A recent episode of my latest podcast obsession reminded me of the power of songs to transport us back to a time and place in our past. After spending some time recalling songs that reminded me of my younger days, I started to wonder if there were books that had the same power. It’s not a one-to-one translation, of course. When I recall books, I think of the plot, the characters, what I think the book was trying to say. Sometimes I feel an echo of what I felt when I read the book. I’m only rarely transported back to where and when I read a book.
All that said, there are some books that evoke the time and place when I read them:
The Stand, by Stephen King
The first time I read this book, I was on a family road trip from Idaho to Wisconsin to visit family. It took days to drive across Montana, South Dakota, and Minnesota to get to my grandmother’s house in southeastern Wisconsin. The miles and miles of open fields turned out to be the perfect settings to read about a post-plague world. We could drive for hours without seeing anyone. When I pick up my copy now, I feel heat through our van’s windows. I picture the acres of drying wheat and corn and whatever else was in those fields. And then I get the willies all over again wondering if Randall Flagg might be out there, lurking.
Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
I read this one in college, when I was a baby English major. It was the first book that made me really get what literary criticism was all about. I am a huge fan of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and, at first, I wasn’t inclined to listen to what Bertha Mason’s story might be. The dreamy, diffuse style also challenged me. Prior to reading Wide Sargasso Sea, I mostly read plot-driven books. I had a lot to learn before I could appreciate what Rhys’s novel had to tell me. To this day, thinking about this book reminds me of uncomfortable desks and talking with my classmates about what it all might mean. It also reminds me of the joy of epiphanies about subtext, interpretation, and retellings that flip old ideas on their heads.
Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
When I think of this book, I think of a very specific copy. It was thick, rebound in that gray library binding stuff, and had a huge piece of grass someone had plucked years ago pressed into its pages. I found it on the shelves of my junior high’s library. (That same year, I had my first library “job” as a shelver during a free period.) I checked that book out dozens of times and would take it out to a shady spot outside after I finished my lunch to read. After the noise and crowds (and smells, let’s be honest) of the cafeteria, I just wanted to steal some alone time with a book until the bell called us back in. I’ve re-read the book as an adult and definitely recognized the sexism, racism, and exoticism of some of its passages but this book made such an impression on tween me that it is still one of my favorite books. I even have a print of its text from Litographs hanging on my office wall.
Fellow bookish folk, are there books that take you back to the first time you read them?
Yes, but like yours, they’re few and far between and mostly from when I was younger. Lullabies for Little Criminals comes to mind, read in a huge binges on my grandmother’s couch one summer!