Editor's note: pimutant lives on the West Coast, and will be along around noon ET to respond to comments.
My contribution should really be titled "Books Changed My Life"--without any of the implications of a definite article. Because it wasn't some particular book or group of books or author that profoundly changed my life, but books and reading in general. Today I am still an addicted reader, and my house contains at least a baker's dozen of bookcases stuffed with books. There are big bookcases and little bookcase and mid-sized bookcases, and they are in every room of the house, except the bathrooms and kitchen (and there used to be cooking books piled on top of the refrigerator). I love books. I've always loved books: seeing them, holding them, browsing thru bookstores and libraries and other people's collections, reading them, owning them.
My husband and I once did a favor for one of his relatives and house sat for them for a few days. The first night I went to find something to read, and couldn't. There seemed to be no books, no magazines, no newspapers in the whole house. I was astounded! I finally found a couple of children's school books that belonged to their littlest kid, but that was it. How could anyone live without books? While I can now accept that some people do live like that, I can't claim to really understand it.
Above, a large bookcase and my smallest bookcase flanking the front door.
When I was in high school I discovered all my friends could read a whole lot faster than I could, and that they had all taught themselves to read before they even started school. This mystified me, I knew I was as smart as my friends, and that I had read as many books and knew as many things as they did. I was in college before I finally found out about dyslexia, and realized the reason I could never remember which way to turn faucets and screws, and when I was kid I found it just as easy to write backwards as forwards, was because there was a little problem with my brain. When I was doing a whole lot of printmaking I decided my problem was actually an advantage: the object and the mirror image look exactly the same to me, unless I view them side by side. But if I look at a lithographic stone, then turn around and look at the print I pulled from it, visually they are perfectly equivalent, so there were no compositional surprises for me. What I drew on the stone was what I saw in the print.
Although I don't really remember learning to read in school, I know that I did learn there because I do remember learning the alphabet, and getting stuck reciting it in front of the class after saying the letter E. I remember my friends shouting, "Your name! Francine! Your name!" And not figuring it out. So obviously I did learn to read in school, and by second grade I was doing very well indeed, at least in the reading and comprehending part, if not the speed part. I know just when it was that I was reading well, because I remember having mumps and staying home, and that I got to read all of the Wizard of Oz books to ease my misery. The reason I'm sure it was second grade is because I have a VERY vivid memory of bumping my mump on the corner of the little telephone stand, and I remember exactly where it was and where we were living at the time--it was Avalon Village, the first government housing project we lived in after we came to California. So I was in the middle of second grade, which means I was able to read and enjoy those books when I was 7--I must have been 5 and in kindergarten when the alphabet debacle happened.
We then moved to another government housing project for the next two years, and I remember going alone with my mother to look at the new place, and to stop at the local library and get my library card. I can remember the bookshelves in that library where all the kid-level dog books were kept, and I read my way through every one of them. The only thing I remember about the dog books now was that basically the dog was the hero. I think there was a long series about Irish setters. The book I remember most clearly that featured animals was Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. I was entranced by the whole idea of being raised by animals, and deeply moved by the language. What kid could resist "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" as a name and a sound? I was so impressed that I carefully committed to memory the opening poem:
Now Rann the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free--
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!--Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
I had no idea what a "tush" was, nor a "byre" for that matter, but it all sounded so grand! That set a pattern, and all my life I have memorized poems, and loved language.
As for school, my chief memory of elementary school was of being confused. It seemed to me I just never knew what was going on. This was probably because we moved every two years, and always moved in the middle of a school year, so more often than not I really didn't know what was going on, because I hadn't been there when the class I had just entered started doing whatever they were doing. Therefor I tended to not pay much attention to what was officially happening in class, and instead concentrated on reading books and trying to make new friends. No doubt this was a handicap in terms of purely academic performance and grades in grammar school, but by the time I got to high school it had become an advantage, because I had read so many books about so many things that I tended to be surprised when I heard something in an English or social studies class that I hadn't already read about, and so already knew. It also meant that when it came to tests of general knowledge, such as the SAT, I did very well. The only classes I truly had to study for were math and science, and Latin--which is where I really learned grammar. The result was that I did reasonably well in school without ever having to work very hard.
Mid-Size bookcase
Because I was such an avid reader my 8th grade teacher had given me boxes of old magazines, including
"The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"--which so impressed me I wanted to be a scientist myself. By my junior year in high school I had decided I was going to be a biochemist. That meant I would have to go to college. While a number of members of my family had done studies beyond high school, they were generally job related, training rather than higher education. My dad's much younger brother went to college, then got a CPA, and then went to law school, but everyone made fun of him. I remember hearing remarks along the lines of: "Jesus, isn't that kid ever going to get a job?" On the other hand, some people in the books I read went to college, many of the people who wrote the books had gone to college, and all scientists went to college. The kids I had gotten to know, who these days would probably mostly be considered geeks and nerds, all planned to go to college. So I planned on it too.
Of course, while my family's finances had improved over the years, they weren't such as to afford to send me to college: I would have to figure that out myself. I realized I would need to get a scholarship and work in the summers to pay for books, and go to a local college so I could live at home. My mom would let me live at home for free, and pay for my car insurance. The rest was up to me. Fortunately because of all the reading I had done my grades were OK and my test scores were very good, so I did end up winning a merit scholarship, which paid for tuition, and my mom found me summer jobs that paid better than babysitting, and that income allowed me to pay for books and gas and such.
Because all the reading I had done had accustomed me to not having to work all that hard in school, my first semester in college turned out to be quite a shock. There was no way I could live life as I always had, and work no more than suited me, and maintain the grade point average necessary to keep my scholarship. Something was going to have to change. So I dropped my science major, which required lots of classes that needed much more hard work than I was willing or able to do, and switched to history. All you had to do in history class was read and then usually just be able to write a simple essay about what you had read. That was a snap compared to the hours of lab work plus nightly homework in math and science classes. As a result I came to know a group of history and social science wonks, rather than science nerds, and in due course met my husband thru one of my new friends. And that determined the shape of all the rest of my life.
Given my mild dyslexia and the educational attitudes of my family, I believe that if I hadn't discovered books and a love of reading I never would have gone to college, except perhaps for taking some vocational training courses at the local junior college. Frankly, I can't imagine exactly what my life would have been like without books, but I'm sure it would not have been remotely like it has been. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing I don't really know, but considering the number of people I've known who have envied me my life, I suspect my life without books would have been a much poorer one, and not something that anyone would have envied, or that I would have wanted.
Thinking about all this now I realize how very important my mother's role was in my love for reading, something that in my feckless youth I didn't notice, and would have been loath to admit. Unfortunately my mother died at what now seems to me a terribly young age--I was just 30 when she succumbed to cancer, and while we had made peace with each other by then, we never had a chance to talk about the many things that I now wish to know about her life, and wish that she knew about mine. I didn't just read books from the libraries she took me to, I also read books she had: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, novels by Steinbeck and Hemingway and Maugham, and others that I have long since forgotten were hers. No doubt my attitudes toward reading were formed by her dedication to getting me to libraries, and when librarians objected to me reading something because it was "too adult" she confronted them on my behalf and saw to it that I got to read whatever I wanted. Her attitudes and actions created in me a sense of the importance of reading and the specialness of books, and determined the course of my life in ways both obvious and subtle.
I'm not sure what parents can do these days that will foster the same love and appreciation for books, in whatever form will dominate the future of their children, the way my mother did for me. But I hope they find a way. Books shape lives. Reading matters.