Mining for Manna

BOOKS. I LOVE THEM. I collect them, buy them, borrow them, read them, share them, discuss them. Lately, I’ve been devouring them faster than ever, gobbling up shelves of contemporary fiction. After thirty-five years of teaching, I am enjoying my first (technically my second) sabbatical, my first real respite from the responsibilities of teaching. During my previous “breather,” I toiled over my dissertation, so pleasure-reading was a rare treat, much like the few pieces of chocolate I allowed myself each time I completed a chapter. This time around, however, I truly am on break. I’m on leave to write and to read whatever and whenever I choose--bliss more satisfying than Godiva.

This is not to say I don’t miss my students. I do, especially during this election year. It is my missed opportunity to engage young people in political debate, dare them to defend their candidates, persuade them even to register and vote. But I am not sorry to have huge chunks of uninterrupted time for reading without the uneasy feeling a stack of unread papers can provoke. No, I am thrilled that this semester heaps of student compositions have been usurped by piles of books littered around the house. Books waiting on my nightstand; books wide-open on the kitchen table; books resting on the living room couch, all of them calling me “to sit and have a read.”

And so I sit; some days I enjoy the added bonus of a book chat, a chance to meet with other lovers of books for an intellectual ménage-a-many. What delight there is in hearing passages lyrical read out loud, each reader lingering on a favorite word. How delicious to predict an intricate subplot or to note a recurring theme. What fun to talk of titles or endings too contrived. How wonderful when characters, likeable or not, remind us what we’re made of and who we’d like to be. As a long-time leader of such discussion groups, I’ve seen how books turn strangers into friends, how books make friends reflect and reconnect. Yes, I believe in the magic of books.

Last week I read two books about books. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008) by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005) are books about books that save people’s lives, literally. Both works describe the Nazi occupation of, respectively, the English Channel Island of Guernsey and the town of Molching, just outside Munich. The characters in both novels rely on books to distract them from the horrors of their realities. They read books because they hunger for words that will deliver them from despair. For the members of the Guernsey Literary Society, a book group born as an impromptu alibi for breaking curfew, books are true life-savers. The group looks to literature for clues on how to survive; they look to Charles Lamb for humor and wit, to Seneca for moral guidance, and Jane Austen for happy endings. Liesel Memeinger, the eponymous book thief, finds solace in The Grave-Digger’s Handbook, a token of remembrance she steals from the young man who buried her brother, and which she reads to the young Jew her family is hiding in their basement. Don’t worry; no plot-spoilers follow.

These fictional accounts of how books helped save people’s lives remind me of the recent best-selling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Azar Nafisi’s moving account of the secret seminars she conducted in her home after giving up her university professorship because she refused to wear the veil. For two years, Nafisi met with a group of female students to discuss books by government -banned authors such as Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and Austen (yes, Austen, whose characters never even hold hands). As the visiting author told my enraptured students at Nassau Community College (where I had the privilege to meet Nafisi), her students quickly recognized that the books they were reading were essential to their survival as women living under strict Islamic rule. These books were “not a luxury but a necessity” to their understanding of what they could and could not change, what they would and would not endure.

Yes, books—bought, borrowed, even banned--have helped generations, real and imagined, fight against the receding shores of hope. During these troubled economic times, during this contentious political climate, I find myself browsing the bookstores mining for manna. I find such foraging can calm, restore, and nurture the soul. I recommend it highly!