My Readingest Year
Wine glass used as a placeholder for the books I’ve returned to the library or loaned to friends. Because, hey, it’s Napa.
It is official: my 2020 reading collection was tall enough to board a kiddie carnival ride. Roughly three feet of novels, young adult literature, and educational nonfiction walked me through an uncertain year. I could pile all 38 inches of books into a tea cup ride without an accompanying adult, and send it whirling to its heart’s content. I read less than some folks, and more than others, but this is probably the first year of my adult life that I can measure my reading with a yard stick.
Most moms did not sit around in 2020, hoping for something to fill our downtime.
We didn’t have a chance to wallow in boredom when restaurants closed. In this pandemic, parenting is the unpaid essential work that seemed to multiply tenfold. I made time to read- usually on borrowed sleeping hours- because stories and ideas became the glue that held my sanity intact.
As a mom, and a wife, with a job, I have much to be grateful for. However, “grateful for having all this time to read” doesn’t really describe how my stack of books grew so high. I read out of near mania; I couldn’t not read in 2020. So I am grateful for the writers who brought a dish to my literary potluck, in a particularly hungry year.
“Mommy’s reading a book so she can learn about her feelings” became a funny quip I threw around with my family. But really. I needed tools.
I consumed nonfiction this year with the intensity of those distance racers who devour their calories on the run. There were handfuls of wisdom that needed grabbing, on the go, to tackle problems that needed solving, yesterday. Navigating the mental gauntlets of work, my children, and even myself was tricky, and in that I am certain that I am not alone.
For example, I would have laughed at a title like Permission to Feel a year ago. This year, however, there were times when it seemed that emotional intelligence was the only smarts that mattered. That book, in particular, offered insight that has come to my aid repeatedly in conversations with my children and my high school students. Offering young people the language to recognize their own feelings, and the feelings of others- beyond descriptors such as happy/angry/sad- is a gift I had to unwrap myself.
Quiet, also, was one of my best reads this year. When I’ve mentioned it to friends, many have remarked, “Oh, I loved that! Read it a few years ago!” I may be late to the Quiet game, but it couldn’t have come to me at a more relevant moment. Trying to coax out, literally, anything I can from my remote-learning students, has made me appreciate the need to build classroom routines that support the input of introverts and their extroverted peers. Naming the finer points of introversion has also helped me to untangle some of the complexities of my introverted son, with whom I’ve spent lots and lots of time once our schools closed their doors last March.
Stories, on the other hand, sucked me in- sometimes against my will. Stephen King, for example, is not an author I’d recommend reading during a global pandemic. But somehow, after a mad dash to our attic, I began reading his Dark Tower series and didn’t put it down until all seven books had been consumed, considered, and marched back up to the attic book box. The joy of entering into a well-written world gave my mind just enough to engage in, outside the echo chamber of always thinking about the running current list of mental projects. (Which, by the way, ranged from developing virtual training programs to finding just the right way to fit three yoga mats across my living room floor.)
Weird truths seemed to surface when I got lost in stories.
That’s both the mark of a good writing, and evidence of the human need for sense-making as our world pivoted, stopped, and turned over itself in 2020. C.S. Lewis was particularly poignant. My husband and I read the Chronicles of Narnia series with our children, and sometimes his beautiful, concise tales left me wondering why anyone else would even bother to write children’s literature. (Thankfully, J.K. Rowling kept me from asking that question for too long.) As I mourned changes at work and my own children’s childhood- kindergarten is not supposed to begin in front of a computer- Aslan’s advice to his youngest heroine, Lucy, were hauntingly relevant:
“To know what would have happened, child?” said Aslan. “No. Nobody is ever told that.”
“Oh dear,” said Lucy.
“But anyone can find out what will happen,” said Aslan.
Nothing like an allegorical god-lion from a kids’ book to remind you that, no matter how grown up you are, you don’t get to know the would-have-beens. This was a year to plant oneself fully in what is.
One of the Dark Tower books also painted a truly uncanny scene, where the protagonists enter into a parallel world whose telltale trait is dim sunlight, and the absence of shadows. This sounds like ho-hum sci-fi, until thousands of acres of wildfire blanket your town in a grey-orange color. In Napa this fall, we had days that were “sunny”, but our own daylight was on a dimmer switch. And no shadows. That part of Mr. King’s book series was intended to draw on its readers’ imaginations- in my case, it tapped strangely into recent memories. Later in the story, the books’ heroes wander through the wreckage of a civilization that had been wiped out by a virus “superbug”. At least Mr. King included mutants and time travel to help remind me that he was just writing fantasy, after all.
Finally, reading Charlotte’s Web in the springtime was a treasure. If you’re feeling pensive about the dearness of close friends (those you are, or are not seeing, during a pandemic), the last few chapters are sure to bring you to tears. Charlotte’s eloquent and gentle explanation to Wilbur, about why it was so important to her to love him well during her short time on earth, had me boo-hooing over every other syllable of our nighttime read. Before we began the waterworks, however, I dog-eared this little gem that E.B. White hid earlier in the story:
Mr. Zimmerman: “A miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Zuckerman, “it seems to me you’re a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.”
“Oh no,” said Mr. Zuckerman. “It’s the pig that’s unusual. It says so, right there in the middle of the web.”
I re-read this sly social commentary to my kids a couple of times. By the end of the book, however, they still thought of Charlotte’s Web as the book about Wilbur the pig. No matter. I was glad the humble farmer’s wife gave us dialogue to consider who we think is the star of the show, versus the contributions of love and effort that put that star into the limelight.
Did the input of all those words make me a better person?
Will I navigate the world with more graciousness that I would have otherwise? Were the hours I invested in a seven-book series (18 inches, in case you’re wondering) enough of a release valve to make me a calmer mother, a more present wife? I don’t know. For now I think it’s enough to say, I read all those books because I needed to, and it was worth doing because I liked it. And It for sure made for a satisfying photo at the end of the year.
I’m sure E.B. White and the editors of a dozen New Yorkers would cringe to see their pages whipping around on a carnival ride. But since my reading pile towers somewhere between the height of my hips and my elbows, I’ve earned the right to picture them showing off their credentials in front of a height requirement sign. A girl can dream. The Napa County Fair is a long way off, anyway.
