 Mom, the Perfect ReaderbyNicki LeoneMy mother is coming to visit. She’ll be staying for about a month. And you can just set all those conclusions you just jumped to aside—when I tell people I am turning into my mother, it’s a good thing. I am actually over the moon that she is coming to stay, and to stay for so long. I don’t get to see her, or really any of my family, nearly enough. This doesn’t mean, though, that I didn’t have my moment of trepidation when she called to say her travel plans were finalized. While I was saying “yes!” into the phone and “I can’t wait!” while I marked her arrival date on the fractal calendar taped to the fridge, I was also looking with something like horror at the cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings, the thick film of dust on the upper shelves of the cabinets, the piles of crumbling brown leaves that had collected in drifts underneath all the house plants. Like many daughters, I have feelings of utter inadequacy when it comes to my mom and my own haphazard housekeeping skills. So I started cleaning, beginning with dusting the bookshelves. (Much more fun than tackling the cobwebs). And here is what happened: I ran the duster along the tops of the books on a shelf, would stop at one—a collection of profiles of women archaeologists—and think Mom would like that. I wonder if I ever gave it to her? On the next shelf I’d see Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which we’d both read, and spent at least thirty minutes on the phone interrupting each other in our enthusiasm to talk about it. On another shelf was a novel that she and I each happened to pick up on a whim, a Dutch novel called The Twin. Mom bought it on impulse in Rochester, NY because of the farm setting, and I had bought it in Wilmington, NC simply because I was looking for fiction in translation. Further along the case was The Moonflower Vine, an older novel now being rediscovered thanks to the enthusiastic proselytizing of Jane Smiley. I had picked up an extra copy for my mother after I read it since it was just her kind of book, only to hear her tell me when I mentioned the title how much she had loved it when she had read it years ago. And so it would go as I ran the duster along every shelf. There were books I’d shared with her, books she’d shared with me, books I had because she wanted me to read them, books I knew I had sent to her for the same reason. Both of my parents had a profound impact on my evolution as a reader. To my dad I owe my love of science fiction and my absolute conviction that if you want to know about something, you can learn it from reading a book about it. It’s the kind of attitude that really helps get a person through some of the tougher courses in school. But mom is all over my bookshelves and it is from her that I learned to love—to be devoted, really—to story. She taught me to love reading. It was mom who when we were children walked my brother and sister and I to the library every week and allowed us to check out the maximum number of books every time. (And now that I think about it, she may have even helped us carry them all home). It was mom who brought the lives of books into the house. She taught me the geography of the Great Lakes with a gorgeous book called Paddle-to-the-Sea. To this day I’m a little afraid of Lake Superior because of a vivid picture of a ship icing over and sinking into the dark green waters. She once found us a picture book of a Ukrainian children’s story, and then must have gone through some serious effort to find the special dyes, cakes of beeswax, and odd little wooden styluses with their copper funnels so that she could teach us (along with herself) how to decorate eggs in the psyanky tradition. Other kids dyed their Easter eggs with the little kits you got in the supermarket. We drew wavering lines in wax on their curved shells and tried to duplicate the intricate designs in the picture book. Except for my brother—he drew a rocket ship on his egg. It was my mother who introduced me to every book and author who are at the foundations of what I like in literature. From the poems in A Child’s Garden of Verses (I still remember the way she would dramatize the battle of the gingham dog and the calico cat) and the oddly poignant adventures of Moomintroll and his friends when I was very young to the bedazzling world of Kim, of the Corfu in Gerry Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals when I was older, to the beautiful, pensive world of Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek, and the wide vistas of the Russian landscape in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don in the summer before I left home for college. I realized as I looked around at all the bookshelves in the room, that no matter where my reading life has taken me in the twenty-five years since I left home, at the root of every interest, every particular thing that draws me to a book, is something that comes from my mother. She is, in my mind, the Perfect Reader. Oh, not because she reads very quickly, devouring a book or two every day (she doesn’t). Not because she keeps up with all the latest books, keeps track of the new and upcoming authors, or makes she has read every book that wins a Pulitzer Prize. She doesn’t do that either. But she does read intently, and when she likes a book it has her full and complete attention. She also reads with an open mind, and is the kind of reader who will try a book simply because someone whose judgment she trusts (usually me) recommends it, no matter what it might be about. This was the reason that I sent her Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles and a copy of the Iliad for her birthday last year. Mom has not, to date, been in the habit of reading the Greek classics, but I have, and I wanted her to share in my enthusiasm. When she got the books she called me. “I’m so tickled you are reading the Iliad,” she said on the phone, “my grandfather taught Greek and Roman classics.” It was obviously a fond memory for her. So even here, in this sphere which I had thought I had come to on my own, I find my mother is there before me. I’m starting to think there must be some very specific reading gene in our DNA that just flares up in each generation with an unexpected love for Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or DH Lawrence (all writers my mother and I found for ourselves, and discovered independently that we both love). Because my mom never once took a book out of my hands, never ever took a book away from me as a child because it was “inappropriate” or “too old for me,” books have forever been a beckoning undiscovered country, one that my mother was happy to let me explore in whatever way I liked. And because she always talked to me about what I was reading, and liked to talk to me about what she was reading, it was an exploration that always felt celebrated. And I think this habit she had, of talking about the book she’d just finished, is the reason I ended up as a bookseller and reviewer. Because to this day I don’t feel like I’ve finished with a book I loved until I’ve told someone about it. I still have two weeks before mom arrives, and the cobwebs are all still in the corners of the room. But I’ve been collecting a stack of books that I want to give her to read when she gets here. And yesterday, when I talked to her on the phone, she told me she has some books she’s bringing down because she wants to show them to me. So it goes with me and my mom. Books mentioned in this column (only a paltry few of the many that I have shared with my mother; the entire list would be as long as the books in my cases laid end to end):
Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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