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I don’t remember much about the rooms themselves — drab little rectangles with a single-cup coffeemaker and a Bible in the bottom drawer of the bedside table — but I do remember the book I was reading. It was a paperback copy of “Darwin and the Barnacle” (2004) by Rebecca Stott. Why that book, that summer? No idea. But ever since, when I think about Charles Darwin and his lovingly detailed sketches of the lowly barnacle, which led to the grand theory that changed the world, I don’t think about the destiny of the human species or even 19th century England.
I think about a single-cup coffeemaker. And a lonely motel room.
Reading is so heavily influenced by the place in which it is done. Venue matters. The location in which you read a certain book somehow becomes tied up with your memory of the book itself, so that when you recall its characters and its plot and its dialogue, you probably also think of the temperature of the day upon which you first cracked it open, the color of the drapes, the comfort (or lack thereof) of the chair — the backdrop against which the reading occurred.
Publishers figured this out a long time ago. That’s why they started referring to certain kinds of books — big, juicy, sprawling melodramas with (thank goodness!) no redeeming social value — as “beach reads.” The beach: sun, sand, surf and an utter lack of seriousness. Place and page merge into a single sumptuous experience.
We sometimes think of literature as a great way to escape the world, yet it’s very much a part of the world. I first read “A Wrinkle in Time” (1962) as a third-grader, lying on my bed in the middle of a hot afternoon. I can still feel the nubbiness of that bedspread, still feel the texture of the fabric against which my elbow was propped as I raced through Madeline L’Engle’s masterpiece.
I remember finishing “Anna Karenina” (1877) just before vacating an apartment. My furniture had already been picked up, so I had to sit on the bare floor, my back to the wall, while reading about poor Anna — who also had her back to the wall, but in her case it was love, not an expiring lease, that precipitated things.
Let’s see. “The Unconsoled” (1995) was read in an overstuffed armchair in my first apartment in Chicago in January 1999. Outside, the snow was falling in hefty clumps. By the next morning, I couldn’t open the front door. That strange fever-dream of a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro had nothing to do with wind chills and Thinsulate, but when I think about it, I also think about boots, shovels, parkas and mittens.
I can tell you exactly where I was when read a paperback copy of “Titan” (1998), Ron Chernow’s phone-book-size biography of John D. Rockefeller: in the bathtub. At one point, I dropped it into the bubbly plenitude; “Titan” still bears the scars of my clumsiness. It’s bloated and crinkled.
When I first enrolled at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., I was eager to start working my way through the Morrow Library. Until classes started, though, I didn’t have a student I.D. card and hence couldn’t check out books. So day after day, I sat at a wooden table reading Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark” (1915). At closing time, I would slip in a bookmark and return the novel to its designated place on one of the towering shelves. The next day, I’d return and resume my reading.
Thus “The Song of the Lark” is forever associated in my mind with a hard wooden chair, a colony of fluorescent lights overhead and the Druid-like presence of tall shelves hovering all around me. Cather’s story — and the place in which I first encountered it — are woven together in my memory, fused and luminous.
