By Vivian Willinger
Posted: August 6, 2025
Sometimes, I am still asked, “What is your nationality?” I always answer, “Bookish.”
As a toddler, I learned the alphabet by playing endlessly with my favorite toy: a set of alphabet blocks. I loved arranging the alphabet letters into little words. As a kindergartener, I already knew how to spell and read.
As an old dame, I keep annual lists of all the books I have read. In 2024, I read 147 books. I hasten to admit, I read but I do not always retain. Or more accurately, I may not recall unless some unpredictable association excavates what lies buried in the book nook of my brain.
In my house, I have a “library room.” It has jam-packed, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, plus books on top of books, books on the floor, books threatening to migrate to other rooms. There are over one thousand books. I did not count them; my mother did. After she surveyed the contents of all my closets and drawers on her first visit from New York to my new Arizona house, the only thing left for her to do was number up my books.
The public library has always been my “go to” place. When I got my first library card, I haunted the library’s fiction shelves, then labeled, “Novels - Character and Atmosphere.” In the library, I found my favorite writers: Virginia Woolf and Raymond Chandler. What connects the frail Bloomsbury lady and the Los Angeles tough guy? Style – gorgeous, glorious style! Her prose shimmers with flights of heightened consciousness and lyrical intensity. His prose simmers with the tension of dark mean streets and offers similes to die for: there is no topping “like a tarantula on a piece of cake.”
Beyond fiction, the library has been my portal to other places, other times. Ancient Greece has long fascinated me with its amazing contrasts:
- Gods who were guardians of justice and serial rapists.
- Goddesses who were protectors of the faithful and jealous bitches.
- Mythical mortals transformed into trees, flowers, heavenly stars and monsters.
- Mythical heroes and murderous families.
- Oracles from priestesses at Delphi and barbecues by priests at sacrificial rites.
- Olympics held during wartime truces so all could play games.
- Designing stadiums and shrines, temples and theaters ... for then and now.
- Inventing tragedy and comedy … and democracy.
- Towering achievements in philosophy, history, science and poetry, sculpture, the arts.
- Terrible flaws … subjugated women, slavery, infanticide, pederasty, ever-warring city states, death sentence for Socrates, oligarchy, tyranny, arrogant empire and its decline and fall.
In the library, the past is not just the past. The past jostles the present.
These days, I am often in the Tempe Public Library as a volunteer in its bookstore. There, I am among my own kind: people who like to talk about books, browse among them, handle them, buy them, read them. No Kindle devices, no Amazon orders, no iPhone downloads for us – only the real-life physical objects called books.
I have my own ritualistic approach to a new book, whether bought at a local bookstore or borrowed from the library. First, I scrutinize the front cover design. Second, I read what is on the back and inside of the book jacket. Third, I look at the author’s photo. Fourth, I check the title page for the date of publication. Fifth, I scan the dedications and acknowledgements. Sixth, I turn to the back for the “Note on Type” and for where the book was manufactured. Seventh, I flip through the pages to see if there are photographs or illustrations. Only after all that, do I start to read. Why? I do not know. Maybe it is just foreplay.
Reading books helped me get through the Covid pandemic and its enforced isolation. And if Virginia Woolf is to be believed, reading will get me to heaven:
When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching
to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze on these mere book-
worms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give
them. They have loved reading.”
Am I Bookish? Damned right, I am!
