{"id":113,"date":"2023-03-07T20:24:56","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T20:24:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jmbask.com\/?p=113"},"modified":"2023-03-07T21:59:12","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07T21:59:12","slug":"my-life-in-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jmbask.com\/?p=113","title":{"rendered":"My Life in Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other evening, I went out to the bookstore\u2013with no kids in tow\u2013and 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This immediately reminded me that I used to love reading Lilian Jackson Braun novels. <\/span>Lilian Jackson Braun,<\/span><\/a> if you aren’t familiar with the author, probably originated the cozy cat mystery genre with her series of \u201cThe Cat Who\u201d 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\u2019t just read a couple of them.\u00a0 I checked out every single one my library branch had.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2013the woman who writes stories about swamp boys and cannibal mermaids and sand monsters\u2013loved to read about crime-fighting cats.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019d be willing to bet this is true for a lot of readers.\u00a0 But let me share some examples from my own life. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>At the end of elementary school, I was obsessed with books that featured talking rodents as main characters, from <\/span>The Secret of NIMH<\/span><\/i> to <\/span>The Mouse on the Motorcycle.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My home life was starting to get rough (I\u2019ll spare the details) and my foray into the world of magical rodents was my first foray into fantasy as escapism.\u00a0 And, man, did I want to escape.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>The Tommyknockers<\/span><\/i>, which I\u2019m only mentioning because it feels like every writer wants to know what every other writer\u2019s first Stephen King book was).\u00a0 I made a blatant point of reading his big, thick tomes in class. I was the <\/span>only <\/span><\/i>seventh-grader reading Stephen King.\u00a0 My logic was, if they weren\u2019t going to like me anyway, I could at least be a little scary, too.\u00a0 This kept up right through high school, when I morphed into an amorphous blend of goth, punk and grunge. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Funnily, this was the same era of those Lilian Jackson Braun novels. I never took them to school, though. Mystery-solving Siamese cats aren\u2019t 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Nerdy 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.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>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.\u00a0 We\u2019ll 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 <\/span>Otherland<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>London Below<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>Mid-World<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 (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.\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Then, I met my husband and things settled down.\u00a0 As we married and started having kids, I found myself drawn to the classics.\u00a0 When I had time to read,\u00a0 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 <\/span>The Scarlet Lette<\/span><\/i>r or<\/span> Catcher in the Rye<\/span><\/i>. This devouring of classic lit\u00a0 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 <\/span>Of Mice and Men<\/span><\/i> in 8th grade, I wanted to have read it too.\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>I started reading A LOT of horror in the last several years. I think that one is pretty self-explanatory.\u00a0 In a world which seemed like it was falling apart (and still does, some days),\u00a0 it was reassuring to know at least we weren\u2019t living in a<\/span> house with a haunted sibling<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>fighting off neighborhood vampires<\/span><\/a>, or <\/span>being sacrificed to an old god in an amusement park<\/span><\/a>. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Maybe I\u2019m 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Or maybe I\u2019m just rambling, since no one is going to read this anyway.\u00a0 But if you do, maybe it\u2019s what you need.\u00a0 Maybe this is the sign to figure out what books are missing from your life right now, and to do that, you\u2019ve got to think about the books that you needed in your past. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Happy book-hunting. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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