A WORD FROM THE AUTHORA letter from David Orr, author of The Road Not TakenWhen I think about librar

A WORD FROM THE AUTHORA letter from David Orr, author of The Road Not TakenWhen I think about libraries, I think about my mother, who grew up an only child in Greenville, South Carolina. Her parents were the practical-minded offspring of hardscrabble farmers: the stories they knew turned on the hard lessons of Job, not the nimble ironies of Austen. But their daughter was a reader. She started with books from the neighborhood bookmobile, since her parents didn’t know much about libraries, and couldn’t have transported her to one even if they had. She read the same books over and over. Her middle school had a modest library – that’s probably overstating it – and she quickly read all of its books, and then started over again with them as well.It was in high school that she first encountered something approximating a real library. A librarian noticed how many books she was checking out, and began making suggestions: Stephen Vincent Benet, Flaubert, Dickens. Within a couple of years, Mom had read all of Hardy. It was, she tells me, the great transformative experience of her life, as “the world just opened and opened.” By the end of high school she had a knowledge of classic American and European fiction that would have served her well in college, had there been money for that.  School taught me to read. But when I was a boy, my mother taught me to be a reader – and by extension a writer. I expect everyone reading this newsletter understands that distinction intimately. My book The Road Not Taken: Finding American in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong is about being a reader – in this case, a reader of the most popular American poem and of its equally popular creator, Robert Frost. It’s a book about how our misreadings of both are inevitable because both hold multiple, sometimes contradictory possibilities in tension – much like the American culture they have come to represent. It’s a book about what it means to choose, and how our own choices can seem to depend on other choices of which we were unaware (for instance, the decision to take the advice of a kindly high school librarian). It’s a book about discovering who, or what, the choosing self is. I should add that the first real reader of my book was my mother (editors and spouses don’t count, I think, as they’re more allies than readers). She read it in one afternoon. And then she read it again.  -- source link

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