Home: Where the books are

By NIELA M. ELIASON

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 31, 2000

I've always been a reader. Little Women, The Bobbsey Twins, The Big Cage were books that I remember reading in grade school. The neighbors had a collection of The Bobbsey Twins, and I must have read 30 of the classic children's novels. I went through Little Women twice or maybe three times and loved Clyde Beatty's non-fiction treatise on the circus.

"If you don't stop that reading," my mother would yell from the kitchen, "you're going to ruin your eyes." Sure enough, by the time I was 45, I was wearing bifocals.

I remember suffering through gym class (known today as Phys. Ed.), giving away my "ups" because I had no interest in hitting softballs. I would painfully count the minutes until gym class was over and I could go to library period.

The librarian was Miss B. Bereson, a tall, thin, mature woman in soft print dresses and oxford shoes tied tautly over her arched insteps. She was tough, but I always felt sheltered in the Asbury School library in Denver. To this day, however, I'd rather be in trouble with the police department than with the library. The librarians might take my card away.

In those days, it was safe to turn children loose in the neighborhood. I was allowed to walk several blocks to the Decker Branch library by myself and did so frequently. I'd start reading the books on the way home, and it's a wonder I wasn't run over in the process.

I haven't changed. I don't know a Ray from a Buck -- or is it Buc? -- and I'm on the volunteer board at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg library. I have more library cards in my wallet than credit cards. Libraries amaze me. What other business will allow you to take its product home, use it and then trust you to return it? Free!

Bookstores are a major interest, too. Whether it's a small independent store or a big one, I'm often in bookstores. Like a lot of people my age, I'm pretty stingy with money, but never with books. I grab, look at the price tag later. Brigit Books in St. Petersburg and Inkwood Books in Tampa are two of my favorite independent stores.

The coffee shop bookstores such as B & N (Barnes & Noble) are good for meeting friends. We'll sit and yadda, yadda, yadda for an hour or more over one coffee. However, I rarely get out of the store for the price of java. There will always be at least one book I must have, or a magazine that is essential. The conversation over coffee is books -- old books, new books, books read and returned, books written and unwritten.

A friend asked one day, over coffee, who my favorite poet is. Instantly I said, "T.S. Eliot." Then I went home and started to re-read.

"There will be time, there will be time ...

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea."

-- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Some think Eliot is cynical and depressing, but I've always found his work witty and thought-provoking. Can you believe his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ran for 18 years on Broadway? What would Eliot think if he knew that? These lightly addressed felines -- the Jellicle Cats, Rum Tum Tugger, Bustopher Jones, Jennyanydots -- won him more notice than Prufrock or The Wasteland.

He probably would love it. According to his longtime friend, Conrad Aiken, "There was something of the actor in Tom . . . and some of the clown, too. For all his liturgical appearance . . . he was capable of real buffoonery." (from T.S. Eliot, An Imperfect Life by Lyndall Gordon, Norton, 1998).

There are two reasons to read. One is for information and the other is for entertainment. Whether it's books, newspapers, magazines or street signs, reading is one of the joys and one of the necessities that stay with us from childhood.

A few of my favorites books:

The Long Rain, by Peter Gadol.

The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

The Love Letter, by Cathleen Schine.

Rosemary's Baby, by Ira Levin.

Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon.

Fine Print: Reflections on the Writing Art, by James J. Kilpatrick.

The Elements of Style, by E.B. White and William Strunk.

And ... Thoreau, Walker Percy, Fran Lebowitz, Tony Hillerman, Vladimir Nabokov, J.D. Salinger ...

This summer, I was running out of space and had to buy two new bookcases. A child visiting our home asked, "Is this a library?"

- Write to Niela M. Eliason in care of Seniority, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731; or send e-mail to Niela@prodigy.net

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