Book Nostalgia

There’s something especially marvelous about looking at a collection of books and stories and seeing yourself in them. Not just who you are today, but who you used to be, and better yet, who you want to be.

Growing up, I read a lot of classics. Granted, they were the Illustrated Classics editions, but since then I’ve read most, if not all, of the originals. I’d go to the library at school in second grade and come back with Jane Eyre, over and over again. I don’t remember when I first discovered it or when I decided that it was going to be mine, but at some point I did, and I read it so many times that year that I think I could have quoted whole passages.

I came across Nancy Drew around the same time as Jane Eyre. The library only had a handful of the books, so I read the same ones, until I went to the county library, where I found shelves and shelves of them, and discovered the magical thing called a holds’ list. The only Nancy Drew book I’ve ever owned, for whatever reason, is The Bungalow Mystery, which I got with my dad at a small bookstore in downtown Fernandina.

Where The Red Fern Grows and The Secret Garden both happened in third grade. Where The Red Fern Grows was an especially memorable read, because it probably the first book I’d ever read where characters that I’d come to know and love died. I’ve read that book so many times now that the cover is made up almost entirely of masking tape.

I can’t remember when I first read Anne of Green Gables. It was sometime in third or fourth grade, or maybe the summer between. I got the boxed set on Ebay for somewhere around thirty dollars; I don’t remember if I payed for all of it, or some of it, or none of it at all. But I remember when they came in, and I remember keeping them in the little box for a long time, until the box was starting to fall apart, and I moved my library out of the single shelf on my closet and into my room. After I read the Anne books, I found the Emily books, and a collection of short stories LM Montgomery had written set in and around Avonlea.

In sixth grade I went through a massive Louisa May Alcott phase. I honestly don’t remember what started it, or when in that year it began. But by the end of the year I’d read every one of her books I could get my hands on, my favorites being Little Women and An Old Fashioned Girl.

There are so many others. Huckleberry Finn, although I can’t remember when exactly I first read it, was a favorite. So was Treasure Island, only I have a date for that – first grade. I was quite proud of myself. Esperanza Rising, the Dear America series, the American Girl mysteries, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter.

I have almost all of these books still. Most of them are sitting on a short bookshelf beside my bed, and they stay there, neatly stacked, neatly organized. But sometimes I have to take them down to clean this shelf and sometimes I end up sitting here, with a stack of books whose covers are all worn and old and rough with use, remembering what it was like to read them for the first time. I say hello to them again, and let them remind who it is I want to be.