We live in a valley full of readers. Some are students, required to read what they’re assigned. But many more are ordinary civilians who find the printed — or electronic — word essential to their well-being. I am always curious about what other people are reading and why. So I set out to interview several readers who have their own styles, their own aims and their own pleasures. There has been a bonus in this project for me: I now have a new batch of books to put on my to-read list.
My house teems with books, occupying the walls on shelves as well as most horizontal surfaces. My husband, Bill, a professor and literary journalist, needs books both personally and professionally. As a writer and editor, I need them sometimes professionally, as in research, but more often personally, for entertainment and general enlightenment. Although we both use computers, we have not fully entered the digital age of reading. So far we read only books — and magazines and newspapers — on paper.
Bill’s habit is to surround himself with piles of books, reading, or at least attending to several of them at once. I do better with one at a time, and my best reading time is first thing in the morning, with the book propped on the kitchen table in front of my bowl of cereal. That book may be a recent publication, but I also love to reread. A few months ago, I reread “Moby Dick,” which I had approached dutifully and with gritted teeth decades ago. This time it seemed delightful — witty, verbally inventive, and informative (all that nautical lore). And as I sometimes do, I copied out a sentence that seemed notable, and in this case politically apt. The sentence refers to Ahab, the obsessed captain of the ship, relentlessly chasing the white whale. Apply it where you like: “Shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?”
Sheila McCormick grew up in a small town in southwestern Missouri, where, she says, “there was virtually nothing to do,” but there was a tiny public library, which she made good use of. In the eighth grade, she and a friend went there and tried to check out Philip Roth’s racy novel, “Portnoy’s Complaint.” They failed, she says. The librarian, whom she describes as “stereotypical” in her severe, puritanical attitude, wouldn’t let them take the book out.
McCormick is now a librarian herself, director of the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown, with an office up a twisting staircase on the second floor of that elegant late 19th-century building. She doesn’t prevent anyone from reading anything, she says, and instead lets parents make those decisions. But what about her own reading? She spends much of the day in her professional role “reading about reading,” as she puts it. Then she reads for herself in the evening. “I tend these days toward comic novels. They transport me out of what’s happening in the world.”
A comic novel she’s just read is by her good friend Brad Leithauser, to be published in the spring, titled “The Promise of Elsewhere.” It’s about a Midwestern professor whose life is falling apart and who tries to find happiness in traveling. Another comic novel she can recommend is “French Exit,” by Patrick deWitt, in which a wealthy widow and her adult son, suddenly penniless, stay in a borrowed apartment in Paris. “It’s absurd, funny,” she says. The New Yorker describes it as a novel that “locks its gaze on the affectations and hypocrisy of the upper classes.”
But McCormick has also just finished a distinctly non-comic work of nonfiction, Bob Woodward’s “Fear,” his book about Donald Trump. “I was reading it in spurts,” she says, “got saturated, then when it was just too much, I had to put it down for a while.”
Sabita Lamichhane was born in the countryside of Nepal and became a citizen two years ago. She doesn’t do a lot of reading on her own, she says, since she is too busy with her job in maintenance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with taking care of her family, and with working privately as a housecleaner. But, as she tries to improve her spoken English with the help of an English as a Second Language tutor at the Jones Library in Amherst, she has been reading a lot to her 4-year-old son. Mostly her son likes stories about animals. “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” is one. He had seen the video and then got interested in the book. Another favorite is “Peppa Pig.” Lamichhane buys the puzzles and toys that accompany these tales, but the little boy also wants to make his own stories and paintings. Her son, like many children of immigrants, is already able to correct his mother’s pronunciation. Says Lamichhane, “He tells me, ‘Mommy, not that way!’ ”
In Nepal, Lamichhane ran a business of her own, a grocery store. She finished high school and studied English there, but never really mastered it. Her husband’s English, she says, is much better than hers. At home, the family speaks Nepali, and Lamichhane also speaks Hindi.
The book that tops her son’s list is another animal story, but this time one with a real-world goal. “The Two Bite Club” encourages children to try foods from all of the food groups. As any parent who reads to a child knows, Lamichhane’s son wants his mother to read it over and over — and over. He just loves it. Lamichhane says she’s gotten so tired of reading it that she’s had to hide it.
Gayle Pemberton belongs to a longstanding book group that meets monthly at one of its six members’ houses on both sides of the Connecticut River. They began meeting in 1980, according to Gigi Kaeser, an original member. Pemberton, who has been part of the group for six years, is their newest member.
Now retired from Wesleyan, where she taught American and African-American literature, Pemberton says the group mainly reads contemporary fiction. Their most recent was “There, There,” a debut novel by Native American writer Tommy Orange. The title refers to Gertrude Stein’s comment — “There is no there there” — about Oakland, California, where the novel takes place. Occasionally the group will pick an older book to read. “We went back to Trollope, ‘The Way We Live Now,’ ” says Pemberton.
When they meet, there’s always a catching up time first before they talk about the current book. This is a group of travelers, says Pemberton, and whenever they return, the tradition is that they bring back bookmarks for everyone. Ruth Solie is the group’s designated listmaker, compiling titles of books she’s read or read about from which the members choose. “I think Ruth doesn’t sleep,” says Pemberton.
The conversation tends to focus on an appreciation of the book’s artistry. There’s no leader or agenda, “We just launch in, mostly to say whether we liked it or not.” Pemberton has learned to know people’s tastes, which side of that line they’re going to come out on. But, she says, it’s all very relaxed. There’s nothing competitive about it, “no preening.” They all value each other’s opinions, she says.
Everyone has busy lives, says Pemberton. But with the group, she says, “We know we’ll all read at least one book this month.”
After working in the corporate world for 23 years, Northampton resident Alan Hoff is about to start work as managing director of Monadnock Media in Hatfield, a nonprofit that designs multimedia exhibits for museums all over the country — from the Boston Museum of Science to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.
In preparation for that work, Hoff has been reading around in American history, most recently, James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” a critique of high school history textbooks, and Richard Wright’s 1938 book, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” a collection of novellas about the post-slavery lives of black people. In between these serious volumes, he’s read some “brain candy,” like the musician Jeff Tweedy’s autobiography, “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).”
He’s also been traveling, visiting some of the museums where Monadnock Media has done installations, and spent a week in Germany, which led him to his current reading, Madeline Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning.”
Earlier, when he was often on the road for his job with Avid Technology, he read more fiction — Updike, Russo, Proulx. “I found it nourishing, getting other people’s stories.”
As a kid, says Hoff, although he was not a voracious reader, he can still remember exactly where he was in the fifth grade when he read Maribelle Cormack’s 1948 novel “Swamp Boy.” His mother read to him a lot, and he continued that tradition by reading to his two daughters — “constantly.” His proudest reading-aloud accomplishment, an Olympic climb, was going through the entire Harry Potter series and doing the voices in character. “The kids loved it,” he says.
Marietta Pritchard is a writer and editor living in Amherst. A former Gazette features editor and longtime columnist, she is the author of three books.