Thank God for Books

I have spent so much time reclining and almost completely sapped of energy lately that I have renewed my commitment to an old passion for books. Even new-to-me books have the comforting power of old familiar friends, and they allow me to break free from the wasteland that is TV and the tedium of my life of late.

This really is a revival of an old love, too. I have several memories of my stolen moments with books. One night, when I was about 15, I stayed up until 3 or 4am to finish the Oedipus Cycle. It was a pleasure read that I had found in a used book bin, and I don't think I had a single friend at the time who would have understood that choice. I also remember reading Nathaniel Hawthorne in a lawn chair in our tiny garden outside, surrounded by Dad's lovingly-tended flowers, and protected from the sun by the wall of the "little house" and my ruffled blue umbrella. Then there were the times I turned down invitations to social times with friends. I don't remember if I was entirely truthful about why each time, but often it was about a book that had dragged me in to its web of words. Fast forward to my tumultuous, confusing and exceptionally long-lasting college years, and you might find me spread out alone on a blanket at the Huntington Library gardens or sharing my lunch and my book time with the forward squirrels in the UCLA Arboretum. On my few and far between visits to the beach, you could find me avoiding the sun in my tent or under my umbrella, book in hand. On our visit to a state natural area last year, Daniel and I dragged books and towels with us so that when we had tired of walking and talking, we could lounge by the river and bathe in the dying embers of the sun while listening to the voices from other times and places in our books.

You may notice a theme here... me, books, outdoors. Perhaps that is why, when I am as shut up as I have ever been, books are so comforting. Their often musty pages evoke the natural settings that I have so often shared with books. I haven't had energy enough to even sit out on our porch to read, so the power of a book to transport me from my present setting has been invaluable.

What do I read? Anything, really. Emphasis on British and Scandinavian novels. In the last week or so, I have finished Possession (by A.S. Byatt: an amazing book that defies my powers of imagination to come up with an explanation as to how one person could have brought such a tale to life in all of its complexity and detail) the Forsyte Saga (an 870-page old library edition printed in 1924 that Dan bought for me from a local used book seller - the only copy of a book by John Galsworthy sold in the memory of the shop's owner), Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset (a fictional story of a 10th-century Norse woman told in a style reminiscent of Icelandic Sagas), The Age of Innocence and The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, and I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree (the memoir of Schindler's List Holocaust survivor Laura Hillman). I'm nearly finished with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and I gave up on page 50-ish of The Book of Runes (when I discovered definitively that the author's aim, rather than explaining the historical usage of Scandinavian runic, was to create a new method to resurrect the runes as an oracle along the lines of I Ching or Tarot and when my patience for that sort of silliness ran out). I have a pile of other books that I will eagerly devour when I have finished these, compliments of the people who sent me books for Christmas and Daniel, who has made periodic visits to the used book store and our storage unit to keep both of us in books to read.

Several weeks ago, at one of my darkest, most frightened moments, the book I picked up was my maternal grandmother's old Bible, given to her by her children when it appears that my mom, at least, was as yet unable to write her own name. Zipped up in its pages were a few scattered bookmarks and scraps of her life and reminders of her faith. I looked through the inserted relics before reading several of the Psalms and some favorite passages from the Old testament and New, and I felt myself growing more calm, and better able to pray, which meant that I could eventually sleep. Grandma was, if she was nothing else, a prayer warrior. I remember thinking when she passed away, "who will pray for me like she did? No one." I can still see her on her knees in the small hours of the morning, lifting up all of those she loved into God's hands.

I'm grateful for the power of words to transport, to comfort, to inspire... and I am glad that God committed his love for us to writing through the voices of the many men who wrote the Book of books. And I am glad that God has given us the ability to keep on writing about the things that thrill, motivate, move, comfort and scare us, because I have found in books, in these lonely, isolated days, connections to divinity and humanity that I have sorely missed.