Janice’s Book Covers:

An Introduction

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away

Nor any coursers like a page…

(from Emily Dickinson poem “There is no Frigate Like a Book”)

I have an early memory of thinking my pull-toy pelican was hungry and so I tore up pages of a book to feed him.   My parents reacted as if I had robbed a bank or murdered someone. (This may also have been my first memory of being threatened by the household flyswatter  - our then “ass”igned instrument of corporal punishment.)   I grew up in a family that treasured books, gave them as gifts and treated some like members of the family.   Books were for reading, end of story!  I never fed “Bill” (the pelican) again.   Rather, instead of feeding pages to my pelican, as soon as I learned to read, books became a form of food for me, an essential daily nutrient for my life.

I did however remain a savage “destroyer of books” in my family’s eyes. This designation, however,  now comes for my sheer love for reading books and the way in which I do so. I can’t resist taking a book into the bathtub with me, slinging a highlighter across some sentences , making notes in the margins, or dog-earing pages to mark my way through  a story.   I’ll loosen book spines so they’ll  lay flat for me or open easily to my favorite chapters. I’ll force a book into my purse because you never know when you might have to wait somewhere  and want a  book to pass the time. Like Green Eggs and Ham, I’ll take,  eat and devour a book anywhere!

There are those in my household who think this treatment of books merits the flyswatter still.   Others enjoy “seeing” my reading through the trail I leave behind in the books I lend out.  In addition to my markings,  my book borrowers will also probably know what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner as I read.   Post-it notes have made my books more pass-on-able. I even have a friend who asks me to leave my post-its on when she borrows it as part of the fun.

Unlike me, when my husband reads a book you can’t tell.  You could re-gift the book with his unnoticeable reading which leaves the pages barely parted.  It is quite the forced discipline to share a book and leave it pristine for him.

When I used to have a “yearly read-thru-the Bible” practice, I would always start with a new Bible and then proceed to question-mark, star, and highlight  my way through, even painting or drawing on  on a page or two.  “Sacrilege on top of sacrilege” some might say of my unholy ways with books and bibles.

Thank God for Audible – one of the greatest inventions ever. Read while I do laundry? Walk? Scrub the toilet (ok I don’t do that anymore) cook? Yes please!    It is a different experience to navigate a book with my ears and I make good use of audible’s handy listening tools, the “back 10 seconds” button and 1.75 speed reading speed . And then there’s the talent. I confess to sometimes falling in love with some narrators because of their lyrical, enchanting voices and to missing them when I’m finished, as if we’d become fast friends. 

When I was young and impatient, I  used to read the end of books first. Now that I’m closer to my own ending, I have so much more patience to wait until the ending. Reading for me now is more about the journey, the beauty of words, the cleverness of the sentences, the suspense of the pages . So I take my time getting to the end. After all, “tomorrow is another day”.

This year I got a kindle and committed to weaning off my Amazon dependence  in favor of downloading books from the library. It’s great but I have always loved physically going to the library so now I find other excuses to still show up there and look around. 

Free library books fuel my habit of having too many books going at once. I always have a few going on audible, a few going on my kindle, a few actually physical books in process. It’s a bit like playing Frogger and it’s a wonder that I get across any of them completely. 

I’m writing this introduction to my “book covers” on an airplane flying to New York but I have enough books loaded on my devices to cover a trip to the moon and back.  

I like tracking the books I read on Goodreads, and reading about what my friends and family are reading or want to read.  I know the Goodreads book lists are as curated as our social media photos tends to be since I didn’t list the Bridgetown collection  or the “Summer I Turned Pretty” volumes that I powered through this summer.  I suspect most people didn’t. As far as my Goodreads account goes, I’m always reading much more sophisticated stuff.  Find me there and find out what or stay tuned for some occasional “book cover”review here.  Happy page turning ya’ll!