As we get older it can be challenging to hold onto the lives we used to have. Although it’s important to grow, sometimes the activities we used to love no longer fit into our everyday schedule. As I have gotten older there are many ways in which I have changed. The summers spent sailing, going to piano, and art camps are farther behind me than I would like them to be.
Coming into college, I knew the adjustment was going to be challenging and wanted to pursue a major that I would enjoy learning about. English is a subject that I have always appreciated. On nights I can’t sleep or lay in the setting summer sun, I have always loved to spend my time reading. There are so many things I will never experience and I believe that even as a kid, I knew that there was so much for me to learn from novels.
Having spent the better part of this spring semester reading for class and competing accounting assignments, I have felt myself distancing myself from the hobby I once found so much joy in. As it was in the fall semester, my escape from my academic work is scrolling through TikTok. A trend that recently crossed my for you page is the books that shaped me. With every video, I saw books that I have read and had a significant impact on me. Despite not sprinting to pick back up some of them, they all played a role in shaping the person I have become. I participated in the trend and because of the impact they had, I wanted to elaborate on the books that I grew up with.
Childhood & Elementary School
Some of my favorite memories as a kid were reading with my mom. Together we read books including The Kissing Hand, Chrysanthemum, and Bear Wants More. For years my mom and I did the sign for “more” that the animals do in Bear Wants More. I accredit a lot of who I am as a person from the lessons and books my mom shared with me as a little girl, and many of my memories as a child are of us reading together. My mom is really talented at creating art, and many of the books that we read were full of illustrations.
I was infatuated with these illustrations and I believe that it’s one of the reasons why I am so drawn to art. The books that I spent most of my time reading have themes of acceptance, identity, adventure and independence. The stories in The Magic Treehouse series were some of my favorites. Everytime I hear the words “backpack”, “bookmark” or “tree house”, I’m transported back to the spinning tree house where Jack and Annie began their travels through time. There’s something about the novels that have stuck with me so heavily that it’s incredible how visceral the memory of the stories are to me, despite not having read them in years.
Ivy and Bean were another set of books that just remain with me. The normalcy of the lives they had just being two young girls living on the same street really resonated with me living in the tiny town I grew up in. In the novels Ivy divides her bedroom into separate parts, with each being for a different designated activity. I remember asking my mom for chalk so that I could divide my bedroom into multiple sections, but I did not succeed. Over the years however I do think I have a mental divide for my room that stems from the concept in the story.
Middle School
Middle school was my introduction to novels that were horrifying, sad, and perspective shifting. In my elementary-middle school we had a library. From the time I was three years old all the way to 14, we were encouraged — and often instructed — to have quiet reading time. I usually shuffled through the same shelves, picking up books about pirates and The Berenstain Bears in late elementary school, and one day I found The Lightning Thief. It was on one of the higher shelves, but I fell in love with the stories and became enthralled with the concept and complexity of Greek mythology that was intertwined in the story.
I also frequently read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It felt like a secret that I got to read them because the book was sandwiched between other books in a section that it wasn’t supposed to be in. I hate being scared, but there was one story in the collection, “The Green Ribbon”, that just had a chokehold on me. This young girl had a green ribbon wrapped around her neck and throughout this story this boy asks why she wears it and doesn’t take it off. Thinking back now, it’s definitely more layered than I initially knew, however when — spoiler alert — her head falls off her body in the end, I was just confused how no one put together that she was hiding something like that.
I also was introduced to Mitch Albom in seventh grade. We were assigned to read Tuesdays with Morrie. In middle school, Tuesdays were my favorite days of the week — quesadillas for hot lunch and book club reading The Secret Lives of Bees with the librarian in the warm, grassy area in front of the school. However, I honestly don’t think I ever got past the first 15 pages of the book. I was just sobbing. Uncontrollably. We later read The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto and it would be a disservice not to say that Mitch Albom was the one of the authors who — over the course of multiple books — dramatically changed the way I view the world. He was the first author whose work moved me so much that I felt I needed to reach out to him, however I never did.
High School
I probably read a wider range of books in high school than at any other point in my life. During Secret Santa, my advisor gave me the Five People You Meet in Heaven — which is another novel by Mitch Albom. Whether he knew it was because I loved English or had coincidentally told him how Tuesdays with Morrie was such a hard novel for me to process, this novel stands as one of my favorites of all time. I also read the sequel, The Next Person You Meet in Heaven, which was just as impactful as his other novels.
In the summer leading up to senior year I was assigned The Poisonwood Bible for summer reading. It is one of the most complex and layered stories I have ever read, and Barbara Kingsolver is another author who I have considered reaching out to. I have read other novels of hers and she has challenged the way I see the world.
When Covid hit, it was slightly challenging — however, it gave me the chance to read a wide range of novels. I picked up The Bell Jar, The Secret History, Normal People, Little Fires Everywhere, and Where the Crawdads Sing. All incredible novels that in their own right have aspects that still come back to my memory. When classes were back to “normal,” I read The Kite Runner, a moving story that tells the account of a boy’s coming of age in Kabul. It’s a book whose impact is never going to leave me. Although books were always a part of my life, this novel is what sparked my interest in majoring in English. A story of a life that I never would have experienced otherwise, it displayed how powerful the form of a book really is.
College
As a homesick freshman in my dorm room, I flew through The Paper Palace. The novel takes place in the summer in Cape Cod, and the images of the main characters swimming through the water brought me back to the summers back home. The characters in this story return to the summer home that they have had for years — and Unsheltered, in a similar way, uses a house to set and tell its story. Both novels describe the way the houses the characters live in have changed and there is something so fairy-tale-like about the way their stories unfold.
I love to read, that’s why I became an English major; but with all of the in class reading and assigned books, I don’t feel the urge to read personal novels. However, this reality is what allows me to feel like a kid again when I do read. Sitting in the summer sun, with nothing else to do but spend time, I leisurely can read. Patti Smith, Alice McDermont, and Ann Patchett are authors that I am constantly reaching for. Their beautiful, artistic storytelling parallels the stories I grew up reading.
It’s hard to exist at a single point in time, worrying about future plans, pressures, or any external conflict. These stories have been my way to escape again, and connect the person who I once was, with the person who is everything she has consumed since then.