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Long after I'd made the last major revisions to How To Buy a Love of Reading-the Advance Readers Copies already printed, the copyedits completed-I began creating the "books" on the virtual bookshelf of my web site. By providing interested readers with additional material, (photo albums, a journal, excerpts from fictional books mentioned in the novel), I wanted to extend the world of the novel past its covers. I thought it would be a fun project, and I knew the site's wonderful designer, eat.tv, inc, would make the "books" look terrific. I loved the fictional "world" of the book I had written about for so long. I thought of it like going back to visit a place where I'd "lived" for so long.

But here's the thing: forgive the cliché (which would make at least one of my characters cringe), but you can't go home again. Or at least, as I discovered, not without a lot of cognitive dissonance.

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"Oh, right.  You're the breast lady," said the staffer at the fourth floor paging desk of the San Francisco Public Library as I handed him the yellow request slips. 

Breast Lady.  The phrase evoked, for me, a grotesque cartoon bosom mounted atop spindly legs.  When he called my name fifteen minutes later to hand me books unearthed from the catacombs of the library, I felt compelled to explain-not for the first time and perhaps more than a bit primly-that my frequent visits to take notes on noncirculating volumes like A Century of Lingerie, Uplift: the Bra in America, and Support and Seduction: A History of Corsets and Bras were for research.  I was writing a novel in which one of the characters, bra designer Francis Wells, turns part of his house into a bra museum to pay homage to the part of the female anatomy he reveres. 

Despite such occasional mortification, however, I relished conducting research for How To Buy a Love of Reading.  First of all, it allowed me to bring home an immoderate number of volumes from the library.  (I'm the kind of geek who relishes sitting on floor surrounded by stacks of books.)  Secondly, it gave me an excuse-at least for a time-to wallow in information.  In real life, you just don't get much license to wallow in unnecessary details.  In real life, one has to decide rather quickly what is important about a situation. 

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As I searched archival films from the nineteen-forties through -sixties for footage to use in a funny book trailer for my upcoming novel, How To Buy a Love of Reading, I chuckled at the depictions of readers and reading that made them seem as exciting as Brussels sprouts (and as humorless).  One of Coronet's "instructional films" shows a student library volunteer-who patently aspires to the position of hall monitor-repeatedly denying a classmate's pleas to keep an overdue book out one more day with, "I can't.  It's a rule."  The narrator of another film proclaims that the purpose of leisure reading is to "learn things you'd like to know about many subjects."

Fifty or so years later, for many people reading still appears that boring.  The protagonist of my novel, teenage Carley Wells, thinks it's stultifying.  She's learned from her parents that people read books or pretend to read them to impress other people.  She's learned from school that books are supposed to be dissected into symbols and metaphors and other literary devices, like "fetal pigs." According to the most recent NEA study on reading, while overall reading is on the rise, we're becoming a nation divided into two categories: readers (like you, I presume, since you're reading a book blog) and nonreaders like Carley.

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Tanya Egan Gibson is our guest blogger during the week of May 11th. If you have any questions for Tanya Egan Gibson, add a comment to any of her posts. 

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Fall in love with reading all over again.

To Carley Wells, words are the enemy. Her tutor's innumerable SAT flashcards. Her personal trainer's "fifty-seven pounds overweight" assessment. And the endless reading assignments from her English teacher, Mr. Nagel. When Nagel reports to her parents that she has answered "What is your favorite book" with "Never met one I liked," they decide to fix what he calls her "intellectual impoverishment." They will commission a book to be written just for her-one she'll have to love-that will impress her teacher and the whole town of Fox Glen with their family's devotion to the arts. They will be patrons- the Medicis of Long Island. They will buy their daughter The Love Of Reading.

Impossible though it is for Carley to imagine loving books, she is in love with a young bibliophile who cares about them more than anything. Anything, that is, but a good bottle of scotch. Hunter Cay, Carley's best friend and Fox Glen's resident golden boy, is becoming a stranger to her lately as he drowns himself in F. Scott Fitzgerald, booze, and Vicodin.