How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.

I miss how Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a “meanwhile”—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.

Harriet assesses my no-rugs no-curtains no-pictures no-books apartment as the water boils. “We’ll have to get you something to read.” Her own voice is a loveliness to me. A clarion whatever. “Books won’t solve my problems, Harriet.” “No, but they give your problems perspective. They allow your problems to breathe.”

Well, that’s what social-work school was for, to teach what her niece would learn soon enough: People set their husbands afire, they nurse their dying mothers, they rob demented old men, they sing songs that bring listeners to tears, they kill a woman while drunk on love and 86-proof. The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.

“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”

We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.

“Apologies require acceptance, so I thank you,” he says, nudging the bookends back into my lap. “But as I understand it, forgiveness flows in one direction only.”

Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all.

“The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”