I was a voracious reader when I was a kid, and I think this was because the internet didn’t really consume my life the way it does now. When I was in elementary school in the late 90’s, the internet existed solely in the sun room of our row house in Allentown, PA. It was one sturdy desktop computer with a dial-up connection. Now I am online almost 10-12 hours a day, and it feels like there is never enough time for reading anymore.
Mine is a family of readers. We never had enough room for all of the books in our house. When we moved in 2001, a third of the boxes we packed consisted solely of books. My mother was always reading memoirs, my father was always reading biographies about US presidents. Once a week my mother would take my sister and I to the Allentown Public Library and we would spend hours there, twirling around on the orange bubble chairs and picking through YA fiction. Judy Blume, Louis Sachar, Caroline B. Cooney: if it was weird or sad or about “being stuck in this town,” I wanted to read it.
I also had a very bizarre obsession with Holocaust historical fiction. When I go home to Pennsylvania I love to go through my old bookshelves, but it’s creepy how many of the books there are related to the Holocaust. There’s Number the Stars, of course, but there’s also When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (HUH?), Escape from Warsaw and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Apparently morbidity strikes young. It is easy to blame this on my father’s penchant for reading me Solzhenitsyn and The Atlantic as bedtime stories instead of Dr. Seuss, but I think that excuse is kind of a cop out. The first R-rated movie I ever saw was Schindler’s List. I guess it’s hard to say which came first: my parents’ willingness to cede violent media to me (but nothing sexual, of course!), or my macabre fascination with it.
My favorite book in elementary school was Mandy, which was oddly enough written by Sound of Music legend Julie Andrews. The book revolves around a little orphan girl building a life for herself when she finds a cabin and tidies it up to make it her own. She is a strangely lonely child and I guess I saw myself in her. I wanted to climb over the orphanage’s fence with a broom and cloth for curtains. There was something romantic about that.
In middle school I transitioned from series like The Face on the Milk Carton, to real YA fiction, which is to say, I sought out books that had an ‘edge.’ Girls having their first kisses, girls getting into fights with their best friends, girls whose parents divorced: if something was going wrong in their lives, I wanted to read about it. Favorites of that time were What My Mother Doesn’t Know, Speak (of which I have a signed copy!), and Sloppy Firsts, the Jessica Darling series which was great up until the 3rd or 4th book. I was luckily precocious enough then to avoid anything by Sarah Dessen; after reading Holocaust fiction for so long, her sugary novels seemed laughable.
YA fiction was an important outlet for me. Like most people, my teens were tumultuous. My family moved from the grime of Allentown to the WASPy suburbs of Philadelphia when I was 12. Without Polo shirts or bows in my hair, I felt out of place almost immediately. Two years later my parents divorced; two more years later my father remarried, and the year after that my mother did, too. Throughout all this I sought refuge in YA. I learned about rape culture from Speak; Jessica Darling was contemplating losing her virginity when I was, too. That her name was also Jessica seemed Really, Really Important.
I read Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby in middle school and began to drift away from novels with pink and lime green covers. Around this time I also tried to read Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, which my parents had laying around on one of their bedroom bookshelves. I couldn’t get through it, but when I went to spend the summer with my Aunt and Uncle in their bungalow-type house in San Francisco, I read On the Road as if it were the first book I had ever laid eyes on. From then on, it was All Beats All the Time. I didn’t read a Lois Lowry or Megan McCafferty novel again after that.
I was contemplating finally reading Infinite Jest this summer, but I think I might take a detour into regression and revisit the YA fiction that helped me through those awful teen years. It just seems like something I should do.
Oh my god, Speak. Yes. I want to read that again when I go home in July.
Also: I hated Holocaust fiction and almost failed 8th grade English when I refused to read any of the assigned books for our Holocaust unit. I just found them really incredibly terrifying and didn’t want anything to do with them. Weird.
How good was Speak?! I’ve read it like every year since 6th grade haha. Apparently they made a movie version of it starring Kristen Stewart which is SO random.
Weird that you hated Holocaust fiction and I loved it, since I’m not Jewish and you are. Maybe it was an affectation of me wanting to be Jewish so badly when I was younger, like, to the point of celebrating Hanukkah by myself in the basement in 6th grade. Printed out the Hebrew prayers and everything.