Anonymous asked: The small bookstore at Emory University's Carlos Museum, an almost century-old repository of antique-to-present art & artifacts, has two sales a year; one of them was yesterday & today (year-round it has some of the finest books you can find--and you can't easily find them elsewhere). There were two copies of "The Books They Gave Me", and I bought one--an absolutely pure delight. I returned today for the other one for a friend, and it was gone. That aside, are you still accepting submissions?
I’m so glad you like the book! Sadly, the blog really isn’t active anymore. I’m finishing up a novel I’ve written, so that’s where most of my attention is these days.
It’s been so many years since the book released and I was one of the lucky authors to be published. This is the signed book that I wrote about for Possible Side Effects, the book I used to read to someone I loved dearly.
Thank you for making something like this for people, something to bring us together. I know one of the things that helped me relieve my heartbreak was seeing my story in this book and knowing so many other people felt it too, saw it too. It made my burden less heavy, and I thank you so much for that.
Keep submitting people! Keep this thing alive. It’s something so magical and beautiful and it means so much to many of us.
Tolkien.
She started reading it to us in the mornings that spring. We crammed onto the couch, all four of us, pushing in at the sides, vying for a spot next to her and waiting for our daily dose of adventure. She did all the voices and made up tunes to each song. I always sat to her right, because although I wasn’t the oldest, I was the best reader. It was my job to pick up the book and keep reading when her voice softly lulled off and her eyes closed, which they did on a daily basis. She’d nap as I read out to my sister and brothers, my voice rising over her humming breath.
She didn’t stop our daily reading when we started living out of the van. As dad drove, she’d sit in the front seat, half turned to project to the back of “Clifford,” our red 16 passenger. As the rain pounded on the roof and my dad white knuckled across glassy lanes of traffic, she practically yelled about Bilbo’s love for root vegetables and a consistent homey lifestyle.
When the air conditioning broke in Wyoming and the heat swelled, stifling out good humor and the childish sense of adventure we had about the road trip, she reawakened it with three giant squabbling trolls that tied us up, threatening to eat us. By the time Gandalf rode in and and the sun rose, the temperature was dropping. The wind blew through cracked windows and we were happy.
Then dad dropped us off at Grandma’s trailer by the lake and left to take summer classes. We laid in the sun and ate boiled hot dogs for lunch and listed to Mom read The Hobbit every afternoon.
Bilbo rode with eagles and inside of barrels. We burned our shoulders in the sun and perfected out cannon-balls off the dock with our dogs. He bantered with kings and dragons. We froze racing to the bottom of the lake and went to Dairy Queen with Grandma when Mom and Dad went house hunting. He had an adventure. So did we that summer. And when he went home, we did too.
King.
One time when I visited her, she brought me to Molly’s Books and Records in Philadelphia’s Italian Market. They had a trade paperback edition of Stephen King’s 11.22.63. I’m not a huge fan of King’s, but I’ve always loved time travel stories, and I was curious about his stab at this sub-genre. I ended up not buying it.
We went back to Molly’s a few weeks later, during my next trip from New York. I’d decided to buy their copy, but someone had beaten me to it. That evening, she gave me a birthday present: a beautifully-wrapped copy of 11.22.63. “I wish you could have seen the look on your face, ya nerd!“
Our relationship started strongly, but our incompatibilities were stronger. It turned out she wasn’t much of a reader, and she criticized me for keeping so many books around. Her friends didn’t like me. Her sense of humor, which used to leave me awed at her wit and versatility, became sharpened, barbed, and lethal. We blamed each other for not listening or understanding. I began to dread her city; the trip that used to fill me with anticipation now felt like a one-sided chore. Our final break-up was epic and violent. I couldn’t remember why I’d ever loved her, and I was glad to leave.
I shipped her things back to her. There were no books, except for 11.22.63, which I kept. Reading it began as one of many exercises in exorcising her. I cried at the book’s ending, and I did again last week, when I watched the finale of the Hulu mini-series.
Closure still escapes me.
Adams; Escher
Number one is I found The Books They Gave Me in book form yesterday at Hastings in Waco TX. Lucky find. Number two is my Books They Gave Me submission. Well not really a book that I was given but rather a book my ex-wife was given. Many years ago now I discovered a small book of Escher prints in our apartment. I had never seen the book before and did not know much about Escher so I opened it and found an inscription to my wife from an admirer. The admirer was a man she worked with at the time. “Oh just somebody I know” was the response when queried. But sadly, the book turned out to be prophetic. Escher it seems is all about illusion. Sometimes that happens in real life. I still don’t like Escher.