one of my best companions
[Welcome to our annual Guest Writers Series. Meet contributor #5...]
I can’t remember not being able to read. Books have always been my companion. My bed had a headboard to which a lamp was attached. I would pull the covers over my head and it, so my parents could not see any light from under my door and thus assume I was asleep. However, I am not sure how that worked because my mother always said my reading habits were the reason I needed glasses at an early age.
I still reminisce over some of those pages… I cried over Bambi, Beautiful Joe, and the March sisters. I learned history via “the best of times and the worst of times,” and labored over “Call me Ishmael.”
I am still addicted to reading, needing the next read available when I finish the one in hand… be it fiction – with truths, non-fiction – facts with opinion, historical fiction – a blend of both, and who-dun-its. Most books I read only once with one exception…To Kill A Mockingbird. When I began my career in the classroom, it was part of the 9th grade course of study, so I taught that each semester for 30 years, re-reading it each year to hone my lesson plans and to re-experience the impact on students, especially those who had never read a book before, but now devoured the antics of Scout, Jem, and Dill as well as the wisdom of Atticus.
My addiction has not ceased as a retiree. My husband was a reader also and with an end table between us which held a glass of merlot, we would reach for the other’s hand in order to share a line to enjoy. How I miss that now.
So how about some suggestions for you?
… books too good to miss… No special order… just appreciated.
I first discovered a Minnesota author Wm. Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace (an oxymoron), Charles Martin, Lisa Scottline and Michael Connelly who create characters who reappear in their books like family. (Connelly’s newest, The Proving Ground, is evidence that the use of AI is far ahead of the ethics needed to use it.)
Backman’s A Man Called Ove, an elderly curmudgeon rule-follower, does have heart. Always Grisham for legal drama, Baldacci for intrigue, and Albom, the journalist story-teller.
Kristen Hannah in The Women, nurses in Vietnam when we were told there were no women there. Brook’s Horse merges the then-and-now story of a contemporary scientist who researches the bones of a legendary Kentucky race horse in the 1850’s. Picoult always with microscopic take-apart of social issues, and my newest favorite which I will read again because of all the reflection it invites, Theo of Golden.
My non-fiction includes Dana Perino’s I Wish Someone Had Told Me (but would I have listened?) and Louisiana’s Senator Kennedy’s wit and wisdom in How to Test Negative for Stupid — and Why Washington Never Will.
The Vanishing American Adult by former university president and former Senator Ben Sasse is for every parent and educator. Then for people like me who reside in an independent living community, Joan Chittister’s The Gift of Years… yes, think about aging even if you don’t want to… you may change your mind.
So thanks, Intramuralist, but enough for now… The Correspondent is waiting, so join me in picking up a book too. Open the pages to learn, laugh, cry, think, escape, enjoy! Don’t miss the companionship.
P.S. And oh, yes, I start my day reading Scripture. That helps me learn, laugh, cry, think, escape and enjoy, too.
Respectfully…
DWL
