For more than a decade, I was a member of a terrific book group. I liked the people, the way it was organized and the exposure it gave me to books and authors I would not have discovered on my own.
The discussion leader for the month always offered insights that made the book more relevant, more enjoyable. Once, a leader convinced me that a book I thought without merit was interesting. She liked it for the very reason I hated it. This small event in a suburban book group demonstrates the value of reasoned discussion.
By the way, the novel was “Memoirs of a Geisha,” which I hated because it is a rewrite of “Gone with the Wind.” The discussion leader chose the book because it was “Gone with the Wind” recast for another time and place.
Reading fiction has always been a struggle for me, although I love books and generally carry one with me. As a child, I was a precocious reader who tested above grade level. Unfortunately, my hometown library limited access to the adult collection to those in the ninth grade and above. It didn’t matter if the author was Shakespeare or Dickens, if you were in seventh or eighth grade, you were confined to the children’s room.
At this time, the young adult novel didn’t exist, but, strangely enough, the books that shocked when they were published, such as the works of the Bronte sisters, were highly recommended to older girls. After reading the Brontes, Maureen Daly’s “Seventeenth Summer,” considered the first young adult novel, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series, I turned to nonfiction, concentrating on science and history.
I also read biographies of famous women, from the suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to pioneering medical doctors like Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Edwards Walker, and lawyers such as Arabella Mansfield and Charlotte Ray.
I remember clearly the books I chose the first time I was allowed into the adult room — “Main Street,” by Sinclair Lewis; “The Forsyte Saga,” by John Galsworthy; and “Ben-Hur,” by Lew Wallace. I found “Ben-Hur” good, “Main Street” terrific, but “The Forsyte Saga” disappointing because it was “just about a family.”
As the members of my book group often said, there are times in life for certain books and the books we loved as children often fail us as adults and vice-versa. In my 40s, I found Sinclair Lewis unreadable, but I loved John Galsworthy. His novel was a wonderful study of characters I knew in real life.
When I began high school that fall, I discovered literature. Our program demanded we read six books each summer and report on them — either through an interview with our assigned teacher or a capsule report on a 4-by-6 index card — within the first two weeks of school. Afterward, we were to read one book each month.
Freshmen and seniors, who were in Introduction to Literature and World Literature, respectively, could read authors from any country. Sophomores in American literature read American writers, while juniors would only receive credit for reading British writers.
That exposure to literature made me think like an adult. I remember standing in front of a display at the local Sears store, devoted to a single novel, “Ship of Fools,” by Katherine Anne Porter, in 1962. The book was touted as “long awaited” and I could hardly wait to borrow it from the library, which I did.
A few years later, in the same Sears store, another display invited would-be readers to thumb through Saul Bellow’s “Herzog.” I asked myself whether a best-seller can be literature.
In terms of reading, college was the low point of my life. I picked up book after book, then returned them to the library because I could not bear to read them. Frustration led me to graduate school in English.
I still read more nonfiction than fiction. I love reading about physics, cast in layperson’s English. I love history and archaeology as much today as I did at 12 or 13. However, last summer, I interrupted my plan to read “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” “The Souls of Black Folks,” and “The Silent Spring” to read some of the late novels of Philip Roth, “American Pastoral” and “The Plot Against America.”
The only book I will refuse is one I think poorly written.
A native of Michigan, Susan Wozniak belongs to three alumni associations with at least one other woman named Susan Wozniak in each. She is not related to Steve.