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The Napping House by Audrey Wood, illustrated by Don Wood

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The Napping House by Audrey Wood, illustrated by Don Wood

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This book is not from my own toddlerhood, but rather from my sister's. When she was two and I was five, my mother would read this book out loud at bedtime. It's a small board book, with a cumulative story--on each page another character is added atop the sleeping pile "in the cozy bed in the napping house where everyone is sleeping." It's my first memory of being part of a reading community--all of us would say the words out loud in unison as my mom read, the book would be referenced when we piled on top of each other in my parents' bed, and even now in my adulthood we still mention the napping house.

The Napping House

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I'll bet most 20-somethings will include Harry Potter here. Though Rowling's politics and off-color Twitter missives discouraged me from putting this series on my list, it feels dishonest to omit it! The Harry Potter series was part of my reading life for so long - I started reading it in first grade, I think, and the final book came out when I was 12. I have some attachment to the story itself--I feel warm when I reread Harry's first tour through Diagon Alley, and devastated when Dobby dies, etc. etc.--but I'm thinking more of the feeling of being part of the fandom while it was happening. Anticipating the next book, going to Barnes & Noble at midnight on the release date, reading fanfiction, reblogging movie stills on Tumblr, racing my friends to finish it first. It was everywhere, and you had to read it and reread it and make up new stuff to read in order to be a part of it. Whew--still chasing that high.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

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This was a required reading book for me in 7th grade. At this point, most books I'd been required to read for school were uninteresting to me (enough so that I seem to not remember any other assigned books from middle school!). I remember feeling shocked by Fahrenheit 451. I'd never read dystopian fiction, and the premise of the story was very moving to me. Book burning? The mechanical hound? The exiled scholars?! I was an avid reader at the time, and while my teachers had encouraged reading in general, Fahrenheit 451 was my first encounter with the stakes. Why do we read at all? Does the fate of society depend on keeping good books around? Maybe! I also remembering thinking for the first time that the "classics" might have something in them for me, or perhaps that I'd become mature enough finally to enjoy them. It was a real lightbulb.

Fahrenheit 451

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Oh, the joys of a boarding school book! When I first read this book, John Green was emerging as a popular YouTuber (in the early days before Paper Towns or the Crash Course series), and I watched his videos all the time. This was the first book I read where I felt in-touch with the author--I could imagine him writing it, I watched him answer readers' questions, he made connections between his own life and the plot of the novel. That was exciting to me at the time, and potentially a newer concept in general. Now I just follow my favorite authors on Instagram and Twitter, but that might not have really been a thing back in 2007...

The book itself also really captured me. The characters are smart and cool--they connect with each other about history and literature, they smoke cigarettes, they care about the meaning of life. I wanted to be older and hang out with them sooo badly. Interestingly, the significant themes of death and grief in the book took a backseat to my desire to have an interesting friend group, be a teenager, and go to boarding school. Perhaps shallow but it stuck!

Looking for Alaska

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Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

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Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

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I *really* wanted to be a cool teen in middle school, and YA about cool teens was as close as I could get (I was, of course, a bespectacled, brace-faced, socially awkward child). This book is about a cool girl (the daughter of a famous music producer) who spends a whirlwind night in New York City with the straight bassist of a queercore rock band; they go to Veselka, they end up at a drag queen rendition of the Sound of Music, they find the secret location where their favorite band is playing, and so on. This book really solidified various fantasies I had about what I wanted being a young adult to look and feel like--grungy, funny, weird, fun. I went on to read a lot of Cohn and Levithan's other books, many of which feature queer characters. I realized I was gay in college, and am grateful to my younger self's healthy diet of gay YA--my subconscious reading brain knew me better than I knew myself!

My research brought me to this ancient Random House web page where all of the music mentioned in the book is listed. It holds up!

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

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 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

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 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

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I really fancied myself an outcast in high school--definitely in excess of my actual lived outcasted-ness, haha, but that's being a teenager for ya! I got hooked on reading all the misfit classics in my teen years and The Catcher in the Rye was my gateway. The alienation, the angst, the ranting against society! Looking back, I'm not sure I really had any idea what the book was really "about" but I could tell Holden was angry at the world and so was I, in that amorphous, visceral way 15 year olds are. In my baby-badass way I was interested in how often the book had been banned, it's affiliation with various assassination attempts...I went on to read everything Salinger wrote immediately (And then Vonnegut and Plath and Kerouac and Heller anyone else who seemed mad at "society" and war and shopping).

At age 15 I also became interested in carrying certain books around to signal something to my peers and teachers. I remember reading Salinger in high school and hoping someone would notice or care that I was a person who read Salinger. Being a teenager is so complicated! This NPR article on the book reflects on what Catcher says about teenager-hood.

And where *do* the ducks go in Central Park when the pond freezes over??

The Catcher in the Rye

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This book was given to my high school boyfriend by our AP Environmental Science teacher and then circulated through our friend group. The premise of the book is hard to describe--a man answers a personals ad and ends up telepathically communicating with a philosopher gorilla named Ishmael who by means of the Socratic method conveys his theory of humanity. It's a bit sweeping and potentially ahistorical--I wouldn't recommend it to a friend now--but it really captured me as an older teen. Quinn has ideas about capitalism and the bible and the Agricultural Revolution that pieced together for me some Big Ideas I had at the time, and ultimately is one of the reasons I went on to major in Anthropology in undergrad. After Ishmael, I went on a real binge of nonfiction about Indigenous cultures, pre-Industrial society, world myths, neo-Luddite manifestos--I picked new books from the author's list of suggested reading on his website (Might give you a feeling for the wacky flavor of the book...). I have criticisms of all of those things now, but I felt like an intellectual at the time--someone grappling with the issues of the world, seeing patterns, and making intelligent connections. And I may have been, or maybe not! But the legacy of the book in my life is that *feeling* of learning new things and forming opinions that I wanted to share.

Ishmael

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The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam

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The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam

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In college, I barely read fiction. Instead, I read theory, for class and for pleasure. I'd come out as gay and started taking Gender & Sexuality courses, and felt very connected to queer theory--I could see how it applied to my own life and the broader world. I was interested in ideas about the performance of gender, compulsory heterosexuality, the problematic equivalence of queer liberation with the right to marry. Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure was an early favorite--its archive is silly, analyzing the plot of the movie Chicken Run or episodes of Spongebob. The book proposes: if "winning" in our world means working 40 hours a week and getting married and having too much stuff...maybe losing is better!

Here's an excerpt:
"Renton, Johnny Rotten, Ginger, Dory, and Babe, like those athletes who finish fourth, remind us that there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing, and that all our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner. Let’s leave success and its achievement to the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows, to married couples, to SUV drivers. The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid
mastery, and, with Walter Benjamin, to recognize that “empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers” (Benjamin, 1969: 256). All losers are
the heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company."

Ugh! It's' so good. I think of this book daily. My partner is a Gender & Sexuality Studies professor--Is that related to my undergrad love of queer theory? I think so...

The Queer Art of Theory

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After college I became a preschool teacher. I already had dreams of becoming a librarian, but I fell in love with children's books by teaching preschool. We listened to the Frog and Toad audiobooks nearly every nap time. They're a delight--they are read by the author, and there's an unusual musical accompaniment. But we also had the physical copies, and we read those on repeat too. The stories are so sweet, their houses are so cozy, the stories often end with an odd resolution. My students knew them by heart, and we liked to recite various lines to each other. Some of my warmest memories of being a working person, and of being an educator, are of reading Frog and Toad out loud, a gaggle of preschoolers piled on top of me, all of us saying the words together.

The thread of queerness follows through here: Arnold Lobel was gay, and though he never commented on whether Frog and Toad are in a relationship, it's easy to interpret that way. I learned this several years ago from the charmingly titled New Yorker piece: “'Frog and Toad': An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love"

I have the cover image of Frog and Toad biking tattooed on my leg.

Frog and Toad series

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Finally, this school year I am a Middle School and Upper School librarian. I read children's books professionally! I didn't consciously do this, but I realized once I started reading YA again for my job that I'd been denying myself the pleasure of it since high school. It's good plain fun--silly, romantic, full of wizards. I read this book on the recommendation of a student and truly gobbled it up, in a flashlight-under-the-covers-past-bedtime way. It's the nature of the genre! This was a shift for me--back to my middle school roots reading fanfiction about gay romance at wizard school. As an adult now, I feel like I can give up some of the literary pretensions I had as a teen and through undergrad. More recently I notice myself asking my friends not for the 'best' thing they read recently, but for the 'most fun.' Mine is Carry On!

Carry On

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Reading Autobiography Reflection - Herron