How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

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.

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

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.”

“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.”

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.