When books come calling

Mary Doria Russell

Reading about people in stories was like having visitors.

Mary Doria Russell, Doc

With a demanding husband and a house full of children, Virginia Earp has little time for herself. When she does rebel, she does it with a book. Visitors are rare in this home where Wyatt and his siblings spend their childhood, but their mom, when she can sneak an opportunity to read a bit, thinks of the characters in stories as her visitors. So writes Mary Doria Russell in Doc, her fine novel about the life of Doc Holliday, in which the Earp brothers play a major part.

Yesterday I came across a similar idea in Vaddey Ratner's novel In the Shadow of the Banyan: "Milk Mother said that stories are like footpaths of the gods. They lead us back and forth across time and space and connect us to the entire universe, to people and beings we never see but who we feel exist." And so through these mysterious footpaths called stories, people visit us or we visit them.

I do love lists, so I thought I might make a list of ways in which books are like visitors.

1. Visitors come in two basic varieties, those who are invited and those who drop in unannounced. The books we most enjoy usually seem to be those we invite into our lives, those we read because we choose to. Drop-in books are those assigned by teachers, those picked by someone else in our book clubs and those given to us by friends who say, "You've got to read this." Sometimes we like them, sometimes we don't. Either way we feel obligated to read them.

2. Visitors tell us something about the world outside our own experience. That's why we read books, to learn something we don't know, in the case of nonfiction, or to learn about the lives of others, even if those others happen to be entirely fictional.

3. Visitors break up the routine of our day. Actually I make reading a part of the routine of my day. Yet every day is different because every book, like every visitor, is different.

4. Visitors mean conversation. Books are the same, or should be. Readers may say nothing, but they should be responding in their minds, thinking about what they read. I am grateful for this blog, as I was for my weekly book column when I worked for a newspaper, for allowing me to respond to the books that come calling.