Are We What We Read?

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person…”  Carl Sagan

I am a lifelong lover of books.  Before I could read, I was fascinated by all those markings on crisp white paper between hard covers. My favorite was one of fairies. The illustrations of their beautiful cobweb and gossamer dresses flowing about their dragonfly wings mesmerized me. I remember tracing the amazing images with my fingertips in wonder.

“If (the book) was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider’s web and enchantingly beautiful.”  Cornelia Funke, Inheart Trilogy

My mother was an avid booklover, setting a good example for me. She filled her empty hours with dreams captured between the pages of each book she dove into. I would watch her eyes flick over the words and wonder where Mom was traveling to on her latest magic-carpet ride. Her fingers, with perfectly manicured red-polished nails would gently turn each page. When finished she would thump the cover shut, sigh and smile in great satisfaction.  She had returned from whatever life, romance or travels she had embarked on between those pages with unknown black markings.

My mother’s favorite genres were romance, biographies and travel. Years after my father’s death she turned her full attention to love stories. I realize now she was vicariously reliving her romantic, whirl-wind life and world-wide travels with my father, through the words of others. After my mother’s death I discovered boxes of beautifully written love letters from my father to my mother, when he was  “across the water” on business. Even the telegrams were exciting and romantic, “Darling, Soon. Can’t wait. All my love. Your Freddie.”  

“Books to the ceiling, books to the sky, my pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them!” Arnold Lobel

I began my own book journey as soon as I could ride my blue Schwinn bike, "Jezebel," to and from our local library. I would fill my bike basket with troves of fresh adventures. Today, my overflowing bookcases, bedside tables and desks can attest to my continued love of  books. I have more books than I could ever consume in a lifetime. As I have grown older, my taste, and haste in reading, has changed. I am much more particular now about what I read. If a book doesn’t grab me in the first ten pages it goes into the library discard pile. The books I purchase to delve into I read slowly, carefully, underlining my favorite passages, words or facts in yellow highlighter. 

My love of literature has led me to this hypothesis: to what extent do books shape one’s life, personality, loves and even job choices?  Authors take you into other lives and places and possibilities.  Would it be reasonable to discover one’s life trajectory from the books we have read as a child?  I thought over my own life and realized my lifelong love of fairies can be traced to my fascination with these little gossamer winged beauties of my childhood. I discovered more captivating art through the images of Jessie Wilcox Smith gracing my favorite childhood books. Eventually, those illustrations opened the door to my love of art.

"A good book is a good friend." Jesse Wilcox Smith

As I grew older my tastes changed. I gobbled up Nancy Drew books. I loved the ways Beth and Nancy solved mysteries, following the clues to finally, triumphantly, resolve their latest conundrum. Could Nancy Drew have sparked my love of solving mysteries with my obsessive compulsion of watching TV Crime shows?

I explored further as I grew older. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn had a great impact on me as a child. From those pages I traveled to a small mining village in South Wales. I absorbed ts families, loves, landscapes and society of friendships. I learned of the inevitable arrival of industrialism, threatening a beautiful, natural world. Is it possible that How Green Was My Valley cemented Vermont in my heart and soul?  The green hills of Vermont, with its winding dirt roads, ancient stone walls, history and generations of families deeply influenced my young life. Whenever I return to Vermont I feel as though I have come home, from the first visit of my life there until today. 

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” Victor Hugo

Green Mansions, by W.H. Hudson was another favorite I still occasionally delve into. The tale of a young, lonely, orphaned girl, Rima, who lived in jungle treetops enthralled me. Her only friends were the wildlife, birds, and the jungle. She came to respect the wild kingdom which she learned to communicate with. I imagined swinging from jungle vine to vine, like Jane in Tarzan, joining the monkeys in their trapeze races. Did my love of climbing trees and exploring nature begin with Green Mansions? Now, my backyard is a jungle, overrun with towering oaks, Spanish Moss, Lady Palms, Lobster Claw and Calla Lilies. My "jungle" is teeming with birds, squirrels and the choruses of cicadas. Am I Rima, absorbed in the wildlife around me? I hope so.

I discovered the Little House on The Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read them, tenderly and lovingly, becoming part of the family. I became was enraptured by the prairies and the trials of families coming to claim their 'promised land.' Eventually, I graduated to My Antonia, by Willa Cather, adding to my education of the hardships and romance of the American prairie. These authors most likely contributed to my sense of adventure and love of history when my husband and I followed our own Oregon trail, driving cross-country from Florida to Oregon and back again fifteen times. We discovered old roads and new ones, traveling in the footsteps of  Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather.

I also love the macabre, perhaps from The Sin Eaters, by Megan Cibisi. The Sin Eaters is the story of a young girl scorned by her community, until they needed her. She was  a fourteen-year old child punished for stealing bread. Her sentence for the theft was to become a sin-eater, part of a necessary funeral ritual. A sin eater must consume a meal set upon the grave of a newly departed, thus eating their "sins." Could this strange book have led me to a love of cemeteries and my favorite hobby of gravestone rubbing?  

Author’s Note: “Obviously, and thankfully, in the fifties no one, not my mother nor the librarian,  censored what I was reading.” 

I have decided to test my hypothesis on friends. We bibliophiles tend to flock together, birds of a feather. There is nothing a friend loves more than to recommend a book, sharing her or his love of a story or author with another. 

“We write stories, not because we have answers, but because we have questions.”

 Katherine Patterson

I began my research with my husband. As a child Tim was an avid lover of Sci-Fi. His earliest

"This form of Space begins here." Tim Gibbons 2025

recalled book was the 1959 Anthology of Sci-Fi. He moved on to Have Spacesuit will Travel, by Robert Heinlein. He gobbled up comic books. True Facts in Science was a favorite. There couldn’t be more proof than my beloved’s trajectory from Sci-Fi books and comics to his love of all things scientific and historic. Science Fiction remains a favorite in his life and art as well as the Aztec culture. The mystery and influence of that culture, gleaned from his earliest reading, now fills his drawings with Aztec images.

“Reading is like breathing in, and writing is like breathing out.” Pam Allyn

I researched my hypothesis with other writers. Cathy fell in love with the book All The President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It sparked her interest in becoming a journalist. Now, in beautiful poetic and descriptive prose Cathy has become her family’s journalist. She is their researcher and historian, documenting her family’s long history from Spain to Ybor City. 

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” Jorge Luis Borges

Jessica, a writer of Science Fiction and history, loved Battlestar Galactica early in her reading voyage. Michelle, who writes tales of “fantasy, the magical, abnormal and things beyond the ordinary,” remembers her fascination as a child with Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are.

Books build not only lives, but friendships. We learn a lot about a person through their favorite authors and books.  Jean and I met in 1991. I was lonely and in need of a girlfriend. I had left behind all my “besties” in Vermont and California. I will never forget my first meeting with Jean when she shared her love of  books with me. I was amazed, a cool, glamorous lady and a booklover? We are fast friends to this day, often sharing piles of books which keep us reading for months. 

I put my hypothesis before you, faithful readers. Explore this experiment on your own. Can you trace books from your childhood which shaped who you became as an adult? I’d love to hear of your own experiences to test my hypothesis further. Are we what we read?  I welcome any answers or insights of your own!

“A book is like a garden, carried in the pocket.” Proverb, unknown origin