The other evening, I went out to the bookstore–with no kids in tow–and grabbed myself a chai tea and started wandering the aisles. It was the first time, in a very long time, that i had been in a bookstore without a child demanding my attention or dragging me from shelf to shelf. It was seven p.m. on a Wednesday night, with no errands or chores or plans awaiting me at home or anywhere else.
B&N had rearranged the shelves again and, when I went in search of the horror section, I found myself face to face with cozy mysteries instead. Hundreds of thick, paperback mysteries, and so many of them solved with the help of cherubic puppies and slim kittens that graced their covers.
This immediately reminded me that I used to love reading Lilian Jackson Braun novels. Lilian Jackson Braun, if you aren’t familiar with the author, probably originated the cozy cat mystery genre with her series of “The Cat Who” books, about a retired journalist in a small town, who solves murders and mysteries galore, with the help of his two Siamese cats. And back, then, I didn’t just read a couple of them. I checked out every single one my library branch had.
I–the woman who writes stories about swamp boys and cannibal mermaids and sand monsters–loved to read about crime-fighting cats.
It made me realize what I was reading at certain times in my life seemed to indicate what I was going through or the kind of person I was or wanted to be at the time. I’d be willing to bet this is true for a lot of readers. But let me share some examples from my own life.
At the end of elementary school, I was obsessed with books that featured talking rodents as main characters, from The Secret of NIMH to The Mouse on the Motorcycle. My best friend and I talked about how we would live, if we were mice, and my mom would be happy to tell you that I wanted to turn into a mouse. And I did. My home life was starting to get rough (I’ll spare the details) and my foray into the world of magical rodents was my first foray into fantasy as escapism. And, man, did I want to escape.
A few years later, around the age of twelve, after moving across the country and being thrust into a Southern school where I was very much the odd-girl out, I started reading anything and everything Stephen King (starting with The Tommyknockers, which I’m only mentioning because it feels like every writer wants to know what every other writer’s first Stephen King book was). I made a blatant point of reading his big, thick tomes in class. I was the only seventh-grader reading Stephen King. My logic was, if they weren’t going to like me anyway, I could at least be a little scary, too. This kept up right through high school, when I morphed into an amorphous blend of goth, punk and grunge.
Funnily, this was the same era of those Lilian Jackson Braun novels. I never took them to school, though. Mystery-solving Siamese cats aren’t scary, and probably would have further relegated me to the ‘nerd’ (and not in a good way) category that the other kids had assigned me to. Nerdy or not, the cats always solved the mystery. Those books represented a time in my life where I wanted something to go right, I wanted answers. And Koko and Yum Yum always figured out the answers.
My twenties led to more escapism. If it was five-hundred pages thick, and came in a minimum four book series, I was reading it, especially if Tad Williams name was on the cover. Neil Gaiman was a big feature those years as well. We’ll just say I spent my twenties at a job I hated, with a string of, uh, less than savory boyfriends. I needed all the magical doors I could get, be they to Otherland or London Below or Mid-World. (You can argue with me all you want, but I still think the Dark Tower series is more fantasy than horror). Portal fantasies (and horrors) still remain my favorite genre.
Then, I met my husband and things settled down. As we married and started having kids, I found myself drawn to the classics. When I had time to read, I went back and read a lot of the books I had missed in high school and middle school. I was in advanced and AP English classes, so often was assigned books considered ‘above’ a lot of the more commonly prescribed books, like The Scarlet Letter or Catcher in the Rye. This devouring of classic lit was partly nostalgia for youth as mine faded toward middle-age, but also a weird preparation for child-rearing. If my kids were going to have to read Of Mice and Men in 8th grade, I wanted to have read it too.
I started reading A LOT of horror in the last several years. I think that one is pretty self-explanatory. In a world which seemed like it was falling apart (and still does, some days), it was reassuring to know at least we weren’t living in a house with a haunted sibling, fighting off neighborhood vampires, or being sacrificed to an old god in an amusement park.
Maybe I’m just psycho-analyzing myself through books, or maybe my theory holds some weight, I dunno. I do think, for true readers, we read what we need.
Or maybe I’m just rambling, since no one is going to read this anyway. But if you do, maybe it’s what you need. Maybe this is the sign to figure out what books are missing from your life right now, and to do that, you’ve got to think about the books that you needed in your past.
Happy book-hunting.