"Morningstar: Growing Up with Books," by Ann Hood

As does the book “My Life with Bob,” by Pamela Paul (posted about here on 6/27/17), “Morningstar: Growing Up with Books” (Norton, 2017), by Ann Hood, tells of the author’s passionate reading history as she was growing up. Hood’s title refers, as some readers will guess, to the book “Marjorie Morningstar,” by Herman Wouk, a hugely popular book when it was published in 1955, and one that Hood – like so many other bookish young women, including me – related to for decades after. This is the book featured in the first chapter in Hood’s current book. Hood, like Paul, and like me and probably a number of you, was the classic eager young reader who felt that all of life was to be found in books. She writes that it is “hard to describe the magic that books held for me then” and speaks of how books made her so happy. In her introduction, she writes of the powerful hold that the book “Little Women” had on her (and I can relate to that!). The rest of the book is organized around specific books that were important to and meaningful to her as she was growing up. There are ten chapters, each labeled as “lessons” and each title beginning with “How to…” – “Lesson 1: How to Dream,” and so on. Some of the books she discusses are “The Bell Jar,” by Sylvia Plath (“it seemed to be written just for me”); “Love Story,” by Erich Segal; “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck; and “Rabbit, Run,” by John Updike. I have read every one of the ten books she lists, some of which I have long forgotten (e.g., “Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows,” by Rod McKuen; “The Harrad Experiment,” by Robert H. Rimmer) but which came back to me as I read Hood’s descriptions. I love that Hood includes some books that are now generally considered to be not particularly well written, because she shows that at the time she read them, they taught her something, or made her feel less alone, or in some way touched her. These are the books that bookish young woman of her and my generation would and did read. In any case, she captures very well the yearning, the connection, the reassurance, the epiphanies, the opening up the world that a certain type of young person (yes, me, and probably you!) feels when entering the world of books. As an aside, a small related story: I remember reading Ann Hood’s first book, a novel titled “Somewhere off the Coast of Maine,” when it was published in 1987. I can still distinctly see, in my mind’s eye, this book as part of a pile of books I took to my parents’ summer lakeside cottage in Michigan that summer of 1987. As I have written before, for me one of the great pleasures of a vacation, especially a leisurely vacation of 2-3 weeks, has always been planning what to read, and storing up a pile of books appropriate for such vacations. During my time at the cottage, I would gradually work my way through the pile, sometimes sitting down by the lake, sometimes in the evenings after dinner, and reading those novels added to the pure joy of the vacation, the time with family, the beauty of the lake and surroundings, and the freedom of those weeks.