nortonBy some fluke of DNA, I was born into a family of scientists. My mother had me when she was just eighteen, so I spent my early years tucked in a corner of her college science labs playing with molecular model kits instead of Tinker Toys. Even at home, all we had was one solitary bookcase in the entire house, and it held only textbooks. Things like Organic Chemistry, Modern Physics, Introduction to Microbiology. But the science wouldn’t sink in.  I wasn’t interested.

Then when I was about nine, I discovered a secret.  In a drawer of my mother’s nightstand she’d stuck some old textbooks from her one required freshman English class. There they were: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes 1 and 2, copyright 1968. The pages were tissue-thin and the covers torn off, probably because in my mother’s student poverty she’d bought remaindered copies. I took them to my room and stuck them under my bed, shoving them all the way to the center where no one would find them. I felt like a thief with forbidden contraband.

Stacked up, they were about five inches tall, their blue and black and green and black spines a little worse for wear, even then. They seemed so modest, so unobtrusive. But inside, inside, they contained worlds and worlds.

I’m sure I was too young to understand most of what I read. But the words were delicious to me.  Shakespeare. Milton. Tennyson. Yeats. And now these volumes were all mine. So there I was, for hours on end, sprawled out with them on the dull beige wall-to-wall carpet of my room in a stone and cedar faux-ranch-style house in rural Alabama. Kind of in heaven.

It didn’t take me long to branch out in my reading. My school librarians, Mrs. Alexander and then Mr. Howard, quickly took me under their wings when they realized they had a reader on their hands. I worked my way through the Fiction and Poetry sections of the school libraries quite methodically. They’d recommend a writer, I’d nod, and then would read every one of their books in the order they were shelved. I hardly remember now what I studied in my classes because the most important education I received was in those pages. The British:  Dickens, Hardy, Austen, Eliot. The French: Balzac, Flaubert, Camus, Baudelaire. The Americans: Fitzgerald, Dickinson, James, Hemingway. And then eventually those marvelous Russians: Tolstoy, Dostoyevksy, Pushkin, Turgenev, and, finally, in my senior year, Nabokov.

My parents and I would never see eye to eye. It was more than a right brain, left brain difference, though that didn’t help. Luckily, though, it meant they paid no attention to what I was reading, and I tried to avoid them as much as possible, hiding out in my room trying to figure out where else life could take me. I like to think I was raised by books and alternative music—a strange amalgam of Morrissey and Sartre that helped me get through the teen years.

I got pretty far away from rural Alabama in the end, but books are a habit I’m glad I’ve never lost. And I kept those copies of the Norton Anthology, spiriting them away when I went to college and packing them up with my ever-growing book collection each time I moved: from Killen to Birmingham to New Haven to New York City to Upstate New York. They were my hidden treasure, the only souvenir I kept from my childhood home. When I pick them up now, I have to admit I notice a slight tremble in my hands—they mean so much to me, even still.

I’m sure I would have found a refuge in books no matter what, but these were the gateway into the literature that saved my life. Now these two disintegrating volumes are proudly displayed on my own bookshelves, surrounded by thousands of other books: literature, crime fiction, philosophy, history, biography, and poetry. There isn’t a science textbook in sight.