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.”

The Book Lady, who is older-lady pretty, with a sweet peachy face and wavy, ash-colored hair and soft jowls, opens her hands.

We call her Bookie. Bookie the Book Lady. On her first day she introduced herself as Harriet. First name only, of course—millions of rules—but within a month we knew her last name (Larson) and the name of her street (Belmont) and the make of her car (Toyota Corolla, marine blue).

Marnie, the store manager,

only when they shook hands did Frank realize that getting hired as the store handyman had been his aim all along.

And so Frank Daigle, who’d labored all his life amid the roar of a machine shop, spent twenty-five hours a week in the scholarly quiet of a bookstore. What an “air,” and that air felt great.

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

Harriet Larson, retiree. She was sixty-four, looked every day of it, tried not to mind.

“When we gather to talk about books, Sophie,” Harriet said, “we’re readers.” She stared out at the moonlit grass. “Not embezzlers. Not murderers. Readers.”

“But in Book Club,” she added, “I feel like the teacher they want.” This simple truth, spoken aloud, left her a little breathless. “It’s the only classroom, if you can call it that, where I feel time moving the way it ought, when it’s just us, discussing a book, existing exactly as we wish to. Of course, the women have their own ideas about how time moves, but for those two hours

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.”

So I swipe my finger across my mother’s name—Eleanor V. Powell, in curly letters—pretending I can feel the heat of her hand.

we laughingly called Portland our “destination.” Because it was our true destiny. We were so happy, headed to our true destiny in Troy’s rehabbed Camry to start a joined life where Troy would play in a metal band and I would work at Dunkin’ Donuts (I had experience) to save up money for college. We planned to get married at City Hall as soon as we arrived. Our mothers would forgive us later. My mother thought Troy was a bad influence. Troy’s mother thought the bad influence was me.

Before we left Abbott Falls that day, Troy bought a “good” bottle of whiskey to celebrate (I found out later from Renee that Jim Beam is crap) and also a little stash of pills that I didn’t quite trust. But destiny was the most electrifying word. Life was fluffy clouds parting just for us, the two of us, living on love and sunshine. So we celebrated a little bit, cheers to this and cheers to that, then we lost our sense of time and celebrated a lot, and then Troy put one of the pills on my tongue and I licked his salty finger, and then we pulled into a woodsy road in broad daylight to make love, wonderful, beautiful, marriage-day love. He didn’t call it that. He called it something else. And afterward he said, Babe, I better not drive, you better drive, they won’t arrest a girl.

How he had loved his tools—the pleasing heft of a micrometer; the fluid swivel of a bench vise; the sleek beauty of his favorite surface plate, a one-foot-square slab of speckled pink granite. He called it Pinky, like a pet. Surface plates of all sizes lived at Pierce Machine, but Pinky was Frank’s go-to, sixty pounds, smoothed to a tolerance of a tenth of a thousandth of an inch, one-thirtieth of a human hair.

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.

“I remember that accident. The woman was a teacher, as I recall?” “Kindergarten.” “Oh, my.” “Twenty-two little kids.” “Three or four years ago now?” she asks me. “Three.”

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

All that murky water, under the bridge. Until Violet Powell reappeared and asked to adopt a cat. Who was that man in the bookstore?

The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.