Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

by Michiko Kakutani

When I was a child, books were both an escape and a sanctuary.

I read under the blankets at night with a flashlight. I read in the school library during recess in hopes of avoiding the playground bullies. I read in the backseat of the car, even though it made me carsick. And I read at the dining room table: because my mother thought books and food were incompatible, I would read whatever happened to be at hand—cereal boxes,

appliance manuals, supermarket circulars, the ingredients of Sara Lee’s pecan coffee cake or an Entenmann’s crumb cake. I read the recipe for mock apple pie on the back of the Ritz crackers box so many times I could practically recite it. I was hungry for words. The characters in some novels felt so real to me, when I was a child, that I worried they might leap out of the pages at night, if I left the cover of the book open. I imagined some of the scary characters from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books—the Winged Monkeys, say, or the evil Nome King, or Mombi the witch who possesses the dangerous Powder of Life—escaping from the books, using my bedroom as their portal into the real world, where they might wreak havoc and destruction.

“You read something which you thought only happened to you,” James Baldwin once said, “and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”