I have active library cards in four counties. Last week, if you’d wandered into the Sebastopol Branch of the Sonoma County Library, you would have found me kneeling as if in prayer before the junior graphic novels section, searching not my heart but the shelves as earnestly as any pilgrim. My kids are obsessed with graphic novels, especially Charlie. It takes him a very short span of time to read one, and although he will reread them multiple times, he is always in search of something new.
I co-taught a graphic novel class with a student at Pratt back in the day, and I love Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs, but it’s never been my form. “The words create pictures,” I explained to the kids when I started reading chapter books to them. I suppose I’ve spent vast swaths of my life staring at black and white rows of letters and seeing vivid, animated worlds. Perhaps this is why I loved The Matrix. Isn’t that virtual reality coming to life in our heads ultimately just reading?
They gulp books down, my children. These labors of love, of artistic vision and enormous effort, scarfed down like donut holes without the side effects of such a binge. I remember seeing the mom in the park whose kids were old enough that she could sit on the bench and read. I watched her with envy as I followed my toddlers around, catching them as they gleefully stepped off high platforms, plummeting towards sand. Now we all sit and read. I have to force us from our books so we will talk at the dinner table. In my world, there’s no one who does not think this is wonderful. And yet. Are we meeting up on the other side of that text looking glass? We’re plugged into pages, not screens, but we are plugged in, focused hard, caught in the fantasies of our separate worlds. “A day spent reading is an ordinary day,” Annie Dillard says somewhere in The Writing Life, “but a life spent reading is an extraordinary life.”
Perhaps worry is the art or merely the curse of parenting. Whatever they were doing I’d be worrying about it, and what they are doing is reading. It’s my fault–I read about 15 books in the month after Leo was born, nursing him and holding a book. “He’s your raisin,” our mindfulness birthing coach said to me, referring to an exercise where you stare at a raisin for long minutes and meditate on all its wrinkles, as individual as the whorls in a fingerprint, the socket of twirl at the base of a baby’s hair. But I would read.
Why am I writing about this today, other than the way worry pulses a subject through the veins and into the pen? Well–here’s the bright side. It can feel, wandering the stacks, perusing the tables and shelves at our local bookstore, that there are so many books. Too many to read in one short life. Does the world need another book and another? Does the world need yours, and mine? But you have only to remember the hungry reader, bored in the morning because he’s read all these volumes a dozen times, to understand the gleeful answer is yes! Yes we need your book! We need it now. Get back to writing.