Beware of the person of one book. –Thomas Aquinas
I fell in love with Jane because she was dressed for the first day of second grade in a blue and white sailor dress like a girl from one of my books. I remember a hat and gloves to boot, but I don’t quite trust that memory because I’m sure as soon as I saw the sailor dress I gave her a hat and gloves in my imagination. She had a British accent: her family had lived in England and Africa and on weekends her father dressed in white trousers and sweater and played cricket in the park, which took like ten hours.
Besides Jane, I was in love with books. Lustfully, extravagantly in love. Jane’s father called me a bluestocking. He said it meant a girl who liked to read. I liked the sound of it: bluestocking. It sounded whimsical to me, old fashioned and romantic, like Jane’s sailor dress (and hat and gloves).
If you look it up, you’ll learn it was actually a somewhat derogatory term for an intellectual woman. Now, it’s possible that I was sometimes a bit of a pretentious pain when I was a kid. I’m certain I spouted lots of opinions. I wasn’t much for deferring to adults just because they were tall. This probably made me the teensiest bit obnoxious sometimes. But I’m okay with that.
Anyway, I’ll take the epithet gladly. Because, books.
Books I read because they were somebody else’s favorite:
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, Tom Spanbauer
Books I love that feature orphans:
A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren
Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
Books that made me want to wear a bonnet:
The Little House Series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Books with the best magic:
Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers
The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkein
The Dark is Rising Series, Susan Cooper
(p.s. What is up with all the initials in this category?)
Books I’m reading because I am interested in the agent who represents them:
The Boy Kings of Texas, Domingo Martinez
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir, Elizabeth McCracken
Memoir of the Sunday Brunch, Julia Pandl
Books I’m reading for other writing projects:
A History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom
Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, Hanne Blank
Books I want to read about authors of books I love:
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers, Valerie Lawson
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Harriet Reisen
Books the nuns made us read in high school:
Silas Marner, George Eliot
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Books I’ve given as gifts:
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, Tom Spanbauer
Wild, Cheryl Strayed
A box set of the first few Sookie Stackhouse books, Charlaine Harris
Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, Matthew Sanford
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, Wendell Berry
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs
Books I fell in love with:
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, Tom Spanbauer
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
Anywhere but Here, Mona Simpson
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
The Nancy Drew Mysteries, Carolyn Keene
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Cider House Rules, John Irving
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
Books that I stayed up too late reading
Books that I took on trips
Books that I borrowed and never gave back
Books I read more than twice
Books recommended in the comments on my blog: (Have at it!)
the saltwater twin 
Books have always been my refuge. When I was young I once read a book about a girl who would read in her closet with a flashlight, so I too started doing that. I felt like I was a million miles away. Anyway, some of the books that have really affected me as an adult: The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. Books that recently transported me fully into another time: The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom, The Shoemaker’s Wife by Adriana Trigiani. Books I’ve read over and over: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, The Harry Potter series. I could do this all day…
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Thanks, Cara! Love the suggestions!
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I adore that Fouquet painting. So round!
Your list reminds me of reading A Little Princess the same year I went away to boarding school in England at age 11 – where I too, met a Jane who’s British parents lived in various African counties and sent her to boarding school at age 6! We’re still friends and she came to visit me last year. Anyway, I was so certain that I would be relegated to a life of servitude that I devised a plan to write a secret message under the postage stamp affixed to letters I wrote home. My best friend was tasked with steaming off the stamps to learn my true state of mind and living conditions.
I’m going to endeavor to read as much of your list as I can.
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That was very resourceful of you, Lily! I always wanted to go to boarding school. Or sleep-away camp. And I read A Little Princess like fourteen times.
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I like this: “Bluestocking,” I’ll be looking for one of those.
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