MORNINGSTAR: GROWING UP WITH BOOKS is a favorite type of book for me. In it, novelist Ann Hood relates the details of her formative years through the books she chose to read at various ages. I am not going to tell you the books she chose because you will enjoy seeing what she read yourself from her first books onward. We learn a lot about her middle-class family and the town of Warwick, RI. where she watched the decline of the town through her formative years. Mills and factories closed, better stores moved out of town or disappeared. A familiar story by now.
All of the books she talks about (and it's not all that many) were books that meant something to me too. And the thing that I liked best about it was her choices were original, realistic, different. Not the sort of books found on BY THE BOOK in the TIMES each week. But instead what a girl might stumble on herself when her family were not readers. This was also the case with me. No one ever guided my reading so I read inappropriate books often. No one told me to read books like FROM THE TERRACE or BABBITT or THE DEVIL IN BUCKS COUNTY or THE IDIOT, but I did.
This is a short book and Hood confines her discussion to about a dozen books, all which resonated with the times she lived in, her age at the time, and the country itself. . I would have like a list at the back of other books she read but did not include here. Especially childhood favorites.
I enjoyed this short book, almost more memoir than literary discussion but that is just fine.
11 comments:
Oh, I do like books about, well, books. It's especially interesting to read about the way books and reading figure into a writer's life. I'm glad you enjoyed this one.
I read and very much enjoyed her FLY GIRL: A MEMOIR (mostly about her time as a flight attendant, as she was just learning to write). I thought I'd read this too, but it isn't on my list. Sounds like exactly my kind of book.
I love books like MORNINGSTAR: GROWING UP WITH BOOKS, too! I just ordered it!
Any book on this subject interests me. Is it we are always looking for new titles or want to share the experience with a like-minded person?
Both, I'd say.
Checked our Winnipeg library and was surprised that two copies are in the collection and now one is en route to my nearby branch. I read Marjorie Morningstar years ago. Like you. I was allowed from an early age to read whatever I wanted, but once we moved to northern Manitoba the choices were few due to no library. The other day I was thinking about what I read, but can't remember any of the very early titles. On a hockey book site this week, someone was writing about a series of paperback originals written by Toronto author Ed Fitkin and suggesting they were some of the early hockey books. A couple of them would have been among my early reads. When I was 11 or 12 , I started reading some of my father's mysteries by Erle Stanley Gardner, George Harmon Coxe and Brett Halliday and read the Tom Swift books in our small school library.
Laura Lippman reads Marjorie Morningstar every year. I read it once but read other books by Woulk as well. A mid-20th century gem.
This does sound like a good book. I don't read many memoirs, but the combination of talking about books and memoir would be interesting. I will check the book sale later in the year.
I was able to get it from the Cloud Library and read more than half this short book yesterday. Will finish it today. I've really enjoyed all her books that I've read (non-fiction, so far) and this is no exception. A lot of it rang a bell. She is eight years younger than me, but we had a number of similar experiences.
Indeed.
And I do read memoirs, bookish ones frequently, and glad to have caught up with this review. Thanks!
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