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How to Read a Book is the newest work of fiction by Maine author Monica Wood. Monica is the author of When We Were the Kennedys and The One in a Million Boy amongst many others. Prior to this book, I had not read much from Monica Wood, which is surprising considering we both call the beautiful state of Maine home and both love a well-told tale. Also, I once spent a Saturday at Southern Maine Community College with our Cub Scout Troop learning about 3D printing, only to discover after the fact that I had spent the day with Monica’s husband. I have not read her more famous works, I have only read and enjoyed Any Bitter Thing. I am sensing now that Monica’s gift lies in the beautiful creation of complex characters who feel so real in their good qualities and bad. She is a weaver of characters in the most delightful sense.
How to Read a Book is an unexpected tale of forgiveness, humanity, and how each of our lives can begin and end many times over in the course of our lifetimes.
Even the least eventful life holds an avalanche of stories.
The main narrative follows the story of three people whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways. Harriet Larson is a retired English teacher who runs the book club at the local women’s prison. She has lost her parents and started again, lost a husband and started again, and is now facing an empty nest for the second time. Violet Powell was less than 20 when she killed a local kindergarten teacher in a drunk-driving accident. She was one of 12 voices in Harriet’s book club, and after twenty-two months in prison, she is being released early for good behavior—set free to a world that she doesn’t know and abandoned by the only family she does. Frank Daigle is a retired machinist, now a handyman at the local bookstore. Frank has not yet fully processed his emotions and the complicated facts surrounding his marriage and its end, his marriage to the woman Violet killed. Thrown together one day at a bookstore, but drawn to each other before then, the changing relationships between these three characters are simply stunning.
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There are three things that make this book really stand out from the crowd for me, the first being the characters created. Fom our three main characters to the possessive niece, the prison warden, the Russian parrot man, and the sister who lets go, these characters are fleshed out so well that, even though many of them occupy the sidelines, their worlds feel complete. I was deeply touched by this book, and I feel these characters will linger with me for some time. Most ardently I was struck by the different shades of forgiveness the characters chose to show each other or withhold from each other, by the mercy they lent each other or zealously guarded. There’s irony in Frank’s daughter singing “Depth of mercy can there be, Mercy still reserved for me” whilst withholding mercy from everyone around her. This theme of when to forgive yourself and others, and when not to, runs deeply through every story touched upon in this book, even down to the last novel studied by the book club, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which deals with how to let go of life’s emotional possessions after death.
The precious moments of beautiful forgiveness shown by certain characters are tempered by their other very human experiences and responses: guilt, betrayal, drunk driving, lust. These are imperfect people doing the best they can, and in Wood’s words, their imperfections are recreated in a believable yet inspiring way. You can feel sorry or mad at the character, whilst they are also helping you process an emotion you have felt yourself. It made me cry in all the expected moments but then also in the strangest ways. Wood uses every part of each character’s emotional makeup, warts and all, capturing so many facets of the actual human experience.
Aside from how wonderful the characters and storytelling are, the sense of place is the second thing that really stands out to me. The book is a beautiful homage to a city close to my own heart. It is set in Portland, Maine, the place where I first lived in the US. This is the city in which I met my husband, where I had all three of my babies, and hosts several of my favorite bookstores, one of which forms the inspiration for the bookstore in this book. Portland is a big city in Maine terms, but it is a blip compared to most US cities. We have a handful of Starbucks, one recently closed down, but we have dozens of independent coffee places. We have no skyscrapers, but we have a working waterfront adjacent to cobbled streets. The people of Portland are kind and quirky and unexpected, very much in the way Wood portrays them in this book.
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Finally, the third piece of the puzzle that cements this book on my shelves: it is a book about the love of books and the people who read them.
Every week they begin with an invocation: I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.
I love a book about books, about bookstores, about people who love books. While this novel certainly covers all of these things and has added several titles to my own TBR pile, it is something more. It touches on how a person “should” approach a book. How twelve different women can approach the same book from twelve different places, and how each finds common ground. How a reader can be found in a bookstore… or in a prison. One of the prisoners gives voice to a thought that sticks with Harriet, or “Bookie” as they call her, and it is one that has also been niggling at me for some time. I now have words to begin processing how I have been feeling:
They were stil plodding through the final pages, Brittie and Jacynta pronouncing Franny and Zooey spoiled rotten, Dawna-Lynn deciding that Franny had a breakdown only because she could afford one. These left-field opinions pleased and surprised her: Harriet had never thought of existential crisis as a luxury, but now she did.
Harriet only became an English teacher after going back to school in her forties. A good English teacher can pave the way but does not have to start early. A good friend can recommend a book by love or accident. A good bookseller who shares your passion is a valuable person to know. Many of the things that Monica Wood says about reading I found myself nodding along with. However, nothing can beat the way she describes the prison book club and how the prisoners delight in their books. It creates such a simple joy, one that I feel myself on a daily basis.
Every Friday, two hours, books, books, books. We get to keep them after we’re done, and that’s no small thing, a stack of triumphs under the bed.
My stacks are all over the house, not under the bed, and while half of them are triumphs, half of them are promises to myself, potential friends and loves, and stories to come. And that’s no small thing.
Published on May 7, 2024, by Mariner Books, I devoured this book on a flight from Maine to Chicago. But even without that confinement, I would not have been able to put this book down.
I received a digital ARC of this book to review for GeekMom, but this will need to make its way to my physical bookshelf for future re-reads.
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