Bibliophile

I have a tendency to buy too many books. Like, way too many books.

This is probably not much of a confession to anyone reading, anyone who thinks, ‘Yeah, aren’t you a writer?’ That’s fair, of course. It’s true that I’m a writer, and (usually) good writers tend to read a lot. It’s how we first discover weird words like superfluous or magnanimous. It’s how we figure out that saying the fog tiptoed in is actually an oddly charming way of explaining something, and that maybe we should also try something kind of like that.

But let me clarify.

The first few yeas of my life, I absolutely devoured books. I was homeschooled after an unsuccessful stint in public school, which ended abruptly after my mother heard that my teacher had told me to stop reading. (This is a story for another day, and I still find it absurd as an adult.) As a non-religious homeschooled kid in Nowhere, Texas, I spent a good deal of time at the public library in a city nearby. It was something like a twenty-minute drive or more away, but my mother—whom I’m sure you’re beginning to understand is the real MVP here—went to pains to ensure that my brother and I could access all the knowledge in the world.

And I did. I ate that shit up.

I read the entire section on Paranormal Investigation, which is how I learned about EVPs and how measuring temperature in different rooms is really very important in ghost hunting. I read all the books on dinosaurs, and I was obsessed, and I (apparently) insisted that my parents not call them ‘Saber-tooth Tigers,’ because the correct name was ‘Smilodon.’ I read all kinds of things, from Spanish History to Fossils of the Deep Sea. I was insatiable.

But the problem was, I was several reading levels above my age and grade. I blew right past Junie B. Jones and spent what felt like the blink of an eye on Dear Dumb Diary. They weren’t enough. I couldn’t entirely relate to the protagonists, even if I knew in the back of my head that I had been that little girl before. I was that little girl, technically.

But I also wasn’t in those books at all. I wasn’t white, first of all, and I wasn’t in public school. I didn’t have a weird best friend that didn’t care about the popular kids; I didn’t even really understand what ‘popular kids’ were. Sure, I’d read about them and maybe seen them in a movie or two, but the concept didn’t stick. I hadn’t lived that experience. So I skated right past those books and straight into the ones about fourteen-year-olds, girls exiting middle school and suddenly entering the wild hallways of high school. The tonal shift almost gave me whiplash. Sure, I felt like the words on the page better matched the ones in my inner monologue, but there were still so many things I didn’t quite get.

Oh. And there was also that one book about the girl who finds her former best friend dead in a tunnel system after she’s been missing for something like weeks.

Also the one where a girl’s twin dies of E. Coli.

Anyways.

This rambling explanation of my literary journey is all to say, I never quite found a book in the fiction genre that spoke to me. I tried, of course, and I read all kinds of subgenres to try and find that magic moment. I read books about romance, about navigating high school (which I quickly gave up on), about mundane mysteries and dramatic hunts for the answers to art thefts (Chasing Vermeer was actually quite good.) I found partial solace in horror and fantasy, drawn in by the Otherness of vampires and pirates (and vampirates.) But even the fantastic couldn’t quite cut it for me, because too often, the characters were concerned with some boy or how they didn’t feel beautiful or worthy enough to be a protagonist. Don’t get me wrong—I certainly felt the pressures of beauty and worthiness as a young woman. But I wanted to escape. I didn’t want the girl who could walk on water to think, there’s no way that guy who hasn’t said more than five words to me would think I was cool for walking on water. I was screaming at her.

WHY THE HELL DOES HE MATTER? HE SUCKS IF HE DOESN’T THINK YOU’RE COOL! AND HE’S BORING ANYWAYS!

There’s a pretty obvious reason why I didn’t click with these stories, but that’s another another story for another another day.

The few books I managed to enjoy were the ones I returned to over and over again. I reread them like watching reruns of my favorite show before Netflix was a thing. I was happy that I knew I could get that one scene that was almost perfect. Although I kept trying to branch out, my hope dwindled.

It took years for me to read a book that clicked. I was a junior in high school, actually, probably about seventeen. I’d probably spent a decade searching for something like Bejamin Alire Saenz’s Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. When I finished it, I both wanted to cry and throw it across the room. It was beautiful, and it was too short, and it was just right, and it was not quite enough. I was reading about teenage boys. But something in that story spoke to me, and I treasured that. I treasured the humor and offbeat relationship of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. I couldn’t stop myself from speeding through Connie Willis’ Passage, heart racing and breathing coming in thready bursts even when I knew what was happening. I adored these books with my entire heart, bought copies, read them dozens of times (even made my entire family read Passage, too.) I found Pride & Prejudice late in life, but I adored it too, the first (in my opinion, not entirely) heterosexual relationship I’d ever really admired in literature for its beautiful metamorphosis and theme of self-betterment.

So while I may hoard books like a doomsday prepper expecting all libraries everywhere to burn (which, unfortunately, is becoming a horrifyingly real dystopia as book bans resurge), I don’t necessarily keep them all. I regularly donate what disappoints, bittersweetly parting with concepts that didn’t quite achieve what I hoped they would (for me) and characters that I wished were just a little more this or that. I hope that they find homes with people who appreciate them, because in the end, they really deserve it—someone worked hard on each chapter, lovingly crafted their stories and subplots, pored over edits at 3 AM with squinting eyes and six cups scattered across their desktop. Just because I didn’t find what I hoped in these books doesn’t mean someone else won’t. That, I think, is the real beauty of writing. It’s the endless search, the hopeful scouring, the fingers tapping against a chin while contemplating which synopsis might be alluding to subversive gender roles and which might just be attempting to echo Gone Girl for the Tumblr aesthetic.

It’s exhausting to be forever searching. It’s lonely. But the sandy copy of Tess Gerritsen’s Life Support that I pilfered from an Airbnb while on vacation will forever remain one of my favorites, and I wasn’t even looking for it. I just had my eyes open and my schedule emptied, and I saw a dusty shelf full of nineties-era thrillers that seemed inconsequential enough to eat up my time on the beach.

So while you’re embarking on that journey, that dating game of The Book-chelor (I know, red card), remember this: just as in love, the right book isn’t always in a catalog you’re scouring for the right buzz words or shared interests. Sometimes, it’s hiding on a familiar island in an unfamiliar place you never thought to look before. So take chances on the weird books hiding in corners of coffee shops with ten-dollar artistic lattes, because while the cover may not be attractive, the pages could delight.