarely watch television. Books are where I go when I want to think, or travel, or feel something, or stop feeling something for a little while. They have never once let me down.

The Books That Have Carried Me

There are books you enjoy and books that change something.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is one of the most important books I have ever read. A Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who found, in the most unimaginable circumstances, that meaning is something no one can take from you. I return to it. I think about it still. Some books teach you how to live and this is one of them.

Night by Elie Wiesel belongs in the same breath. A book that everyone should read and that I have never been able to shake entirely — nor would I want to. There are books that ask something of you as a reader and this is one of them.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch is something altogether different and equally important. A woman who loses her sister reads a book a day for a year to carry herself through grief. I read it and felt seen in a way that only the best books manage. If you have ever turned to books in a hard season, and I suspect most of you have, this one is for you.

I came to Toni Morrison the way a lot of women my age did — through Oprah’s book club. Morrison wrote about the inner lives of Black women with a power I have never forgotten. She is not a comfortable read. She is not meant to be. That is exactly why she matters.

The Books That Take Me Away

There is something that happens to women at this stage of life — in middle age, in the later years after the children leave or the career shifts or the life we planned turns out to look quite different from the life we are actually living — that changes how we read. We stop reading to impress anyone. We stop finishing books we do not like out of some sense of obligation. We start reading for ourselves, on our own terms, because it makes life better. I think this is one of the quiet gifts of getting older. We finally know what we actually want. And what I want, it turns out, is exactly what I have always wanted: a good book, a quiet room, and enough time to disappear into both.

Reading has also, over the years, done something quieter and harder to name. It has helped me silence the inner critic. A good book reminds you that everyone is managing, in their own way, with their own weight — and that your life, however imperfect, is enough. I have learned as much about how to live from novels as from any practical advice anyone has ever given me.

I have spent a large part of my life reading seriously. For school, for my graduate degree, for research, for the kind of reading that demands your full attention. During my masters I read Harlequin romances to decompress and I am not even slightly embarrassed about that. At one point I thought I might write a romance novel myself. Turns out there is actual research showing that romance readers score higher on empathy tests than people who read other genres. I am choosing to take that as a personal compliment. [See the study]

You do what you need to do.

Now I read for joy. For travel. For the pleasure of being somewhere else entirely for a few hours without leaving my chair.

I am a romantic at heart — what can I say. Give me England, Scotland, France. Give me a bookshop, an old house, a garden, a love story that makes me believe in people, a little history woven through. I do not need it to be serious. I need it to be real. Historical fiction especially — the kind where you can feel the research underneath the story without ever being hit over the head with it.

I am not a snob about it — I read popular books and Booker Prize winners with equal enthusiasm.. I love a short story collection for the same reason I love a short book — the compression of it, the way a good writer can do in twenty pages what others cannot do in two hundred. And I always have a recent book on the go alongside whatever I am rereading, because there is always something new worth finding.

Ferney by James Long — a love story that spans centuries, set in the English countryside, one of those books that quietly gets into you and does not leave. The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher, which I have recommended already this year and will keep recommending until everyone I know has read it. One Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi — an American woman falls in love with a Venetian stranger and follows him there. The whole book feels like a beautiful dream. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce — a man walks the length of England to visit a dying friend and the book is really about everything happening inside him while he does it. The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg. My Mrs. Brown by Sandi Toksvig. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, which made me laugh and cry in the same chapter and which I cannot recommend enough.

And The Long Walk Home by Will North — a man carrying his wife’s ashes across the UK, walking through grief and landscape and what it means to love someone. Not a sad book, really. A book about what you carry and what you finally put down.

Food is my love language. Anyone who knows me knows this. So it will surprise no one that I am just as drawn to books about food as I am to novels — books that tell a story through what people cook and eat and share. Chocolat by Joanne Harris. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, where emotion is literally cooked into every dish. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote about food the way other people write about music — as one of the serious subjects. Which of course it is. I return to her every few years and she always has something new to say to me.

One Thousand Days in Venice belongs here too because Marlena de Blasi cooks throughout and the food is completely inseparable from the love story. That is, I think, exactly how it should be.

For those who love gardens and the natural world — The Two Gardeners, the correspondence between Katharine White and Elizabeth Lawrence, two women writing to each other about gardens across decades. And The Curious Life of Elizabeth Blackwell — a woman determined and brilliant and ahead of her time. I found myself wanting to be her friend.

For food history — Savoring the Past by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, which traces the history of French cooking and food culture and is the kind of book that makes you understand that everything on your table has a story. If food has ever meant more to you than fuel, this is your book.

For art — anything about the Impressionists. Anything about the Great Masters. I have a shelf of art history books that I return to the way other people return to novels — for comfort, for beauty, for the pleasure of just looking and remembering trips to see them.

And for those who have never read Tove Jansson — not the Moomin books but her novels for adults, The Summer Book especially — she writes about solitude and the natural world and old age with a quietness that I find completely irresistible. Short, perfect, unlike anything else. I shared both the book and the film adaptation over on Weekend Meanderings and the response told me everything I needed to know about the women who read this blog.

On Reading for Pleasure Without Apology

When I was young I read every Stephen King novel. In the eighties and nineties I loved the Bourne books — all the tension and pace and international intrigue. I do not read true crime. I do not read anything that frightens me, not anymore. I have enough reality. What I want from a book now is what books have always given me at their best — the feeling of being somewhere else, someone else, in another time, in another country, in a life I will never live but can borrow for a few hours on a winter evening by the fire

My mother read to us. Her mother read. My father reads. My sister comes on weekends and we sit in our chairs in companionable silence. Books are not just what I read. They are part of how my family loves each other.

Tell me in the comments — what are you reading right now? And what is the book you would press into the hands of every woman you know? I would love to know. If you are in a book club, I would especially love to know what you are reading together. Some of the best book recommendations I have ever received have come from other women and from the readers of this blog. We know what we need.

We always have. Long before books were widely available, women passed stories to each other — old girls and young ones, across kitchen tables and back fences and now across the internet. That quiet tradition of women encouraging women, sharing what has moved them and sustained them, feels to me like one of the most important things we do. Not in any grand public life sense. Just woman to woman, book to book.

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Monday Musings No. 218 | Picky Bits, a Blush Lily and a Book About a Bookshop