Discussion Time! Is your memory of certain books enhanced by the memory of where you were when you read them? Do you remember the experience as well as the book?
Sarah: Absolutely yes. I remember reading a Julie Anne Long historical (A Notorious Countess Confesses – I even remember the TITLE which is a rare thing indeed) on a long haul flight to Australia. I was wrapped entirely in a blanket so the light from my ereader wouldn’t bother anyone, so I was cocooned with just me, my Kindle, and my noise-cancelling headphones.
I remember the experience as being so soothing and deeply enjoyable. I don’t sleep well sitting up so I rarely sleep on airplanes, but reading that book was a lovely few hours, and I wasn’t entirely bleary and drunk-tired when I arrived.
I have lovely, almost quietly lush memories of reading The Thing About Love by Julie James because the weekend during which I read it, I had an uncommonly large amount of time to read, and so little standing in the way of my getting back to it that my recollection of the book and the story is one of extremely happy indulgence and eagerness. I read on the couch under blankets, and I read in bed, for several hours uninterrupted, and it was marvelous.
[book aside slug=”the-anatomists-wife”] I also read several of the Lady Darby mysteries very recently, which were recommended by so many of y’all, when I was in Japan over the new year. Not only was that a memorable trip in and of itself, but jet lag hit me pretty hard, so one morning at about 2am, I gave up sleeping and started reading.
Again, I was wrapped up in a warm duvet, everyone was asleep, and I was happily solving crimes and adventuring through the first few books of the series. I guess for me, being wrapped in blankets while I read in the dark is one element that deepens the memory of the book.
Amanda: As good as my memory is, I’d have to say no to this one. Sometimes I can remember that I read a book in a car or on a plane, but rarely do I remember more than that.
It could be that a lot of my reading spots don’t evoke a memorable sense of place. I’m either reading in bed or on public transportation, neither of which are too exciting. As for travel, I always pack books in the hopes of reading but I typically conk out on planes or my vacations don’t allow for a lot of reading down time.
CarrieS: Sometimes, yes. I have two examples. One is that my middle school was a miserable hell pit just like every other middle school and I was wretched just like everyone else BUT the school had a big tree and I would take books and climb it and hide up there.
I remember reading My Antonia in that tree and despite my analysis of the book changing with age I’ll always associate reading about resilient women while hiding in a tree to be a thing of great peace and comfort.
The other example is Jane Eyre. The book begins with the narrator, Jane, age ten, hiding behind some curtains in the window seat at her awful aunt’s house and reading a book. The language in the book is just slightly beyond her, but she is attracted by the illustrations and can follow the book well enough to be fascinated by the imagery.
As it happens, when I was ten, I was babysat by my not-at-all-awful aunt. I liked to hide behind a chair by the window curtains and read her books. That is how I found the 1943 Random House edition of Jane Eyre. The language was just slightly beyond me, but I could follow it well enough to be fascinated by the imagery and the story and I was attracted by the illustrations (by Fritz Eichenberg). This experience always made me feel that Jane and I were two “plain and small” girls who grew up together over many years of re-reading.
What about you? Is there a reading experience you’ve had wherein the place and time you read a book affected and influenced your memories of it? Which book, and where were you?
When I was nine or ten I found a copy of ‘A Christmas Carol’ whilst staying at my grandparents’ house – an inscription on the flyleaf revealed that it had been a Christmas present to my uncle in the late 50s. I started reading it in the living room (two armchairs pushed together to make a reading nook) and finished it in bed. My grandparents let me keep the book and I still have it. Whenever I open the book I time-travel back to that day, almost fifty years ago, and I even transfer Dickens’ description of Scrooge’s house in a courtyard – ‘one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again’- to my grandparents’ home, which was once a chauffeur or gardener’s lodge in the grounds of a mayor’s mansion.
And now I’ll have to sniff the pages to complete this nostalgia trip…
I had a favourite spot in my middle school library. I read so many books there because we actually had a weekly library period. One I distinctly remember reading there is Gone with the Wind. It was finished at the kitchen table because I couldn’t put it down.
My mother always used to include a book with my Christmas stocking to keep me occupied since my father often had to work on Christmas day. I read Anne of Green Gables, The Blue Castle, Little Women and Jane Eyre in bed on Christmas morning. All of these are on a shelf about five feet away from where I am sitting right now.
The other very distinct memory I have is of finishing The God Beneath the Sea, which is my all-time favourite book, while sitting on the balcony at some of my parents’ friends. It was a warm summer evening and I watched the sun set with chills running down my spine for about twenty minutes after I was done.
I only really associate one place with a book.
It was my 13th birthday, my family went away for the weekend, and I distinctly remember reading the 1st young wizards book and listening to nesian mystik while in bed at the place we were staying. Now that book and album are constantly tied to that memory in my head.
I have a highly ambivalent relationship with audio books. Often, I’ll start an audio book and, if it is good, about a third of the way in, I’ll get the ebook and gobble it up and return the audio book. However, because I typically only listen to audio books when involved in a long-term project like painting a barn, a house, a room, I do associate spaces with books. Two sides of my barn are imprinted with introduction to Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Komarr” and “A political campaign,” my kitchen ceiling is tied to Mariana Zapata’s “Rhythm, chord, and Malykhin,” the upstairs hall and back bedroom will forever be associated with her “Kulti.” The kitchen walls are associated with Meljean Brook’s “The Iron Duke,” and the entry way/staircase was made even a more terrifying task by listening to RF Kuang’s “The poppy wars.” As I walk through those spaces, bits and pieces of the book replay themselves for me. I think I read too quickly and too much in the same locations to make as strong associations with print or ebooks, except that I remember having a panic attack on a plane about 15 years ago while ready one of Kathy Reich’s “bone’s” books that involved a plane crash. Shudder.
I very much remember reading Dune in high school trigonometry class.
I think so, part of the reason I love the Harry Potter so much are the countless memories I have of them growing up. Like a lot of other people of my generation, the books aged as I did which is something truly special that would be hard to recreate for other generations.
A more recent memory is a couple years ago when I went to Cozumel, Mexico with my family. One of the biggest takeaways of that trip was reading on the beach and later exchanging romance novels with my grandmother.
I read My Antonia on a trip to Colorado when I was 12. Although we didn’t drive through Nebraska it was still an excellent backdrop for the book.
I read The Secret History by Donna Tartt on the plane back from my first term at Oxford to home in Missouri. It was perfect for my life at that time.
I read The Woman in White and The Historian at someone’s lake house.
Fascinating. I remember how books make me feel, but never where I am when I read them. Although the public library of my childhood was my favorite place in the world, I have no sense of connection beyond that.
One of my most powerful reading experiences was with Robert McLiam Wilson’s EUREKA STREET, set in 1990s Belfast. The book is often very funny. I remember turning to a new chapter and feeling a soundless whoosh of air that deafened me. Everything changed. I’ve never forgotten that feeling and I have no idea where I was.
Growing up my family used to have Christmas early and then go camping in Mexico at Bahia Kino near Hermosillo. The timing wasn’t great for me because my birthday is Dec 19, and it seemed like I was always spending it in the car driving, or spending the night at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a place I could probably appreciate now, but at that age, and in December was just really windy desert. We took a day and a half driving from San Diego County, (Cardiff-by-the-Sea) and one year we got The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I spent the drive down and probably most of that vacation immersed in Middle Earth, that peculiar place where there are only 4 female characters!
I have such a pitiful memory that I’m lucky to remember having read a book — if I’m lucky, I might even recall the names of a character or two. After I’ve reread it a few times, details might start to stick. I don’t recall where I read a book, but the odds are high that’s it was the loveseat or the bed!
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but I am addicted to audiobooks since my life allows me very little time to sit still and read. I’m a runner, so I love to listen to books while I run, and while I absorb books of all sorts, my default favorites are romance. So humorously, I often end up with spacial memories attached to particularly . . . hot passages in books, something I’m sure people living on those streets, etc., would find most disturbing! An added interesting benefit: I sometimes find myself at the top of a hill without even realizing I was straining when a passage gets steamy!
But on a completely different perspective of this topic: I was reading books during two episodes of labor (YES, the childbirth, kind!), and I while I remember each title and the experience of continually stopping and starting over and over, I was never able to return and finish either one!
Whenever I travel, the book(s) I read simply must be the environs to which I’m thrown into. (Sometimes traveling is not for fun when it is attached to family or work).
So yes, I read ‘Room with A View’ when on a very sunny & warm holiday in Tuscany – (Florence of course included) when traveling with my parents. I read ‘Thunder Falls’ when visiting my best friend on the Idaho/Montana borderland. I read ‘Wuthering Heights’ during one of the coldest winters ever in windy/stormy Yorkshire. Just 3 of over a thousand examples throughout my short lifetime thus far.
It’s interesting – I journal my experience and then read what authors of long ago write and get to compare with my own contemporary experience.
It never fails to go somewhere that is nature and wildlife bound – for you can feel like you are time traveling when you find out that the same wildlife and scenery still exists (it helps if it is a national/state park).
If it is a city, like reading Gigi or Breakfast at Tiffany’s – you can be quite shocked in the differences. Modern life still presides – that is why if I’m traveling to a big metropolis area, I tend to read something contemporary and compare the p.o.v.’s of the author that way.
I also relate with the other posts; I completely remember reading every book and where I read it – whether it was a dentist waiting room or cozy nook in a library, etc.
Great discussion! Thank you for bringing up good memories – and seeing the not so great memories as – “Well, at least I was able to read a book out of the experience!”
🙂
I don’t know if books are enhanced by memories of where I read them, but I do associate certain books with places. When I was a teenager, every summer my dad would pick my brother and me up from New York and drive us to California. I read many books in his car. I have a specific memory of finishing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in the back seat of his car. The ending of that book is still one of my favorites. The following summer, I slammed my copy of Order of the Phoenix closed after Sirius died—we were somewhere in Nebraska and my dad jerked the wheel because I scared him (oops).
I also remember protesting having to leave the apartment and go to the beach by reading The Chase by Brenda Joyce while everyone else went in the water. I hate the beach—sand gets everywhere and you inevitably forget to put sunscreen everywhere, so you get burnt in the worst places. This beach in particular was way too close to San Francisco and was cold and foggy (and yet I still got burnt).
I have very vivid memories of the circumstances in which I read some books. Julia’s story of reading “A Christmas Carol” at her grandparents’ reminded me that when I read the opening of the copy of “A Christmas Carol” that used to be my grandfather’s, I always visualize the carpet–a rust orange and olive green diamond pattern–of his finished basement, because I was lying on that carpet when I first read the book, age eleven. I started reading “Little House on the Prairie” at age seven, sitting in the balcony over the pool area of the local YMCA, while my brother had a swimming lesson in the pool below. Later that same day, I continued reading the book lying on the living room floor, while the sheer white curtains of the open dining room windows blew in the summer breeze. More recently, over the years I read many, many books in my local teashop, which closed a few months ago. If I revisit one of those books, I remember that’s where I read it. In fact, just last week I reread a book that I realized I read eight or nine years ago in the teashop. It’s bittersweet.
Having three younger brothers I would escape to the car in the driveway to read. I can remember the sound of the rain on the roof while reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. My mom would drop me off on Saturday morning at our public library and I recall their club chairs fit me perfectly. I’d walk the 3 miles home with my book bag, stopping for an Icee and a red licorice rope.
This happens to me much more with audiobooks than with hardcopy books. I listen while driving and while walking. Sometimes when I am walking without an audiobook I will find that the scenery gets parts of a particular books back in mind.
What is especially interesting/annoying is that is totally just related to the book. Not whether I enjoyed it or not. I remember being very disappointed by Notes on a Scandal, but whenever I walk a certain path to the nearby nature preserve I start thinking about that book.
Yes sometimes my memory of a book and where I read it are all tied up together. I read the first book of The Hunger Games trilogy on a beach vacation and remember sitting under a sun umbrella, turning to my husband (who had already read the books) and saying if Katniss ends up with Gale and not Peeta at the end of these books I am going to throw them all out the window of our house (if you can’t tell I am Team Peeta all the way).
On that same vacation in our hotel room I remember finishing Mistress in the Art of Death which I found horribly disturbing (CW for violence against children, Anti-Semitism from a portion of the characters in the book, and deaths by torture) and thinking I am on vacation and this is not what I thought I was signing up for with this book!
On a different beach vacation, I remember racing to finish Ready Player One as our day at the beach was coming to a close.
And I vividly remember reading Gone Girl on a cruise vacation and after finishing remember looking around like my brain had been turned upside down by the book. I was so engrossed in the story it was somewhat of a shock to look around and find myself on a cruise ship in our cabin.
So I guess the lesson is I remember a lot of what I read on vacation probably because the setting is so different, but at home I am either reading on our sofa or in bed, so those don’t stick out to me.
I remember the experience of listening to the audiobook The Hunger Games and reading the physical copy of the Mockingjay.
I don’t know what led me to download the audiobook from the library (no one I knew at the time had heard of it) I probably searched fiction – most popular – available now. My habit was to listen to audiobooks during my long runs. I was so into the book that I added miles on to keep listening.
This happened before Mockingjay came out. So I preordered Mockingjay and took the afternoon of release day off of work. But when I got home, I had a note from UPS, my delivery would require a signature. I was so mad! When I finally got my copy, I settled into read. I have the memory of being stretched out on the couch, around 3am and so exhausted, 3 chapters from the end. I so desperately wanted to know how it ended but I wasn’t retaining the words I was reading anymore.
I remember certain reading experiences more as holistic experiences.
I remember hiding from my family’s chaos when I was eight or ten, behind the Christmas tree in a living room chair inaccessible to adults, reading Black Beauty. (I still like to read behind or next to a Christmas tree.)
I remember rereading the entirety of Georgette Heyer in chronological order of publishing to get a feel for how her writing changed, while pregnant with my second child in our old apartment.
I remember reading the Harry Potter series, chapter by chapter, aloud to my sons in my favorite secondhand recliner, with one falling asleep on the couch beside me and the other in the good recliner on the opposite side.
And I remember rereading the entirety of the Bridgerton series during the days leading up to a critical medical procedure and while waiting for the results, in an old rocking chair next to the patio doors.
So I don’t think it’s so much a matter of the place influencing the book or vice versa, so much as tying the whole experience up in a particularly memorable event, good or bad.
Oh, yes! The first dirty book I read was “Peyton Place”, and I found it on the shelf in a family’s house where I was babysitting. I think I sped read through most of it in one evening. I still know exactly where the house is but I can’t remember the name of the family that lived there!
Most of my strongest memories are associated with books I read while traveling. I backpacked through Europe for months, and in some places English language books were hard to come by. A lot of the books I stumbled across were British Penguin editions, like “Goodbye To All That” by Robert Graves, which was unforgettable. It’s a crime and a travesty that this book is out of print in the U.S. and there is no Kindle edition. I remember being thrilled to find a really good bookstore in Dubrovnik, of all places, with a selection of Kurt Vonnegut books. This was surprising because back then it was still Yugoslavia, under President Tito, and I went on a mini buying binge. And I remember the small library at the kibbutz in Israel I worked on for a while, because I pretty much read my way through everything they had in English, including “The Sot-Weed Factor” by John Barth, which I would never, never have the attention span for nowadays.
Someone else has The God Beneath the Sea as one of their favourite books! (bounce!)
Leon Garfield and Ted Blishen? Totally amazing illos by Charles Keeping? Undeservedly out of print for years?
Probably a Brit–somehow I can’t imagine it stood up to flashier more “popularly appealing” books enough to export over the years, and the last time I saw either book (forgotten the other one’s name) was probably in my school library forty years ago. (Apparently it did get over to the US, with pretty-likely much worse illos. Nothing against the Yank illustrator whose work I don’t know, but Charles Keeping (instantly-memorable, mean, moody and magnificent) deserved his Kate Greenaway award as much as the authors deserved their award.)
If you read any of Ted Blishen’s many autobiographies, you may find hints that these astonishing works were a young men’s game: they happened to be friends and like each other’s work, they wrote together with fierce irrepressible exuberance, it never even occurred to them that it could be some of their best work, and create something rich and strange and entirely unlike their separate writings.
I don’t usually remember where I read something.
I remember how I got it, and the physical particularities of the edition I read.
In the late ’70s/early’80s I was to be found in the library of my secondary school picking up their backlist of Aidan Chambers’ “Topliners” imprint for teens — sublimely unaware that they were books for “reluctant readers”, not for people like me, and equally unaware of the politicking behind the scenes. Kaye Webb had added the older range “Peacocks” to her Puffins” line, intending it as a curated series to lead younger readers to adult books with a fairly definite “Reithian” “educate and entertain” brief. Working for her at the time, Chambers had asked to add some books that teens might want to pick up anyway. Rejected, he started the “Topliners” line at Macmillan: short, readable novels with action and a sense of humour. Books with covers designed to look like teen magazine covers, so that the intended audience might pick them up anyway. Books with interesting hooks in the blurb. Imagine the hero wasn’t a “pop singer” but a “pop whistler” (Birdy Jones series by E W Hildick: the humour comes from the hero being a sulky, dopey teenager who doesn’t really want to do anything very much). Imagine the antihero is a really unusual milkman, with really unusual tactics, interviewing boys for his round with competitive sports involving Note Reading or Dog Avoidance. Then there are the creepy/zany capers of Old Ireland Yard in Scare Power and The Lie Witnesses, with a sense of whimsy I loved, and a really odd time-travel/witchcraft piece called String of Time. I loved these as much as the more challenging things in the school library (Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter books, in the Gollancz yellow covers, and the Gollancz SF backlist). I don’t remember where I sat when I read them, but that was where I got them. I remember lots and lots of Gollancz yellow-covers, favouring Celia Fremlin for crime and quite a lot of people (including Ian Watson) for SF.
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising: hardcover, Nottingham library. Picture of the Walker as a tramp on the cover.
Ursula K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) The Farthest Shore. Grey cover, very stylised picture; dragon. Passionately awaited since i read the first book, q.v.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (really unfortunate cover; Ged doesn’t only look like an effete princeling from Havnor who’s never done a day’s work in his life instead of a goat-herder from Gont, but he’s noticeably blond and pale instead of the earth-brown he is in-text). Given to me since my Nana gave me money, and my parents gave me my favourite present ever, a bunch of books.
Joan Aiken’s The Cuckoo Tree. Aiken and Leon Garfield were the two writers who introduced me to historicals: I struggled very hard with Dickens’ style at the time, and these writers and a few others wrote modern prose, yet put some archaisms in the dialogue for “flavour” so I gradually got used to different styles. Also in bundle of books from my Nan.
I was given a bunch of SF, I think Sidgwick & Jackson, later on. Did not in general impress me as much as the Gollancz line, but introduced me to Octavia Butler’s chilling immortal sociopath Doro (Mind of my Mind).
I remember being introduced to a book, but not specifically reading it, the latter happening as soon as possible after the former.
Books are marked by place in my memory when either the event or the book were impactful to me.
In terms of significant books:
When I read Harry Potter 7, I was 7, and in the second grade, and I very distinctly recall getting called out in class for reading under my desk.
I read Inheritance, the last book in the Eragon series by Christopher Paolini, on the bathroom floor because it was the only place in the house that had a door I could lock for privacy.
For events:
I will always associate my first Nora Roberts with the time my sister was accidentally abandoned at an Indiana highway rest station.
Dragon’s Blood, by Thea Harrison, brings to mind wandering my a local river and then hiding in the basement of my church instead of going to mass.
I only have a few memories of where I read certain books, but they are very strong.
I read “The Red Riddle” by Scott Corbett at home in California. When I finished it, scared out of my wits, I realized that I was alone in the house. It was a sunny afternoon, so it wasn’t even dark, but something about being all alone in a silent house after reading a ghost story freaked me out. I had to rush outside to calm down. I was around nine years old.
The second strong memory is of reading “The Shining” at a family reunion in Idaho when I was 13 or 14. I can still see the distinctly yellow cover in my mind’s eye with the screaming face incorporated into the text making up the title. I scares myself reading the book and also retold the story in some form to my youngest brother, scaring him to the point that my mom had to ask me to stop!
Writing this, I just realized these were both horror books. I think what made these memories stick was how the writing was so scary that even looking away from the book at the ordinary world didn’t stop the fear. I didn’t know the written word could do that.
Like @KatieC I sometimes remember books I read in memorable locations but for me, it only sticks if I read multiple books in a series. I read Crazy Rich Asians and both sequels on a beach vacation, and I have strong memories of my favorite reading spots in the hotel.
I read the first 4 Harry Potter books while stuck as a third wheel on a looong trip in the Pacific NW with a squabbling married couple. I have vivid memories of pine trees, and the cabin reading nook I hid away in.
This topic brought back a lot of memories.
I read all the the Anne of Green Gables books in my bedroom by the light shining in from the street lamp outside into the wee hours of the morning (boy that started a bad habit ).
I read Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series in one rainy summer day sitting in my friends basment on a chair that fit me perfectly but was covered in an awful 60/70s fabric. I miss that chair.
While in college I was dealing with some homesickness one weekend and read Withering Hights and Jane Eyre in the comfy chairs on the top floor of of the library. I read/studied a lot in those chairs.
Recently I was so entranced with Iona Andrews last Kate Daniels book that I read it in one sitting on my porch while it was raining.
I started reading GWTW at my grandma’s house and she let me take it home to finish it. This meant I would have it for months. It was a great deal of trust she was giving me, especially since it was her favorite book and she read it each winter.
I have vivid memories of reading Heidi in the car, waiting for my Mom to drive me home from school when I was about 10. Of reading Pride and Prejudice on a hot Summer day, under the air conditioning in one of my families giant velvet armchairs (I adored them). I can remember where and when I read each and every book in my collection – they feel like placemarkers in my life and take me back to exactly how I felt and what the world looked like to me at that point in time.
I seem to associate a place more with books I read as a child/teen more than as an adult: The Hobbit in a car, several Agatha Christies during a hospital stay for surgery in the 3rd grade, The Chronicles of Narnia books in the comfy armchair in my first grownup bedroom (and 50-odd years later, I still have the same furniture).
The only vivid book/place association as an adult that springs to mind was trying to read the Harry Potter book my sweet nephew generously shared with me while I was confined to the most uncomfortable bed in the most uncomfortable room in my parents’ house while I was recovering from a serious car accident. My brain wouldn’t concentrate and I was in a lot of pain. It put me off Harry Potter for years. (And I still don’t get the hype.)
For most adult reading, tho, I’m either like @Kareni and have a hard time even remembering that I read something (thank goodness for my GR log/notes) or I’m like @EC Spurlock and associate them more with life events. Or music. I’ll often remember music I was listening to during or around the time I was reading something.
That said, I listen to a lot of audio books in the car so those are pretty easy to remember, especially if I’ve had to pull over or turn it off for an emotionally difficult scene. No crying and driving!
The first time I read A Wrinkle in Time at age 10, I was in the middle of the book (Charles Wallace and the man with red eyes and the recovery of Mr. Dr. Murry) as I walked the quarter-mile between my bus stop and my house, and I didn’t look up from the pages the entire time. I remember the sun on the pages, absently stepping to the curb every time I heard a car coming, and being actively annoyed when I got home because I was going to have to stop reading and go be sociable with my family, when all I wanted to do was find out how Meg got out of this.
The first time I read Dragonflight at age 12, I was sitting in the loud and noisy cafeteria of my middle school, waiting to be released to homeroom. I read Lessa’s Impression of Ramoth over and over and over, all the cacophony of middle school fading out around me, and thinking “Oh, here’s where I’m meant to be. I just need to get to Pern and find my dragon.” Pern got me through the hell that was middle school.
I love reading these!
I forgot to mention that when I was in Oxford, I was a terrible student, I was drunk most of the time, I didn’t appreciate the opportunity I was given, but I read The Waves by Virginia Woolf during the spring term and it was one of the most beautiful and transformative reading experiences of my life, second only to Wuthering Heights when I was 13.
I vividly remember reading An Affair Before Christmas by Eloisa James during the last few days of my deployment in Iraq. The weather was unimaginably hot and I was stressed, anxious, tired, and ready to come home. I read this book in bits and pieces between packing and loading to come back to the US. It was exactly what I needed at the time and I can still remember how good it felt to read something about Christmas and cold weather when I was constantly covered in sweat and sand.
I feel pretentious writing this, but we were visiting my aunt in the Paris suburbs during the height of The Da Vinci Code craze. After blazing through my grandmother’s copy during out first couple days, she and I made it a point to visit as many places mentioned in the book as possible. As such, I have fonder memories of that book than it probably warrants.
I tend to get associative flashes of books I’ve read when it was an unusual location for me to be reading.
The Count of Monte Cristo almost always flashes through my mind when I stand in the corner of elevators, something I generally try to avoid, but I was so engrossed the first time I read it that I specifically chose the corner of an empty elevator as it seemed the best spot to continue reading and not be interrupted as the elevator filled.
Standing in line at the post office makes me think of The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard, my absolute favorite 19th century American novel.
Both of these books would make my top 10 desert island keeper list so it makes sense that the first time I read them I couldn’t put them down.
Although I have only been consuming audiobooks for the last five years I have very vivid memories of the books I was listening to each year when I prep the beds and plant my tomatoes, all 22 plants, which I start from seed in January. Plant out day always feels like a holiday to me and I was amused this year to realize how unconsidered and random the books had been for such an important occasion:
Grimspace by Ann Aguirre,
Lady Be Good by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Which Witch Is Which?: The Witches of Port Townsend, Book 1
Don’t Tempt Me by Loretta Chase
Evernight by Kristen Callihan
The Westing Game by Ellen Rankin
I first read Black Beauty while in the car on a vacation trip. My parents bought me the book at a dime store during a trip to the nearest town because I had read all the books I brought with me. I was so excited to get a new book, I started reading in the car and became really carsick. To this day, I can’t read anything while riding in a car; even maps or glancing at my email can make me queasy.
I have a horrible book memory. Generally, I only remember if it is an unusual location. And then I think it is more that I remember the location or circumstance and as an aside “oh, I was also reading this book.” Rather than I read this book in this instance. But I do remember two specifically for the books. Both were the first in a series that was recommended by a friend. I have no idea why those stick out in my head.
Actually, I do remember very specifically Marley and Me, because I was on a plane to visit a friend who had lent it to me and I left it in the seat back pocket, gah.