I have a confession to make: I am finding it difficult to read children's books. this is hard for me to admit, being a children's librarian; it's my job. If you look closely at my signature in Gmail, you will see I only have children's books listed as things I am reading and listening to. While that is not entirely untrue, it's not entirely true either. I started those books weeks ago, but I haven't made it much past the first few chapters. Realistic and historical fiction just doesn't hold the draw it typically has for me. I'm not interested in the struggles of made up characters in the present or past. Instead, I find myself picking up narrative non-fiction.
The other thing I find disheartening is my inability to actually focus on and read a print book. I find myself reaching for my computer every couple of minutes to look something up or to add one more thing to a class I am working on. I have even resorted to stashing all of my devices away and setting a timer to force myself to concentrate and read, but it hasn't really worked.
I couldn't put my finger on why I could easily get lost in a book about the dire effects of climate change while I couldn't read or listen to much about the spread of Covid-19. However, as I read, I drew parallels between our lack of preparedness for climate change and the onset of the coronavirus. What drew me most to the narrative, besides the beautiful language, were the stories of communities that came together to respond to the flooding of their homes in ways that preserved their tight social communities and allowed the land to return to its natural role of protecting our coast.
More recently, I watched the Netflix series, Unorthodox and that led me to download the audio
book of the memoir by Deborah Feldman that is the basis for the series. I found the narrative transfixing as she described her early experiences in her Hasidic Jewish community and then her disillusionment with it once she got married. She discovered that married life did not provide the opportunities for freedom that she once imagined. She secretly signed up for writing classes at Sarah Lawrence where she began to see herself as a writer and young woman with aspirations of her own. This led her to carefully extricate herself and her young son from the community.
You may wonder, as I did, why I have been drawn to such tragedies. In writing and thinking about this post, I discovered the thread that ties these books together. It is this: they are all stories of real people overcoming devastating traumas in realistic, ugly and sometimes magnificent ways. Perhaps these books, for me, have provided a personal bibliotherapy. In each book, I see regular people who lived through extraordinary circumstances and came out the other side stronger and more connected to the communities around them. These stories provide the hope I crave in these scary and uncertain times.