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I own four different copies of Crime & Punishment. Not to use as bookends, but because it is one of my favorite novels and each copy is a different translation. Though if you ask, I will steer you toward the Volokhonsky/Pevear translation because I think it is best and has the additional benefit of copious footnotes. They also translated Dostoevsky's magnificent and under appreciated novel Demons, which gave me an existential epiphany on my own depression during while waiting for the bus during my first year of college.
The front bedroom is more of a library than guest bedroom now. My favorite bookshelf holds two copies of The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky, one of them a first edition. Beside it is the fragile trade edition of The Miracle Game I read while living in Prague. There is a copy of a little known young adult novel Downriver, signed to me by the author Will Hobbs. Inside is a letter he sent, care of my middle school library, where he praised my overwrought handful of poetry I foolishly put in his hands after he visited my school. There's a Czech translation of Where the Wild Things Are, a book documenting Russian prison tattoos, and Sergei Lukyanenko's urban fantasies set in Moscow. Max Brook's novel World War Z stands there, possibly one of the best novels of the 21st century and so achingly good it makes me wish I had written it. There are biographies of Vera Nabokov, Peter Jennings, and the history of Luby's Cafeterias. Slash's autobiography sits next to Anthony Bourdain's books, an accidental and appropriate kinship. Sitting on top of my 1942 Amy Vanderbilt Guide to Etiquette is a Czech language Bible, also printed in 1942.
While my parents may have made mistakes in my upbringing, their commitment to my literacy and the free reign they gave me to read whatever I chose was invaluable. While at times there were ordinary children's fare (the A Children's Garden of Verses, a picture Bible from my grandparents, a phase of Babysitter's Club and Sleepover friends, that summer in 4th grade where I read almost nothing but Sweet Valley High and those absurd teen horror/suspense paperbacks) most of the time I read my parents books. They were largely science fiction and fantasy, high brow and low brow. I read Asimov and Card as a little girl in my bedroom closet, followed Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring in a corner of the room piled with pillows and my sleeping bag. I also read the Shanara books, Jean Auel's peculiar historical fiction of men, mammoths and sex, and almost every collection of Hugo winning short stories between 1977 and 1985. I had a special edition of Dracula and Frankenstein bound in one enormous hardback that I stuffed in my backpack every day during second grade in hopes of finding a few moments to read.
Reading so much so early was good and bad. Of course there were nuances I missed, things I found when I read the books again years later. Stranger in a Strange Land made more sense at seventeen than it did at eleven, though Heinlein's Friday was and remains just sort of creepy to me. In middle school, I caused a stir by hysterically reading out passages of Auel's pages and pages of explicit sex during lunch period to a rapt audience. My parents were forever assuring school teachers and principals that yes, I really could have those books. Whenever I finished an assignment I would slip my book into my lap to read. Sometimes during band practice I would memorize the pieces so I could play my french horn and read with my book propped up on the music stand. The band director didn't approve of my talent for sight reading and memorization however.
While books set me apart initially from others, they were my lifeline and brought others into my life. In books I found comfort I could not find in others. I was lonely as a child, because I was too smart to fit in and not enough of anything else to belong. I was bounced out of the Girl Scouts because I didn't get along with the other girls who all came from nice upper middle class families and because my parents didn't take me to church. I played a lot of Mario, but always went back to the books. It wasn't until I was in high school that I came to realize other people didn't read the same way my family did, and some people couldn't read at all. I remember listening with mounting queasiness as a star football player, shoehorned into my sophomore advanced placement English class to plump his transcripts, struggled to read aloud from a textbook better suited for eight year olds instead of high school. It never really did occur to me, in my book filled bubble, that illiteracy was a genuine problem or that people didn't like to read. Many of my college classmates were scarcely better, able to read and not bothering to conceal their distaste for it. It was, and remains, an attitude I find difficult to fathom as my life was so full of books from such an early age that I simply cannot imagine a world without them.
I love books. I love the worlds and lives contained within them. They shaped me, helped shade the long lines between black and white. The year I divorced my first husband, I had the Key to Hell from Seasons of Mist tattooed on my leg to remind me that stories were real and we had to be responsible for our own lives as well. In these books filling up my shelves, I found voices and stories who helped me grow up, helped me grieve and helped me go on living. I could not be who I am without them.
The front bedroom is more of a library than guest bedroom now. My favorite bookshelf holds two copies of The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky, one of them a first edition. Beside it is the fragile trade edition of The Miracle Game I read while living in Prague. There is a copy of a little known young adult novel Downriver, signed to me by the author Will Hobbs. Inside is a letter he sent, care of my middle school library, where he praised my overwrought handful of poetry I foolishly put in his hands after he visited my school. There's a Czech translation of Where the Wild Things Are, a book documenting Russian prison tattoos, and Sergei Lukyanenko's urban fantasies set in Moscow. Max Brook's novel World War Z stands there, possibly one of the best novels of the 21st century and so achingly good it makes me wish I had written it. There are biographies of Vera Nabokov, Peter Jennings, and the history of Luby's Cafeterias. Slash's autobiography sits next to Anthony Bourdain's books, an accidental and appropriate kinship. Sitting on top of my 1942 Amy Vanderbilt Guide to Etiquette is a Czech language Bible, also printed in 1942.
While my parents may have made mistakes in my upbringing, their commitment to my literacy and the free reign they gave me to read whatever I chose was invaluable. While at times there were ordinary children's fare (the A Children's Garden of Verses, a picture Bible from my grandparents, a phase of Babysitter's Club and Sleepover friends, that summer in 4th grade where I read almost nothing but Sweet Valley High and those absurd teen horror/suspense paperbacks) most of the time I read my parents books. They were largely science fiction and fantasy, high brow and low brow. I read Asimov and Card as a little girl in my bedroom closet, followed Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring in a corner of the room piled with pillows and my sleeping bag. I also read the Shanara books, Jean Auel's peculiar historical fiction of men, mammoths and sex, and almost every collection of Hugo winning short stories between 1977 and 1985. I had a special edition of Dracula and Frankenstein bound in one enormous hardback that I stuffed in my backpack every day during second grade in hopes of finding a few moments to read.
Reading so much so early was good and bad. Of course there were nuances I missed, things I found when I read the books again years later. Stranger in a Strange Land made more sense at seventeen than it did at eleven, though Heinlein's Friday was and remains just sort of creepy to me. In middle school, I caused a stir by hysterically reading out passages of Auel's pages and pages of explicit sex during lunch period to a rapt audience. My parents were forever assuring school teachers and principals that yes, I really could have those books. Whenever I finished an assignment I would slip my book into my lap to read. Sometimes during band practice I would memorize the pieces so I could play my french horn and read with my book propped up on the music stand. The band director didn't approve of my talent for sight reading and memorization however.
While books set me apart initially from others, they were my lifeline and brought others into my life. In books I found comfort I could not find in others. I was lonely as a child, because I was too smart to fit in and not enough of anything else to belong. I was bounced out of the Girl Scouts because I didn't get along with the other girls who all came from nice upper middle class families and because my parents didn't take me to church. I played a lot of Mario, but always went back to the books. It wasn't until I was in high school that I came to realize other people didn't read the same way my family did, and some people couldn't read at all. I remember listening with mounting queasiness as a star football player, shoehorned into my sophomore advanced placement English class to plump his transcripts, struggled to read aloud from a textbook better suited for eight year olds instead of high school. It never really did occur to me, in my book filled bubble, that illiteracy was a genuine problem or that people didn't like to read. Many of my college classmates were scarcely better, able to read and not bothering to conceal their distaste for it. It was, and remains, an attitude I find difficult to fathom as my life was so full of books from such an early age that I simply cannot imagine a world without them.
I love books. I love the worlds and lives contained within them. They shaped me, helped shade the long lines between black and white. The year I divorced my first husband, I had the Key to Hell from Seasons of Mist tattooed on my leg to remind me that stories were real and we had to be responsible for our own lives as well. In these books filling up my shelves, I found voices and stories who helped me grow up, helped me grieve and helped me go on living. I could not be who I am without them.