Victoria Jelinek

As a child I read my mother to sleep each night. We shared the classics, coming-of-age tales, newly released novels, short stories, and many books the rather uptight librarian at my grade school thought summarily inappropriate for my age (but which provided opportunities for discussion at home with my parents). Humorous, moralistic, insightful, entertaining, thoughtful, bizarre tales were discovered, with themes that covered the gamut of human experience: love, hope, rejuvenation, identity, grief, loss, loneliness, isolation, injustice, fear, sadness, outrage…it feels good to feel deeply for the characters and their circumstances within a book. It reminds us of our collective humanity and builds compassion. If I managed to make tears slide from my mother’s eyes as she listened intently to a particular passage, I would finish the page and ask her if she wanted me to read it again. 

I have never killed a spider, despite their terrifying me, because of Charlotte’s Web. Dr Seuss’s morals remain stalwart guides for my own values. Archetypal characters from Winnie the Pooh serve to classify the personalities of those I meet and know. There is no hidden painting assuming the burden of our “sins,” as Wilde imagines, so one must watch one’s penchants for self destruction. The absurdity of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle perpetually resonates. I mourned Anna Karenina for days after reading the novel. At a loss for what book to read next after finishing A Gentleman in Moscow, it was only The Brothers Karamozov that satisfied. Plainsong left my soul silent and thoughtful for weeks. Jet lagged and unable to sleep in a hotel in Bangkok, I cried alone when Sirius Black died. A poignant scene from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn still haunts me years after reading it. Zenzele, A Letter to My Daughter recalls the dusty roads and sounds of baboons in Zimbabwe. John Steinbeck encapsulates my gorgeous memories of California and a mythologized USA. Tommy Orange and Sherman Alexie are responses to an idealized America. Twain’s quips are brilliant anecdotes. I chuckle to remember incidents in The World According to Garp and remain in awe of Irving’s prescience of modern culture. Jane Austen and Elizabeth Strout would be guests at my dream dinner table. 

Considering the stories I have loved over my lifetime swells my heart with fond emotion. Invaluable friends and inspirational “guardians,” various epochs of my own life are chronicled by when I read these books and first met their authors, much like a great soundtrack enriches a movie. My mother, now dead, remains alive for me whenever I pick up any of the books we shared. There is a reason Victorian men did not like their wives to read fiction and Faust swore he would relinquish his books to save his soul: novels explore, describe, and expand upon the human experience — both our triumphant selves and our worst selves – and consequently make our understanding of “mine own” and the world around us richer, more infinite in its possibilities. They give us knowledge. They remind us that we are not alone. Yes, reading is magical indeed, “98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.”