Book Love
by Maureen—Age 23—New Haven, CT
Five weeks into my third semester at my second attempt at college, I padded down three flights of stairs on a Sunday morning in my slippers and PJs. In one hand I carried a coffee press, full and hot, as well as a coffee mug with a carton of half-and-half precariously balanced inside of it. My other hand clutched a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a copy of Imperfect Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology, by Bonnie Spanier.
Once outside in the gazebo 50 feet away from the back door of the dorm reserved for smokers and other degenerates, I settled myself into something of a routine, quietly sipping my coffee, absorbing myself in this treatise by Spanier on her trials as a molecular biologist. Barely noticing the other kids that came and went, I sat in the gazebo until my ass was numb and the leftover coffee started to get cold. This routine had been repeated on other mornings, in other locales, with the inevitable results that I started a day relaxed, informed and appropriately caffeinated.
In middle school my friends and I would trade off, reading in tandem and racing to the ends of books simply to show that we could. I became the fast reader, finishing the complete unabridged Les Miserables in record time despite having it confiscated for a day for whacking someone in the head with it. In my later years books moved away from being my actual weapons to being figurative ones. My bookshelves, once simply repositories for the weekly “pick up the books off the floor and dig them out of the mattress” sweep, became my allies in the war to be cool, intellectual and attractive. Shakespeare, Plato, Burroughs and Lakoff took the ultra-visible top-shelf positions, proving to the world at large that I was, all at the same time, intellectual, artsy, ultra cool, and politically active.
In public, while I sit outside with my coffee or discuss politics in my living room with the intellectuals that New Haven seems to be constantly teeming with, I am super reading woman. I read Shakespeare, and long complicated political histories. I quote Burroughs in witty bar conversations and coyly reminded guys that I flirt with that I read In Cold Blood before Philip Seymour Hoffman was up for an Oscar. My top shelf is full of books that I feel I should be reading, or am proud of having read, and signify my ever-present devotion to bettering myself, to expanding my mind and vocabulary, and, let’s not forget, to looking cool.
(Image: Steve Keys)
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