~a column by Colleen O’Brien
No matter how good some books are, I know I’ll never want to read them again. But now and then a book comes along that warrants repeated readings. Three of my favorites I have read three times. They are all journal-entry or correspondence stories centered around a war that altered the entire world.
One of the favorites is Twentieth Century Journey by William L. Shirer, a two-volume tome about Germany from the early 1920s through 1941 when America entered WWII.
Another is Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, a small epistolary memoir relating the buying of hard-to-find books from a London antiquarian after WWII.
My favorite is the novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece Annie Barrows, about an island in the English Channel occupied by the Germans during WWII.
Over the years, I’ve learned about myself through these books, the sign of a good writer and probably why I return to them again and again. I also have learned that I gravitate to them when I am troubled or bereft. I believe this part of the rereading has to do with each book’s ability to make me feel I am listening to an old friend.
The best part, especially for a person like me who bristles at advice, is that these books are constantly slipping in advice and wisdom so subtly I am unaware I’m being taught something I need to know. Reading them, I feel privileged, picked out as a good friend, soothed during a lonesome time, bettered despite myself.
Right now, I’m reading the Potato Peel book again, underling thoughts I apparently did not think worthy of pointing out the first two times I read it. The ones I highlighted this time have to do with time in the way another writer, Faulkner, talked about it: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The Guernsey literary Society during WWII had these things to say that are pertinent today:
- “We started out hopeful…. But it stretched on and on…. Everyone was bleak from wondering if it would ever end.
- “My worries travel about my head on their well-worn path.”
- “Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of – hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate.
- “The mind will make friends of anything….”
And,
- “…love of art – be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music – enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.”
