How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

“in order for reading to become an exercise in empathy, it helps to think of all the characters in all the books as fellow creatures.”

“Catcher in the Rye is for innocents,” the Book Lady says as Roberts, the ugliest CO in the place, looms outside the door, because God forbid we get two extra seconds of Book Club. “This one’s for people with some life behind them.” We like the sound of that. We are women with some life behind us. We know some things.

Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle. She is part of me now, a sliver of bone knitted to one of my bones.

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

Theirs had been a pleasant, circumscribed relationship, clerk and patron; Harriet believed these small connections made the world go round.

What is the purpose of an epitaph? Whom would you trust to write yours? Is it possible to sum up a human life?

Guess what was Sophie’s favorite question—her life, despite the scar of tragedy, was a perpetual looking forward.

A squawk of laughter came loose from On High, and Frank suddenly hated all young people, who thought they knew all things and in fact knew only some things. Then he felt a waft of affection from that same infuriating source, and loved them again.

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.

“I suspect you could read the dictionary under a tree and birds would cease their singing in order to listen.”

“Books won’t solve my problems, Harriet.” “No, but they give your problems perspective. They allow your problems to breathe.”

When at last he could breathe, he found he could not work. He went into the house, fixed himself a ham sandwich, and found he could not eat. He poured a glass of water from Lorraine’s beloved farm sink, and found he could not drink. Finally he left the house, stood on the back steps, and found he could not stand. So he sat, woozy with shame.

Her oafish brothers had taught her to lead with her chin; in her world, the winner was completely right, the loser completely wrong.

These flaws made Harriet love her more, not less, because Sophie had fought all her life against her own nature. To be loved by prickly Sophie was to truly be loved.

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.

One thing I learned in prison is that sometimes rotten things fly off people’s tongues because they’re mean, but mostly it’s because they’re scared.

I’m just a person, who hopes to become a good person. If they didn’t agree this was possible, I could not bear to hear it, so I just stood there with my unfinished sentence and let them go.

“Not only can you get a library card,” he says, “we’re delighted to give you one.” He is delighted. I swear to God, the light in the place turns up a tick.

What I do know is there is nowhere else I want to be right now, no person I would rather be than me. It’s been a long time since I felt this way, and the realization pours down, cool and refreshing,

Did they love him? Who exactly did they think he was? Certainly they loved their creation—good old Frank, father figure from a bygone time when fathers checked your oil and put air in your tires. That was all right. He didn’t mind. He, too, loved what they’d created.

“Not wow,” Dr. Petrov warns me. “We observe; we record what we observe. That is all.” I nod obediently, nerves jangling. “Observe and record.” “Wow skews the study,” he explains. “Wow creates expectation. We observe what is. Not what we hope. Not what we suppose. Not what pleases us.” “Okay.” “We leave wow to those who believe parrots are circus animals. Silly pets. Entertainers.” As he resets the tray, he adds, “Leave wow to stupid people who do not understand science.” “I will,” I tell him. But. Oh my God. Wow.

The next morning a bouquet of tulips arrived at his door—apparently sending flowers was still done. They came with a note: Give me time. Like her mother before her, Kristy had a knack for upsiding him when he least expected it. For one fleeting, bewildering moment, he missed them both.

“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.”

suppose I’m just trying to look after you, Violet.” I should have felt happy to hear this; I hadn’t felt “looked after” in quite some time. But Harriet wanted Troy to have been behind the wheel, and it made a difference to her that he wasn’t. A small difference, but a difference nonetheless.

From her years in the classroom, Harriet understood that any group, no matter how diverse, eventually acquired a personality; Book Club had decided they were misunderstood souls born to the wrong era, and William Butler Yeats was their proof.

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Because life is the same as books, Misha. There’s a story and a meanwhile, and we get to say which is which.”

My life unfolded as most lives do, day upon day of doing my best and occasionally my worst, that human continuum.

Even the least eventful life holds an avalanche of stories. Any one of mine would give you a fair impression of who I was and how I lived. But the one I chose—the one that now composes this epitaph—isn’t a story at all. It’s what Harriet would call the meanwhile, the important thing that was happening while the rest of the story moved along. My name was Violet Powell. I took a life. I lived and died. Meanwhile, I was loved.