How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

“I understand your point,” the Book Lady says. She always understands our point, because she’s a retired English teacher who enjoys “lively” discussion. Plus, she likes us. “However,” she adds, which she always does, “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.”

She and the women had passed the winter reading books they hadn’t cracked since age fifteen, books with recollected plots, books with well-trod furrows of discussion, books understood best in retrospect. She was glad to have honored their request to revisit the past, for the future—theirs; hers—felt shadowy, and immense, and beyond discussion.

In Book Club the Book Lady gave us a mantra that we chanted together, which was kind of lame but we all did it, and I whisper it now: “I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.”

I miss me in Book Club, too. 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. Three bears strolling in the forest: story. Goldilocks wrecking their house: meanwhile. Heartbroken Cinderella sweeping and scrubbing: story. Handsome prince searching far and wide: meanwhile. Felon from Abbott Falls on the terrifying Outs: story. Book Lady plinking dishes at the felon’s sink: meanwhile.

Harriet sits with my story for a few moments, the way she sometimes did in Book Club. Let it settle first, she’d tell us. Let it settle before deciding what it’s about.

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

Women left prison physically diminished, but in Violet that diminishment seemed of a different order, as if the part of God that is said to dwell in all creatures had flown from her, only to perch somewhere nearby, awaiting reentry.

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.

He’d left his toolbox at the bookstore and could no longer stand to be without it. His best level was in there, and his grandfather’s claw hammer, and his favorite micrometer, and his sense of meaning.

“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.” Misha opens his icy eyes, which do not look icy to me. “We are the given reader,” I tell him. “We decide what’s the story and what’s the meanwhile.”

The moat of bliss that surrounds me is far too wide for the truth to cross over.

My theory is that all humans secretly long for the mother they always wanted. This longing turns half of us into resentful babies who didn’t get properly mothered, and the second half into surrogate mothers for the first half.