A History of Reading

A lover of animal tales, I read all I could find in comic books and the library. Black Beautyis a saga of trials and redemption that pierced me in the third grade. Rin Tin Tin and Lassie in all her coming home permutations, Rhubarb the Millionaire Cat, The Black Stallion, his return and son; Hi-Yo Silver, Champion. The riders of those horses were irrelevant: I wasn’t interested in men.

An artist neighbor we briefly had in one of the many places we briefly lived was enough moved by my ten-year-old horse drawing to give me C. W. Anderson’s Deep Through the Heart, an exquisitely-illustrated book about valiant horses like Seabiscuit. Its full-page charcoal drawings took my breath away and I tried to copy them over and again. They were a level of art I hadn’t seen before, by a noted equine artist of the 40s, something my parents wouldn’t have known about. That book gave me a glimpse of another world.

In my twenties, drawing horses still, with little technical improvement

At eleven, while babysitting my younger brothers, I finished a book about mustangs, wild horses of the west. The last story featured a captured and broken horse that when it was ridden at last, buried its nose in the river and refused to lift its head. I was sobbing when my parents came home. Mom rushed to check on my obliviously sleeping siblings. Neither she nor Dad could comprehend tears for a fictional horse that committed suicide, laughed in relief. In my grief-stricken moment, I thought them hard-hearted people.

As I’ve written elsewhere, by thirteen, those books no longer sufficed. My mother’s Reader’s Digest condensed books felt like unfilled pastry shells. A librarian pointed me to a teenage section: Betrayed by My Best Friend, She Loves Him but He Loves Someone Else, Guy from Wrong Side of the Tracks Wins Popular Girl. Those stories. I tried to read them, dutifully, but could not, sank into a non-reading bog. My period and this too? Swelling breasts and a book desert as well? I came across my classmate Joy Duncan absorbed in reading, asked her what it was. “It’s good,” she said, showing me the spine.War and Peace.

Thus I discovered the 800 section of the library, which they had been keeping secret, and the existence of Russians. After reading them, I went happily back to a different section of American literature, one that included Faulkner, Hemingway and Richard Wright. At my 50^thhigh school reunion, I learned Joy was among the 25 of our original 140 already gone and felt a sharp moment of grief. I would have liked to thank her for the Russians.

My entry into Latin American literature

Long before that reunion, in my thirties, I had another reading crisis. I went through contemporary American writers randomly, feeling less than inspired. It didn’t help that I was married to the wrong man, living in a basically non-reading world, with no access to a Joy Duncan to point me someplace new. My husband was Mexican-American and I was disposed to notice anything related, stumbled on Where the Air is Clear, La región más transparente. Sometimes books come to you when you need them. I promptly read all of Fuentes, and because one book leads to another, Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos. From Mexico I crossed borders to reach García Márquez, Cortázar, Valenzuela and the rest. The Boom. And what came after, ever more international. Galeano revised the history of our hemisphere for me. The U.S. is insular. Breaking through our borders was a revitalizing ocean breeze after being landlocked too long.

Around that time I also found Doris Lessing, who spoke to me like no other woman had about my doomed relationship. Her books were therapy, a revelation that I was not alone, a way to converse with other women like me, stay sane until I got through what I had to go through.

Joy pointed me to the path I needed in my reading, one that led me to become the first in my immediate family to go to college. That had unintended consequences, as such things do. I left home never to really return, having become someone else, having learned a vocabulary shared by no one at home. The Latin American expedition twenty years later took me south in unanticipated ways as well. I went back to college for Spanish, which led to becoming a Spanish teacher and then a literary translator, occupations I had no inkling of assuming when I earned my English degree at twenty-one.

These days I have a perpetual stream of international reading. Latin American writers have made me cringe over U.S. foreign policy for decades. Now Middle Eastern, African and Asian writers do the same. Carlos Fuentes once said you may be what you eat, but you are also the comic books you read as a child. Reading is a powerful engine: you never know where it will take you.