collecting and curating memories on my bookshelves
In her latest column on tordotcom, Molly Templeton quoted Leigh Bardugo: “I think any time you can remember where you were when you read a book for the first time (Dune—tiny motel room on a miserable family trip, A Swiftly Tilting Planet on the white shag carpet in my grandparents’ back room) that means something.” She went on to write about how certain books and times are just so intertwined, and will remain in your memory always, and how these are the books that might truly matter (to you, the reader) in the end.
I’ve done my fair share of reading “aesthetically” - bringing the right book to the right cafe with the right cup of tea/coffee; sprawling on my yellow (GOAT HOUSE!) sofa on a perfectly sunny (or rainy) afternoon with a book I’m completely absorbed in, with the right music on; under the shade of a tree on a patch of grass by the beach, a cozy book on my lap and the sounds of waves carrying me gently into the story.
But - yeah, Bardugo and Templeton got it right. It really isn’t a choice you can make, the books and places that make themselves matter. Because these are the books I remember so clearly the times and place when I first read them:
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, late at night, classic under the covers with a flashlight, except this wasn’t one of those sweet movie moments where if a parent discovered the scene they would smile and leave them alone - as absorbed as I was in the book my heart was also pounding with anxiety, because getting caught meant getting screamed at, maybe getting thrown out of the house for the night again. Wishing so very fervently to disappear into the book the way Bastian Balthazar Bux did. And slipping away at 4am in the morning, when I finished reading, to rush to my then-best friend’s house to return her book in her mailbox, and maybe to run away.
The Wind in the Willow by Kenneth Grahame. School holidays were always both the best and worst days, because my cousins and aunts weren’t as subtle about talking about me “behind my back” the way classmates and teachers were, and I know everyone’s always watching out for a “tantrum” (really a meltdown) and trying to avoid it by keeping me at the very margins of inclusion. I didn’t know anything about self-regulation (I would not learn about autism until decades in the future) but I did know the things that made things a little easier.
I squeezed into the small space under the bed in our family room to sleep - the floor was hard and dusty and I’m always hot and sweaty, we didn’t have AC, but it was the only place I could actually fall asleep at night. When I was about 8/9yo and could no longer squeeze into that space, I snuck into the tiny store room and rearranged old boxes to make a space I could curl up in. I remember so clearly how I was sweating so much in the middle of the day, in that small fan-less, AC-less room full of boxes and plastic bags full of things no one wanted or needed (hey, they’re just like me), fully transported into Toad Hall, that house at the edge of River Bank.
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, at 10/11yo. I kept misremembering it as The Hobbit when I talk about it, but I really wouldn’t read The Hobbit until much later when my friend Kumaran would lend me his copy. I don’t know if reading LotR so young was the right thing to do, because I don’t have the energy to reread such a dense book now, but I definitely did not have the capacity to appreciate it the way I would now, back then. Either way, I can’t turn back time and un-read it, and I still loved it, even if I might never know all the nuances of this book first-hand - instead learning things via essays, academic papers and discussions.
Anyway. Back then, for a couple of years at least, I was a novelty. I had a novelty, in an aunt (my mother’s cousin) and uncle (my father’s brother) who recently got married, and had no children. I was a young “girl” that they could practice parenting skills on, and they were the first people that treated me the way parents treated their kids in books.
Once a week, after school, my aunt would actually pick me up, on time and not as an afterthought, and take me to their apartment. I would be allowed to just do my own thing while she marked students’ papers and did other work around the house before my uncle finished work and then we would all go out for dinner, the sort where we would have actual conversations instead of them not noticing I exist, before they sent me home. They didn’t have kids’ books, and hardly any fiction at all, and no TV (this was a time before Astro anyway), but it didn’t deter me. I flipped through my uncle’s psychology texts (some of them are still in my parents’ house in Melaka now because I just ended up taking them) and economics texts (these, I abandoned very quickly), and then, one week, I found a Lord of the Rings omnibus tucked in a corner.
I was so absorbed I took it to dinner, and my uncle said I could take it back home with me, which I did (and I got scolded for but it was worth it). I didn’t understand half the words I was reading, and didn’t understand why there would be anthropological or historical lectures in the middle of a story, but I loved it all anyway, and it was all because I quickly imprinted on Frodo. My aunt and uncle would have their first kid in the next year or so, and I went from pretend child to babysitter, and eventually, in the few years after, just another nibling among three dozen or so, and if it wasn’t for Lord of the Rings, I think I probably would not have remembered the feel of being curled up on their makeshift couch, their small, spare first apartment, and the sweetness of a Swensen’s ice cream parfait after dinner.
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, another book read late at night/early in the morning, but this time I no longer needed to try to hide. I was 14 or 15 (all those years blurred together for me, I was so burned out from masking), and most of the time they (my parents) forgot I existed, which was really the best thing for everyone involved. I would have been plugged to my secondhand walkman listening to a mixed tape while reading and looking out the window thinking about the black trees I couldn’t see that I know are outside. I remember reading the part where Polly finds herself alone in the city with no parent that would claim her and admiring her bravery, because I would’ve had a meltdown rather than find my nonexistent Tom, but then again my no-nonsense grandmother would have just sent me back to my mother who would be displeased to remember me, and then I would get screamed at, so maybe if I was in that situation I would just stay lost.
I remember trying to be quiet so as to not wake my sister as I read, which was hard, because I was on the top bunk and our beds creaked, and I remember having a pile of things next to/underneath my pillow (walkman and a small stack of cassettes, two or three books, a notebook and a few pencils/pens, one or two comforting items), a habit I still have now even though I’m no longer using a bunk bed.
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. And Girl Goddess #9 by Francesca Lia Block. To be honest, my memory of reading these book are not quite as clear, but I put that to the fact that the books themselves are somewhat fragmented, and the fact that with Kitchen it was my first time reading a book translated from Japanese, with all that entails (the different ways the narrative was structured, the flow of the story, and so on). And Girl Goddess #9 was my first encounter with punk, and magical realism, and unapologetic queerness. Well, Kitchen, too, had unapologetic queerness, but it was subtler, and I was not in the frame of mind to appreciate subtlety back then.
I remember being 14 or 15 and how it felt, spending all those hours (it’s a small book, but I spent so many hours on it) waiting by the side of the road for someone to deign to remember to pick me up from school. I remember how it felt to have my entire brain and sense of self being slowly picked apart and put back together just ever so slightly off. I read these two books very closely together, and in the same place/situation, and feeling mostly the same - a strange sense of wonder and isolation mixed with the knowledge that it’s quite possible that one day someone might entirely forget me, and a prickling of hope and optimism in the idea of found family. (Spoiler: Didn’t happen.)
Because I lost about 8 years, give or take, to extreme autistic burnout, I don’t really have any clear memories of that time. I probably read good books, and I know the events that occurred in my life, but I don’t have any actual lived memories of these books/events. So let’s skip these years to…
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. I want to say that this was another moment of reading that altered the way I thought, but I’m not sure if it’s really true. I was working part-time while hazily taking weekend classes, chugging along and picking back up what’s left of my life post-shutdown. I don’t know how old I was; from this moment onwards I always remember my age wrongly because my brain keeps trying to put things into the spots when I was in shutdown (it’d be like, “it’s impossible that you have ZERO memories of that year! Here take this year’s memory and shove it in there since there’s so much blank space!”). But I do remember that I was still hazy, and most days I don’t remember much, and I had the blandest job doing the most routine shit, and it… kind of helped?
Reading Murakami while sitting by the bike stands waiting to go in to work slowly helped my brain to… brain, again. For the first time in YEARS, I found myself impressed by clever turns of phrases, and enjoying the rhythm of (Murakami’s) language. Maybe it helped that Toru Okada was also in kind of a brain fog and was slowly working his way out of it. I remember sitting on the steel rests where you chain your bicycles to, the pain of touching steel (it’s one of the textures I absolutely hate) keeping me grounded in the here and now while I was swept away in a weird fantasy version of Tokyo.
And of course, I would never forget the bus ride from Singapore during which I swallowed Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief and The Queen of Attolia whole. Goodbyes are always so profoundly sad to me, even when you’re just waving at a friend going to a different direction that you might meet up with again the next week. And going home from Singapore, that’s a lot of goodbyes to the small humans I love, and to some of the rare “adults” in my life that I actually admire. But instead of dwelling on those feelings as I often did, that bus ride I was in Sounis, then Attolia, then Eddis, and back again.
Having the memory of a book be completely entrenched in the moment you read it is not the only kind of unforgettable reading experience, and not the only good reading experience, but it’s certainly something. These days, I’m inching my way towards burnout again, and I’m often too tired to appreciate the times and places I read, if I’m reading at all. I did start and finish two perfect (for me specifically, or for the space in my mind that I needed to fill at the exact time I was reading them) books since the last newsletter came out, but I read them in fits and starts, binging in the bus and train, and in stolen lunch hours. I’m reading a third book now, but I think the space that I needed filled is mostly okay now, and I’m taking a longer time reading, while letting my mind open up new spaces for new kinds of reads.
Two newsletters in a row, just when I was wondering if I should at least try for once a month! Anyway, stay safe and drink lots of water <33