I sat in the back seat of the red minivan that transported my family on almost every road trip I can remember—through the scorching desert to Four Corners, up though the northern prairies, out east through infinite corn.
My family picked me up after my college graduation in Michigan and meandered back to Colorado, pausing briefly at the St. Louis Arch.
Leaving St. Louis, we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic. Tail lights stared back at us, unblinking. A turmeric haze of dusty afternoon light hung around us.
Usually, reading in the car makes me motion sick. But that typically requires motion. We weren’t moving. And I was a mere twenty-five pages from the end of American Gods. Worth the risk.
American Gods had broken a serious book burn-out. I hadn’t read for fun in years. I’m a slow reader and consequently have spent most of my life “behind on the required reading.”
Then, in December of my senior year of college, I cracked the spine on American Gods while my flight out of Dallas was delayed again and again. The vivid prose all but stood up from the page. I hunched awkwardly in a too-square metal chair until at last my boarding group was called. I resented the chatty fellow in the aisle seat for interrupting my reading with tales of the riveting world of auditorium seating sales (who knew that was a job?).
I didn’t manage to finish the book over Christmas break (the fault of the stadium-seat salesman). In a heroic act of self-discipline, I forbid myself from reading it during the semester and went back to doggedly decoding the English canon and pecking out papers.
After graduation, without any clearly defined plans for the future, stuck in traffic, I read the end.
Do you get that heady rush after finishing a book? Like drinking a fruity cocktail too fast? That feeling is compounded by a stuffy car. It was also amplified by my awareness of my liminal life stage.
Here I was, a new college grad reluctantly returning to my childhood bedroom, slapping at echoes of every “can you make any money with an English degree?” I’d ever heard buzzing through my brain like horse flies. I felt like I’d looped backwards through time.
I’d done the grueling work of untangling the mysteries of literature, practiced hammering out sentences until they became sharp steel. But I didn’t feel particularly enlightened. I think I thought the books—all of it—should have mattered more.
American Gods is not a book with obvious themes and lessons to be parsed. The gift of the story wasn’t a quotable nugget or a wise revelation. But it is a book where the ordinary and even crass are bound together with the magical. Very little is obvious. And I needed the reminder that the wild mystery of the ocean exists under the filth of the oil slick.
Perhaps I would have felt that way about any good book I read at that specific moment. I often feel a slight vertigo when I finish a book.
I was standing stupidly still on a treadmill in a busy gym while I plummeted toward the unyieldingly grim ending of And Then There Were None on audiobook.
I finished Ninth House by candle light during a hot summer blackout in 2020, a fitting end to a spooky story that weaves itself in and out through the frayed ends of lives and afterlives.
I also avoid the endings of some stories. I have never read The Last Battle. The story and probably most of the best lines have been spoiled for me. Still, I can’t bring myself to finish the series. As long as I hold off, some door—to Narnia, to my childhood—stays ajar.
It matters when you read a book.
We readers age our lives in the barrels of other narratives. When we pour out our memories, the flavor of The Hobbit or The Hunger Games or American Gods decants into our stories.
I don’t think I could pry a particular meaning out of most of the books that have mattered to me. It would probably be akin to defacing a mystical icon by plucking out its jeweled eyes. Maybe it’s something as simple as finishing a book draws your awareness to the narrative patterns of real life—beginnings, endings, chapters.
Instead of asking people what their favorite book is, I ask, “What books shaped you?”
Context creates meaning.
I recently read my first ebook, despite having long declared my loyalty to print books and disdain for anything mediated to me through a bright screen. Nevertheless, I consumed Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood in fits and starts on my lunch break, in line at the store, or even sitting in my suffocatingly hot parked car.
I have now joined the ranks of my friends who are picky about what books they listen to, read as ebooks, or read in print. There’s probably some science to it. Certain formats may lend themselves to memory or catalyze mood.
Even with a hard-won English degree, I’ll be the first to say that there is no objectively right answer to what you should read or how. But it does matter, in a weird, mystical, personal way. It matters what books you read, and when, and where. And I’m curious, what books shaped you?
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
