Certain books establish a pure, unbreakable bond in my soul. A recent metaphor for such a bond is the instant connection created in Avatar when Jake “hooks” his toruk. These are the books I read again and again and again:
1. CELIA GARTH (1959)
The first book I bonded with was probably Celia Garth by Gwen Bristow. Celia came into my life at my 11th Christmas; the inscription is hand printed by my dad with a swoosh underneath:
To Patricia
From Dad
Christmas 1959
I read this book almost every winter since then. Celia overcomes whatever adversity enters her life. She exudes the positivity that I identify as my strength. How did my dad know that this would be exactly the right book for me? I never got to ask him that question.
What is it about Celia Garth that intrigues me? I believe it is the author’s fault. Somehow she uses the right words to make her characters come alive in my soul. The events are historically real and engaging; I demand Celia’s success.
2. During high school I remember bonding with Frank Yerby books. I don’t remember what attracted me to them at first except that they covered a whole shelf or two at the bottom of the stacks, on the end. I loved going into the Public Library and heading for those shelves to see what different books had been returned. I cannot remember how many Yerby titles I read but I do remember reading my favorites more than once, a personal policy I continue to follow.
Yerby’s subject was similar to Celia Garth’s: life in the antebellum south. No one book stands out in my mind but I remember musing on the historical context, a time and place far removed from 1960’s small town South Dakota.
At that time I did not research authors. It wasn’t’ until much later in my life that I began to rethink book connections and discover that Yerby was a prolific African American author who was criticized for setting his early stories in the white south.
3. Many favorite books later, I recall Christmas, 2008. My brother’s wife, quite a bit younger than me, had just died. His teenage daughters pointed out Twilight at a local bookshop and, on a whim, I bought it, and became an immediate fan.
I eagerly awaited the publication of each new book in the series. I even attended and eventually volunteered at Twilight conventions across the country.
My fandom, however, is not so much the love story or the vampire realm, as it is the concepts of life and death. The timing was serendipitous to me and Twilight has remained my go-to when I need a comfort read.
4. Several popular YA series are also among my REREADS: Hunger Games, Divergent, even Harry Potter. The fact that these series capture readers’ interest means that they are worth studying from a writer’s viewpoint. I catch my self reading them differently after the first or second read.
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