The Books They Gave Me

In which we reflect on books given us by loved ones. var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-24253340-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

[thebookstheygaveme]

My sister gave me the Wealth of Nations with a note saying "merry christmas you capitalist pig"

[thebookstheygaveme]

The small bookstore at Emory University's Carlos Museum, an almost century-old repository of antique-to-present art & artifacts, has two sales a year; one of them was yesterday & today (year-round it has some of the finest books you can find--and you can't easily find them elsewhere). There were two copies of "The Books They Gave Me", and I bought one--an absolutely pure delight. I returned today for the other one for a friend, and it was gone. That aside, are you still accepting submissions?

I’m so glad you like the book! Sadly, the blog really isn’t active anymore. I’m finishing up a novel I’ve written, so that’s where most of my attention is these days.

[thebookstheygaveme]

It's been so many years since the book released and I was one of the lucky authors to be published. This is the signed book that I wrote about for Possible Side Effects, the book I used to read to someone I loved dearly. Thank you for making something like this for people, something to bring us together. I know one of the things that helped me relieve my heartbreak was seeing my story in this book and knowing so many other people felt it too, saw it too. It made my burden less heavy, and I thank you so much for that. Keep submitting people! Keep this thing alive. It's something so magical and beautiful and it means so much to many of us.

[thebookstheygaveme]

Tolkien.

She started reading it to us in the mornings that spring. We crammed onto the couch, all four of us, pushing in at the sides, vying for a spot next to her and waiting for our daily dose of adventure. She did all the voices and made up tunes to each song. I always sat to her right, because although I wasn’t the oldest, I was the best reader. It was my job to pick up the book and keep reading when her voice softly lulled off and her eyes closed, which they did on a daily basis. She’d nap as I read out to my sister and brothers, my voice rising over her humming breath. 

She didn’t stop our daily reading when we started living out of the van. As dad drove, she’d sit in the front seat, half turned to project to the back of “Clifford,” our red 16 passenger. As the rain pounded on the roof and my dad white knuckled across glassy lanes of traffic, she practically yelled about Bilbo’s love for root vegetables and a consistent homey lifestyle.

When the air conditioning broke in Wyoming and the heat swelled, stifling out good humor and the childish sense of adventure we had about the road trip, she reawakened it with three giant squabbling trolls that tied us up, threatening to eat us. By the time Gandalf rode in and and the sun rose, the temperature was dropping. The wind blew through cracked windows and we were happy.

Then dad dropped us off at Grandma’s trailer by the lake and left to take summer classes. We laid in the sun and ate boiled hot dogs for lunch and listed to Mom read The Hobbit every afternoon. 

Bilbo rode with eagles and inside of barrels. We burned our shoulders in the sun and perfected out cannon-balls off the dock with our dogs. He bantered with kings and dragons. We froze racing to the bottom of the lake and went to Dairy Queen with Grandma when Mom and Dad went house hunting. He had an adventure. So did we that summer. And when he went home, we did too.

[thebookstheygaveme]

King.

One time when I visited her, she brought me to Molly’s Books and Records in Philadelphia’s Italian Market. They had a trade paperback edition of Stephen King’s 11.22.63. I’m not a huge fan of King’s, but I’ve always loved time travel stories, and I was curious about his stab at this sub-genre. I ended up not buying it.

We went back to Molly’s a few weeks later, during my next trip from New York. I’d decided to buy their copy, but someone had beaten me to it. That evening, she gave me a birthday present: a beautifully-wrapped copy of 11.22.63. “I wish you could have seen the look on your face, ya nerd!“

Our relationship started strongly, but our incompatibilities were stronger. It turned out she wasn’t much of a reader, and she criticized me for keeping so many books around. Her friends didn’t like me. Her sense of humor, which used to leave me awed at her wit and versatility, became sharpened, barbed, and lethal. We blamed each other for not listening or understanding. I began to dread her city; the trip that used to fill me with anticipation now felt like a one-sided chore. Our final break-up was epic and violent. I couldn’t remember why I’d ever loved her, and I was glad to leave.

I shipped her things back to her. There were no books, except for 11.22.63, which I kept. Reading it began as one of many exercises in exorcising her. I cried at the book’s ending, and I did again last week, when I watched the finale of the Hulu mini-series.

Closure still escapes me.

[thebookstheygaveme]

Adams; Escher

Number one is I found The Books They Gave Me in book form yesterday at Hastings in Waco TX. Lucky find. Number two is my Books They Gave Me submission. Well not really a book that I was given but rather a book my ex-wife was given. Many years ago now I discovered a small book of Escher prints in our apartment. I had never seen the book before and did not know much about Escher so I opened it and found an inscription to my wife from an admirer. The admirer was a man she worked with at the time. “Oh just somebody I know” was the response when queried. But sadly, the book turned out to be prophetic. Escher it seems is all about illusion. Sometimes that happens in real life. I still don’t like Escher.

[thebookstheygaveme]

I love your blog. I'm sad it's not as active as it was before. Can we make it so again?

That’s all up to you. Send me your stories, and I’ll post them. 

[thebookstheygaveme]

Hello, dear Reader. Tell me a story. Did you get a book for the holiday? Did you give one?

[thebookstheygaveme]

Winterson.

There were ten years between us, she was an actress, and I was just a child. I did not expect us to become friends, but we did. The first time we met face to face was about half a year after we first began our friendship. At the time I was in love with another girl; I did not expect to feel anything more for her than friendly affection.

Across the next year we talked, laughed together, shared our little moments. Nothing changed, until this March, when I met her in person again, for the first time since 2013. She lent me this book, assuring me that I would enjoy it, and I left realizing that I’d fallen in love with her somewhere along the way without understanding that I had.

She has since told me that I should just keep the book, and keep it I will. She is the ocean and I am just a wave; and I know she will never feel the same way I do about her, but that is of no consequence. Perhaps she is not my first love, and god willing she will not be my last, but she is my best friend- and that is enough for this book to have a special place on my shelf, and in my heart.

[thebookstheygaveme]

Rowling.

He taught me how to read when i was 3 years old using picture books, and i forgot this until the fourth Harry Potter was gifted to me by my father many years later. He read the first two books to me -though at that point i could easily read by myself; he worked a lot- and he read parts of this one aloud as well, and waited for me to finish before he picked it up himself. it was something of a reminder that our strained relationship wasn’t as strained as i so often felt it was. the books were always ones we both returned to periodically, for one reason or another.  

[thebookstheygaveme]

Murdoch & Lowry

When I was young, in New York, I met a romantic Scotsman. We were having an intense and lovely affair.  He had to go on a business trip for a week. We gave each other our favorite books to read during that time. He gave me Iris Murdoch’s An Unofficial Rose, (her least successful book, I still feel) and I gave him Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano, one of my favorites then and even now. When he came back, we told each other how much we hated each other’s beloved book. The affair came to a crashing halt. We could not go on!

[thebookstheygaveme]

de Saint-Exupery.

I didn’t speak a word of the language of the country I had just moved to. When I had no friends (due to the reason that I couldn’t communicate and didn’t exactly try to), she brought along this old, tattered, yellow-paged book with her to school one day and handed it to ten-year-old me. One page was in English, the other in Korean. ‘You can have it,’ she said in clumsy English. She said it was the only book in her house that was in English. She said she was sorry for it being so old. She said she wanted to be my friend. And then she smiled. That day she read page by page with me. Taught me the language a bit. I thought she was an angel sent to me by God. 

[thebookstheygaveme]

Hey, Tumblrers. It’s me, Jen Adams, editor of The Books They Gave Me.

Omg, how are you guys? I’ve missed you. It’s been a little over two years now since the book came out, and about six months since I decided to take a bit of a break from The Books They Gave Me. I’ve been working on other...

[thebookstheygaveme]

Yiyun-Li.

He was- and to this day, is- one of the few boys I consider a true friend. We were fourteen, young, foolish, children. We had known each other for over five years, meeting up weekly in basic French classes. During one of these classes, I made a passing remark about how I wanted a copy of Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (after falling in love with her previous book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers), but it was too expensive.

Many, many months later, I had forgotten entirely what I had said. It was my birthday when he texted me and asked “did you never check your schoolbag’s front pocket?”

I had not. I unzipped the front pocket of the bag I dutifully dragged along to French classes every week and found a brand new copy of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, bought at full retail price- a small fortune for a teenager of fourteen. It had lain there for two weeks, snuck into my bag while I was in the bathroom by a boy who had a youthful crush on me. He confessed in June; I tried to reciprocate in the naive way only a fourteen-year-old girl who does not yet know she prefer women can possibly manage. He posted on Facebook that it was one of the best days of his life; we spent three days in succession that June talking all night for hours on end. After that I flew off to Germany for a family holiday that lasted a little over two weeks; all plans we had to go out on any sort of date at all vanished after I returned, and our sort-of relationship that never really was dissipated. We never went on a single date, and the next time we met in person, we interacted in our usual friendly manner, as if nothing had ever changed at all.

It was the first (and til this day, only) time anyone ever expressed any sort of romantic interest in me. We have never tried to rekindle what once was and perhaps could have been if not for that fateful trip to Germany. He is still one of my greatest friends. That book did not resound in me the way A Thousand Years of Good Prayers did, but it holds a special place on my shelf and it always will.

[brooklynbook]

[thebookstheygaveme]

brooklynbook:“A few years ago there was a pretty active Tumblr called The Books They Gave Me where people could submit stories about the books given to them. The stories were a mix of funny, and...

[thebookstheygaveme]

Fowler.

I had always had a rather pragmatic approach when it came to relationships. I believed that fairy tales and happy endings looked good only on paper. They seldom happened in reality. And while I had had my fair share of falling in and out of love, I had never let it destroy me. But then I met this boy and suddenly all my practicality went flying out of the window.

There was nothing extraordinary about him. We had met through mutual friends and had hit it off almost instantly. What had started out as innocent friendship, eventually tuned into a passionate yet perplexing relationship.It seemed like a bad idea from the very beginning- we both had pasts that we were not entirely over and had too much to lose if it did not work out. We never fought. In fact, I have never been so much in sync with another individual. But, our relationship was anything but stable. His past has a strange, unexplainable hold on him and as a result of it his feelings towards me were inconsistent. One day, he would be in love with me, wanting to not leave my side all day and the next day he would be wanting to put and end to the entire affair.Despite the fact that this drove me crazy, I never called quits. For the first time in my life, I had felt something so real, so intense and even though it was unhealthy, I wanted to hold on to it. Deep down inside I always believed that this unpredictability would soon end and he would be mine forever. I was miserable and out of control. I was no longer myself; no longer an independent individual. I wanted to be a part of him. I wanted to be something he desired. As crazy as it sounds, I was both ecstatic and wretched at the same time.

On my 21st birthday, my flatmate gifted me Z. I absolutely adore Scott. Fitzgerald and his books. I have read them countless number of times and can now recite quotes even in my sleep. My flatmate who was aware of my Fitzgerald obsession thought I would love to get to know a little bit more about his wife. There is no denying that Scott and Zelda were so passionately in love. Yet, they had the most toxic relationship. For those brief moments of unequalled love, they were willing to put up with long periods of unhappy and gloomy days.Furthermore, Zelda got lost in the relationship. She transformed into a completely different individual. She was a Mrs. Fitzgerald, devoid of her own thoughts and beliefs. While, my relationship came no where close to that of Zelda’s with Scott, it did open my eyes. Ironically, a story of blind, passionate and intense love, made me realize how self destructing and poisonous mine was.

The book brought me back to reality and helped me deal with the end of this incomparable love. I am convinced, I will never feel emotions of this intensity ever again. While that saddens me a bit, I am also glad because, I cannot imagine being so helpless and out of control for all of my life. Z opened my eyes to the insanity that was creeping into me. I believe that we all have that one great love. The kind that challenges us and makes us a different person. We never get over it or ever feel the same way again. While there are a lucky few who get to spend the rest of their lives intoxicated by this perfect bliss, the rest of us need to learn to live a life separate from it. Z brought me this and I have my flatmate to thank for that.

[thebookstheygaveme]

You.

Hey, Tumblrers. It's me, Jen Adams, editor of The Books They Gave Me. 

Omg, how are you guys? I've missed you. It's been a little over two years now since the book came out, and about six months since I decided to take a bit of a break from The Books They Gave Me. I've been working on other projects. My day job, at a really cool tech company you've probably heard of. My family. And some writing projects, including my first YA novel. It's a historical novel set in the final days of the Cold War. 

But this is about you. The Books They Gave Me exists because of you, because you've shared your stories here. So it's really your project as much as mine. 

I've been thinking of ways to revive the blog. What else can we do with this idea? What do you think it can be? At heart, it's about sharing books, sharing stories. How do you feel when you share stories with others, and how can I help? 

Let me know. Send me a message.