Copyright ©2003 by Nancy Pearl. Reprinted from Book Lust by Nancy Pearl with permission of Sasquatch Books.

I love to read. And while I might not absolutely agree with the Anglo-American man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith, who said, “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading,” I come awfully close to subscribing to his sentiment. In fact, back in the days when I did such things, I needlepointed the quotation onto a piece of canvas. I’ve never gotten around to framing it or turning it into a pillow. Too many books, and life, had my attention, I guess.

Reading has always brought me pure joy. I read to encounter new worlds and new ways of looking at our own world. I read to enlarge my horizons, to gain wisdom, to experience beauty, to understand myself better, and for the pure wonderment of it all. I read and marvel over how writers use language in ways I never thought of. I read for company, and for escape. Because I am incurably interested in the lives of other people, both friends and strangers, I read to meet myriad folks and enter their lives—for me, a way of vanquishing the “otherness” we all experience.

I grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Detroit in a family of readers, although my father only went to school through the sixth grade and didn’t get his GED until he was seventy. My mother, a highly educated woman, was a disastrous combination of fury and depression. She read poetry (especially those depressed poets like A. E. Housman and Philip Larkin) and fiction. (She’s the only person I know of who loved books of fantasy and science fiction with the same degree of intensity.) Mine was a family that today would be labeled dysfunctional. All I knew then was that I was deeply and fatally unhappy.

It was painful to live in our house, and consequently I spent most of my childhood and early adolescence at the public library. The librarians at the Parkman Branch Library found me books that revealed worlds beyond what I saw and experienced every day. Although I remember very few specific events in my childhood, I have vivid memories of hundreds of books I read and loved during those years. Sometimes I can’t quite come up with the plot, or the names of characters, but I do remember how I was transported when I read them.

 I’m talking about books like The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron; Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse; Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet; Red Planet; and The Star Beast; Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field; Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis; The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien; Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays; The Sea is Blue by Marie Lawson; Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats and Ginger Pye; the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace; the books about Beany Malone by Lenora Mattingly Weber; the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome; Evelyn Sibley Lampman’s Crazy Creek; Wait for Marcy by Rosamund du Jardin; Green Eyes by Jean Nielsen; The Casket and the Sword by Norman Dale; David Severn’s Dream Gold; Betty Cavanna’s young adult novels, especially Going on Sixteen; Minnow on the Say by Philippa Pearce; and John R. Tunis’s The Kid from Tomkinsville, among many others. (Just listing them here makes me want to track down the ones I don’t own and reread them.)

It’s not too much of an exaggeration—if it’s one at all—to say that reading saved my life.

By the time I was ten years old, I knew I wanted to become a children’s librarian, just like Miss Long and Miss Whitehead, the two main influences on my reading life. And although for a few moments in college I was tempted to go to MIT to study transformational grammar with Noam Chomsky, I’ve never since wavered in my belief that being a librarian is one of the best, and noblest, careers that anyone could have.

To paraphrase Robert Frost (from “Two Tramps in Mud Time”), my love and my work are one—and I feel extremely lucky to be able to say so. I’ve been fortunate to work in three great library systems—Detroit Public Library, Tulsa City-County Library, and Seattle Public Library—and a wonderful independent bookstore, Yorktown Alley, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which have allowed me to grow as a reader and to share my knowledge and love with other readers. I’m also grateful that I have been given the opportunity to review books weekly on two public radio stations: KWGS in Tulsa, and KUOW in Seattle.

Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led. How could I have predicted that reading Richard Bausch’s Hello to the Cannibals would send me on a reading jag about Victorian lady travelers? Or that Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children would lead me to Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre and open up the world of India to me?

Each time I begin a new book (and any book I haven’t read before is a “new” book), there’s the very real chance that this is a book that I will fall in love with. Some books let me know from the very first sentence that I am in great hands, that this reading experience will offer me pure pleasure. When I began Pete Dexter’s The Paperboy, Ward Just’s A Dangerous Friend, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, I had no doubt that I would fall in love with them. And I did.

One of my strongest-held beliefs is that no one should ever finish a book that they’re not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed the book is. Believe me, nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read. I live by what I call “the rule of fifty,” which acknowledges that time is short and the world of books is immense. If you’re fifty years old or younger, give every book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding. Keep in mind that your mood has a lot to do with whether or not you will like a book. I always leave open the option of going back to a book that I haven’t liked (especially if someone I respect has recommended it to me) sometime later. I’ve begun many books, put them down unfinished, then returned a month or two, or years, later and ended up loving them. This happened with Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers, John Crowley’s Little, Big, and Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal.

Book Lust grew out of my more than thirty years of work as a professional reader and book reviewer, and my ongoing experiences of talking to people all over the world about the books they most love. In many ways this was an easy book to write, because I’ve read and enjoyed so many books that I’ve wanted to tell other people about. The difficulty arose because the more lists of books I made, the more books I remembered that I wanted to include. Having to decide, once and for all, which books belonged here was agony. (Even as I write this introduction, other titles spring to mind—wonderful books that I hate to leave out.)

You will notice that many of the books I recommend are out of print. If you have a hankering to read them—and I hope you do—check at your local library, which, even if it doesn’t own the book, will likely be able to borrow it from another library for you. Or take advantage of the power of the Internet in locating out-of-print books. (One result of working on Book Lust is that I’ve spent a lot of time—not to mention money—purchasing books that I realized I just had to own.)

So get yourself settled in a comfortable chair, grab a pen and paper, and enjoy yourself as you read through this book. Incidentally, I’m sure you’ll be horrified about books I’ve left out or overlooked. I’d love to hear what books you think I should have included, or which books I could as easily have omitted, in your opinion. Sharing the books you’ve loved is one of the great pleasures in reading. You can reach me by email at nancy.pearl@spl.org.

One of the most wonderful paragraphs about the joys of reading is in “How Should One Read a Book?,” an essay in Virginia Woolf’s collection The Second Common Reader. She writes:

I have sometimes dreamt . . . that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

It’s an honor to share some of my favorite books with you. I hope some of them will become your favorites, too. Let me know.