The Second Story

For the last couple of years, I’ve been keeping a journal in which I list the books I read that year. At the top of the page it says “Books – 2011″ followed by numbered titles and their authors. It’s a very simple list—there are no reviews, no ratings, no lines jotted down from each book.

I just like to know when I read what. I like keeping track of the time period certain books occupied in my life. They’re like memory triggers for me. In the same way a scent or a song can take me back to a summer 15 years ago or a friend’s house I only visited once, books carry a story.

I guess you could say they carry two—the one they tell, and the one we experience as we read them. Here are a couple of my favorites:

I read Ellen Baker’s Keeping the House at my very first apartment. Recently engaged, my husband and I had spent weeks searching for our perfect first place together, and this was it. There was nothing fancy about it; it was a 900-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with an 80s kitchen and a surprising amount of closet space.

But it was so cozy, and quiet, and in the afternoons, my next-door neighbor would practice the violin while I wrote the first draft of my novel on our dining room table. I’d bought Keeping the House for the obvious reasons (back then, anything with “house” in the title caught my attention) and was immediately pulled into this multi-generational family saga about a 1950s woman trying to be the perfect wife.

One Friday night, when I was halfway through the book, my husband ended up pulling an all-nighter at work. He was shooting a commercial that day, and the production ran over. I could’ve called some friends to make plans for the evening, but I chose not to. I had the house to myself and a book I couldn’t put down. You know how the world seems to hold still once it gets past a certain hour? It’s the perfect time to get lost in a book. I never felt more at home in an author’s world than I did that night in my new apartment.

When I read Jami Attenberg’s The Kept Man (about a woman whose artist husband has been in a coma for several years, and who’s only half-living, half-waiting for him to wake) we’d just moved into our next apartment, which was two blocks from my favorite park in Miami.

This was a pretty blissful time for me; as a newbie(ish) full-time freelancer, I’d finally found a balance between work and leisure. Every afternoon around 3, I’d step away from the computer, grab a blanket, Maggie, and my book, and walk to the park. I spent those afternoons reading The Kept Man and several other books, but Attenberg’s became the one that captured this moment in time for me.

What are some of your favorite book-reading memories? Share them in the comments.

photo credit: ginnerobot.