An hour with Nancy Pearl and Regina Sirois

from the lord's public library k pr preserves an hour with national public radio's favorite librarian nancy pearl i'm kate mcintyre nancy pearl is the author of book lust more book lust and the only librarian i know of with their own action figure she the frequent guest on npr's morning edition she spoke at fillmore in public library on nov second two thousand eleven you clapped before even said anything and i have to share with you it makes me a little nervous when people do that because i'm always it reminds me of something that bishop fulton sheen one said bishop sheen once said that what when people clapped before he says anything he's sure they're clapping out of faith and hope and afterwards he suspects it's out of charity and so i want to do a couple of things about a couple of things on this evening and one of them is i want to share with you a little bit of a mom my library story and how i became a

reader and a library and because i think it will oldham speak to many of you talk just a little bit about how the book lust books came about and then conclude before i take questions and talking they're just out selling you on some of the wonderful books at the raven a bookstore brought to sell based on my list of ten of my favorite books and it was very funny when i went back there and i just felt like hugging all those books that i loved that book i was so glad and then i wanted to include writer for the questions with top telling you about the perils of the life of reading i'm going to talk about the pleasures of the life of reading on we could all talk about the pleasures of a life reading i'm sure that you're as familiar with them as i am and as different as our backgrounds might be those pleasures i'm sure would be very similar but i would be remiss in my job as a

librarian if i didn't talk about the perils of the life of reading because one of the first things we learn in library school is that in a collection development class is that you have to balance your collection you can't have only one side of an issue represented on the shelves so if i were to just stand here and talk for you know however many minutes about how wonderful breeding is without alerting you that there are certain perils associated with reading then i would not be doing my job so will end up with the perils of a life of breeding but i i grew up in a detroit michigan and i grew up in a lower middle class section of detroit my family were readers but it was not a particularly unhappy household if the word dysfunctional and more in common usage way back then and that's probably how i would have described it the only way that i knew to describe my family was to say that they were and it was it was not a safe place to be my

house and so i spent my childhood and a good deal of my adolescence and my local public library it was the parchman branch library in the detroit system and it was an open boulevard it was about a mile and a half from my house i would go there every day after school i'd come home from school i would drop my books off i my homework and everything and i would walk to the library and spend until dinnertime at the library saturday mornings i wake up early i would pack a lunch i would either bicycle or walk to the library i would be there when it opened at nine o'clock and i would still be there at five thirty minute closed and those were much simpler times but at very different times the librarians frequently at that library would drive me home because they knew that that wasn't where i would head off two if i had the choice and

so that my library and i still have it i have to say i still think of it as my library my apartment branch library played such an important part in my life that i find that whatever else i'm dreaming about you know whatever the subject of my dreams are very often whatever is happening occurs in the park when branch library and i knew when i was ten years old that i wanted to be a librarian and i was the kind of child who really wanted to make the world a better place you know one of the sort of insufferable kids to just you know like who are you know it's a good idea and i and i remember thinking what can i do better than what the librarians and bear did for me what they did was take this a miserably unhappy child but i was and they opened up the world of books and reading to me and i thought if i could do that for other children what a wonderful job that would be and what a good job that

would be and i did become a children's librarian and i got my degree at the university of michigan and my first job after like preschool was at the detroit public library and i did it because i spend so much time at the parchman branch library i of course got to know the librarians very well and they got to know me and my favorite of the librarians was a woman named miss whitehead and this whitehead was the person who introduced me she was canadian and she introduced me not all of those redish children's writers and so she she's a person who gave me the hobbit for example when they had five children and gets an all of the eden as the box and needed to lighten box and all of those just wonderful wonderful books and that and i i thought it would be so wonderful if when i went back to work at the detroit library if i could work with this whitehead will not be just like a dream come true and

i ended up not working there i worked instead on the bookmobile one and in some other branches witness whitehead my work colleagues and that was very very very meaningful to me to be part of her life in that way and have her part of my life in that way but i remember at that library you had to be was it was what i was thought was a carnegie library it was an easy the same and i didn't learn until after book lust was published in the introduction of book lust talk about it and i described as a carnegie library and of course at you you know in in this world where if you say one thing wrong there's maybe twenty people always telling you these centers are so i got a letter an email from somebody who said what he had devoted his life to studying carnegie libraries and he was very sorry to have to tell me that the parchman branch library was not actually a carnegie library was built a few years afterwards but in my mind it had all the hallmarks of the carnegie library you walked up the stairs to get in the front door you're member all that and carnegie's all

parties libraries have those walking the stairs because carnegie believe the us ended to knowledge and that that was the function of a library and i think what a wonderful metaphor those stairs were for what apparently believed and then you walk in and go ahead and he was the circulation desk and to your right is the children's room and to the left is the adult room and in that library you had to be at that time you get to be thirteen years old or in the ninth grade before you could go over to the adult section of the library and i remember when i turned thirteen i said to miss whitehead i'm thirteen so can i go over there and this white had very grudgingly agreed to let me go over there now she wasn't writing because she had any kind of oh you know i don't want her to read those books and i could be good for her she didn't want me to go over there because she was afraid that if i went

over to the adult books i would never come back to the children's section and i would miss out on all those wonderful book she still had waiting for me to read but very very generously ungraciously she took me over to the adult section of a library introduced me to the librarians there and let me go off to pick out the books that i wanted to check out and so i checked out on my thirteenth birthday my very first the adult block and i suspect some of you might have checked out the very same first grown up book which was gone with the wind by margaret mitchell so that line where a mock mind might hearken branch library was just so so so important to me and all the years since when i've gone on to work at libraries and bookstores in tulsa and in on seattle that library has always been the hallmark i mean it's just been for me what a perfect library it should be

and in my last job you know i always thought i told you that i that i dream about my childhood library in it and i really for many many many years thought that everybody dreamed about their childhood library that it was just a normal kind of a dream and then i learned that maybe it wasn't a normal kind of dream because my last job at the seattle public library i was in charge of programming and so i supervised all those great librarians who put on the summer reading program for kids and did the seattle reads project all of those things and an a for the summer reading program in seattle what we do at the end of the summer is we have a representative from each of the twenty three branches and the central library come together for breakfast it wanted the fancy downtown hotels and the mayor comes and speaks and you know it's just a very festive celebration well i had always avoided going to those things because i have to say i am not really

comfortable in public in the park and you know being outside of my own house and and actually you're at it i don't go anywhere in seattle because i may not get invited anywhere even now after all this time because i have people now i just don't wanna go out and say that they stopped inviting me which is fine because it don't wanna go out there and you know it and i really i just sort of feel like i have nothing to say to anybody except about books and reading an inbox every mean i'm really pretty good at i can do that but i have no small talk and you know my my favorite question because i'm genuinely interested in this is like i will say some new old what you're reading like i said you know like when you really are because i want to know because that tells you so much about the kind of person that you are the kind of books that you read so i didn't want to go to this practice but i knew that i had to because i had to support my staff and so united and worried about what i would say to people

there and tried to think of other things to talk about the site sparks i can come up with anything and i got there that morning in and they showed me where was supposed to set and i sat down and i the minute that they showed me the table i knew that my worst fears were realized because i was they sat me at a table that there are three men there there were circular circular tables and tables for six and so we were a forum in other two table the other two seats at the table were supposed to be for others seattle library people but they work busy going around talking to other people and so they are the four of us were signs still basically down at this table on my left is the deputy met one of the deputy mayor's of seattle and my right is a member of the library's foundation board and he is one of those people who is always to hand now now

if you are always scanned in seattle you know that you don't spend the winters here so it's so he had he actually withstand the gorgeous summers in seattle and it's been the winter is in palm springs and plus this man war and those in theory shiny loafers with tassels on them and i you know i i have always believed that that even if i had something to say to somebody just decided those loafers strikes me to dumb it i i can't you know and he was the kind of person who wore those shoes without irony and the navy you know i can try to be ironic aspect of them but they're so he was on my right and directly across from me was a guy named dennis pounds who was one of the local newscasters was always be the mc for the breakfast so we sit down the three guys are not talking to each other at all i

mean the waitresses coming in pouring coffee a hand that they're eating their fruit but they're not talking so i say oh my gosh you know like i'm probably the hostess at this table i have to say something so i said well what's everybody remained and that conversation ended in three seconds or less because that answer was the davinci code over here the da vinci code over here and have the vinci code and then the silence fell again and again when i get nervous i get very can't say and sighs like i think probably fellini myself around and might share but i noticed that my napkin had certified loan on my lap and disappeared and so i had to lift up the table skirt like those table skirts eye to lift up the table skirt and look for my napkin under the table and i saw tsarnaev under the table but it involved mike been getting out of my chair and panic rawling and

so i crawled under the table and got my now ben and sat back down and said to dennis brown's the newscaster sit down as great boats and he said oh delighted i said yes i love them they said oh do you know why i wear it and i said you know why and he said because i don't have to match my socks now i was so rattled by the level of rhetoric that i have neglected to ask him the next most important question at what point didn't he have the matches sachs i mean imagine how great it would be if you could just watch all your socks and then just not even bother about rolling them up just yet and i'm in a drawer and then pulling out any choose stocks that you happened to come up with an isis backed up it had never checked this out i suspect that what he meant was that he didn't get the match them to the suits he wore

on here on that than you know there in my heart is like pounding it's so exciting cash and then and then silence falls again total total total silence and i'm getting increasingly desperate for something to say and so in that silence i say you know i dream about my childhood public librarian frequently and the man on my right he of that perennial tambo library foundation board those shoes looked at me with horror and you know it has ever looked at with horror a new some unique and wonder what might recognize that you know believe me you will know it when you see it i mean most capable so he looked at me with horror

and he said he said just like this he said oh my god name psy get all life and i wanted to say to him on but i didn't because i have some sense and i was working for the library and he was a very generous foundation board member i wanted to say to him you know in this world we have one life were given one life to live but is through books and reading that we can have any number of lives we can go anywhere and we can do anything and we can be anyone and i knew that that was true when as ten years old and i know that it's true today and i am i know that i and you can imagine how excited i was excited and curious i was when i got a phone call from a guy named gary luke who has a stop publishing company was an editor at a small seattle publishing company arm it was was besler called sasquatch books which were they were best known for their series of best places

best places seattle less best place is alaska best places portland i'm all northwest books so he called me one day at work and he said nancy come to god like you to come come down to the office because i want to talk to you and i said oh you know what about annie said i want you to write a book for us and so i thought that sounds interesting site went down to his office and he then i said what kind of a rethinking of teary and he said nancy and it or write a book about good books to read he said on it said you know i'm just thinking that if you could do that would make you know we could get a few readers in the northwest i think who have heard you review books on the local npr station that we could sell a few books and i said oh well you know good books to read well could i include both fiction and non fiction because i'm a huge non fiction reader as well as a huge richard he said oh yeah non fiction spike as it could i include children's books he said children's books fine i said well what about books that are out of print can include out

of print books he said you'd see you conclude an e books you what he said at all but i want you to do is come up with three hundred quirky categories write two hundred and fifty words for each of those perky categories filled with you know just good suggestions of books to read to fall within that category he said sixty five thousand words wendy i think i said i think i'll go home and try to do so i went home and i wrote what became the first section it i wrote the first section of what would become the book book lust and ono because kerry said to me i've read this is a sadist gary said to me i just have one request so i knew that there was going to be like a catch what could their progress because i said what is their request geary he said i really want you to do a section on good civil war egyptian civil war fiction well what was the first book i read

on the other when i mean i just started making a list in my head and then i said oh it's easy to do to rebuild why do you want a section and good civil war fiction and he said i'm looking for a good novel to read about the civil war and i want you to find one for me so i went home and wrote this section which is called variant for police civil war fiction and it kind of was the template for all the other sections it i'd done in all and three other book lust books i believe that one of the things that we mistakenly do or that we pretend to do way too much of both in the library world and in our general society at large is that we focused too much on what's new and we forget that there are plenty of books that were published five years ago and ten years ago and fifty years ago and more that are wonderful wonderful books to read and any book that you haven't read is a new book to you so i wanted to start each of the sections in the book lust books with the

best of the past and then bring it forward to the present so if you're going into civil war fiction of course you're going to start with gone with the wind and then that book the hefty of especially if you're a public library yeah you wanna have on hand unlike a wednesday night when at high school sophomore comes in and needs a historical novel about the civil war or could it be really short and so you now you wanna give the red badge of courage but i could also include i did also include what is probably the best novel about the civil war ever written and it won the pulitzer prize back in the fifties it was out of print for a long time and is now the last i checked back in print if you have not read if you like historical fiction and you haven't read a hendersonville by mckinley cantor do not miss that book it is reading experience and you kill you will never be the same after you read that book it's absolutely amazing and it i include bad and i could include

cold mountain men all of those things and i finished that perception and so much fun to do it was like a sitting at home and i was looking at my bookshelves and just making connections and i thought wow this is so much fun i must be doing something wrong so i called jerry and said oh you know would you look at this can i email just you could you look at an tell me what you think it is this really where you want and i emailed assuming he called me right get nice again it's it is exactly what i want he said i can't talk much that you have two hundred and ninety nine more to go so you know get cracked and he said i'm on my way to elliott bay bookstore to buy in person feel so i knew i was kind of on the right track and and i ended up writing i think we i ended up with about a hundred and seventy five quirky category says was very hard for me to stop just two hundred fifty words on ranging the categories range and the quest from the first one is a my name is alice good

books by will and women whose first name happens to be alice and it ends with a section called zero this will mean nothing to you which i thought was really genuinely a great very funny quirky title and it's all about how the number zero came into western mathematics through the babylonians and the indians and because i love i love popular science like that and so in between that are just some of mine what i thought were every single one of my very favorite books i'm from the time that i turn to read to you to two thousand up to the beginning of two thousand and three when carrie finally said you can't make any more changes you can't get anything this is at a stop but i thought you know well i've done at every single book that i loved is in this book and you know maybe ten other people read the book and they'll find wonderful books an errant look at beaches so exciting and google plus was finished and i was the unit came out and it was just so exciting and i was so i was so happy

for the books that i had put in there and i just thought about how much pleasure i had gotten from the books over the years and then i had put in the introduction to book lust my email and i said oh gee i'd love to hear what books you've liked that i didn't include and i really thought that i'd get maybe five or six emails and people would send me you know i would just be able to start a reading list for myself cause i thought oh i don't have a project now what will i be thinking about well that these emails just started coming in remember the poem that the waltz in the carpenter by writer lewis carroll that ended so the oysters come thick and fast they came out last and more and more and more about what the emails started doing so people would send emails and they would say they would all say the same general thing they would take during yancey loved book lust the trust you've never heard of and then they would list two hundred boxes

so some of those books were books that i had indeed not radical and that was actually wonderful cause then i could read that some of those books are books i had read that had not launched so there was no where's can include them in book lust anyway and that's fine because i believe you know one of things of our reading is that we all write the books we read you know at ease that's a pleasurable i mean that's a great thing about book groups is that we all read different books and we're collaborating with the author as we're reading the book i am and that's why you can read we can be reading the same edition wallace stegner is anglo proposed but what you're gonna read and what i'm gonna read even though it's the same paragraph exactly word for word the same paragraph is going to be very very different from each other because we bring to our reading everything all of our lives up to that moment and that's why i can make a really good argument that there's not even a such thing

as re reading a book because you are a different person when you re read a block than you were when you were originally read it and so they sent me the sight at all these lists and you know some were as i said books that i hadn't read that was great summer books and i did like that was fine too but many of them were books that i had read and loved but that hadn't appeared in my mind when i was writing those categories and that was killing me and so all of my happiness and excitement about having written book lust had turned into was rapidly turning into regret and remorse and ruled those are my three r's and i i just thought oh no i mean i didn't mention peaceful and i didn't mention that book and how can i looked at other in the face and i ran into them on the streets in seattle oh god i just felt terrible and as in new york a publicity thing and jerry called and said they had seen what would you think about doing a companion

book lust talk and i said i'll carry that would be so great to recall a book lust to the morning after and jerry said oh nancy great title i love a great title but in the end they called it very boring lee and mistakenly in my humble opinion i'm more book lust so if you think it should be called book lust to the morning after i will be happy to give you here easy email land ho ho because we're still fighting their battle for south between book lust and more book lust eat that there's ice there's still blocks that i left out and marilynne robinson is one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite books of hers as housekeeping and i didn't include that for some reason it is amazing i'm dorothy dunn at a great historical novelist i choose i for some reason i just left her about it was it was very sick and that i did because i my shoulders like her and i really wanted to do one for kids or for kids and teens and so we couldn't call at last weaken of lust in the titles

so we called the book crush and then and then i really thought that i was done and i was no more of more book lust and but then i noticed that it really kept it one of things that i really love reading his armchair travel and i love explorers tales and i love when i'm going someplace to read books that are set in that place and i thought we would be fun to do something like that for travelers and that idea week after two years of reading because i do not include any books a very included in the earlier books and it year of writing that became book lust to go recommended reading for travelers vagabonds and dreamers which i think was my was the hardest book to write and eight and i think it was in a way well they were all my favorites but this was a favorite of mine to do and so does the book lust books and had had i been writing them now i would have included everyone of the box that's on this red book mark in your packet and i just wanna tell you just about a

couple of them and one of them i know you're familiar with the nets can the small arts destiny of the republic because i know she was here and that a spectacular program about president james garfield and but lorraine adams the nominees are all books back their for sale the room and the chair by lorraine adams if you like and it's if you like the rulers but not the sort of page turner's where you know better if you like the kind of thrillers that are very narrative have any kind of issues and they have just fantastical writing and really interesting characters the room and the chair is the book for you the room in the title is the newsroom of a major urban newspaper and you might as well think the washington post since that's where lorraine adams worked as a reporter the chair of the title is the chairman of a top secret agency in the us government and when a helicopter

crashes over the potomac river the lives of people in the newsroom and this agency become intertwined it is absolutely wonderful my favorite spy novelist is john le carre his early books like tinker tailor soldier spy this is a book it reminded me of that it's great if you're looking for books for i'm for likes at nine to twelve year olds you could not do better than get them the pender wicks series by a woman named jeanne birdsall they are today these are the best way to describe him is to say these are old fashioned children's books there is no there are no zombies there is no magic this is safe these are what we use to call fondly family stories and the interesting thing about these books is that jeanne birdsall wanted to do on she want them always to be for those middle grade readers so she didn't want her characters to

age out of that period because she always wanted to kids to be able to identify with the narrator so what she's chosen to do is that each book it has a different narrator a younger child and the family and it's such a great it so wonderful so that the brits also check our backs and the art of fielding oh my gosh what a great book and this is one of those books that when you finish this book you just wish you you know you know all the characters you know everything about them and you wish this book would go on and iman on a nine and leaving it is like being kicked out of this world that you really you really grown to know set in a small midwestern college it being the overarching be that kind of a long narrative of scaffolding has to do with a young baseball player on a college team but you don't have to like baseball you not to know anything about baseball really what you're reading about is the relationships that this baseball player has with his roommate

with a young man who has recruited him to the college with a college president with college presidents daughter ana how all of these relationships intertwined and it's a it's great to be some underwater by tom mcneil is a wonderful story a wonderful wonderful novel about a couple who fall in love in high school and the young woman and yet they plan to get married in the young woman goes off to college outside of nebraska which is where they've grown they'd grown up together and of course they don't get married but years and years later she decides to try to find him and this is the story of their relationship is just great skippy dies oh my gosh skippy dies is that the blurb on earth and the jacket says that all it says that this is the moby dick of an irish adolescence and i think whatever that means it is it's just perfect for that because this is about a boy scout and a day school a public school in dublin and the main

character who dies in the first chapter so i'm not giving anything away is a young man named skippy and this is about what has what were you then read is what leads up to that a habit is so good it's fabulous the tragedy of arthur by arthur phillips and if you like this kind of on well this is a book and it is a book in which there are four characters named arthur ok three of them are named arthur phillips and the main character's father he is a master forger and he has gone to prison for a long time because he was caught for jeanne and a manuscript and he is about to get out of prison and he and his name is arthur phillips and he writes to his son arthur phillips to say that he has a lost play by shakespeare called the tragedy of arthur and

arthur phillips had this son has to figure out whether this is truly a play that shakespeare wrote that nobody ever knew about or if this is another one of his father's times it is just it's a it's a purr the lotus eaters by touch on a solely this oh my gosh this was like one of the best books i read in two thousand and ten and it's out in paperback and two thousand and eleven and that's what we have back there but it's about a woman photojournalist in vietnam in in the nineteen seventies and it is it's a book that really talks about what what the experience of war is like and how and makes you wonder when you read it how somebody who is experienced life at that higher pitch of war can ever come back and live a normal life and that's what the main character in this book is going to have to deal with but it begins on the day it opens on the day that

the us has abandoned their embassy in south vietnam and you remember those pictures of something he's trying desperately to get on those last helicopters going out from the embassy and from that day it goes back a decade when helen goes to vietnam to try to find out what happened to her brother and this is how she becomes a photojournalist their kisses her career this is the man she meets this is her life and it's just a spectacular book stone arabia the best way i know describing stone arabia it's about a brother and sister it's like fran eons do we go roane up and set in los angeles it's about how we create our own lives and it's about a man who act who actually in in fact has created scrap blocks and biographies about concerts that his band has given interviews that people have done with him everything out of his own head he has just

created this life for himself and this is about his relationship with his sister and the last work is is just i think just spectacular it's called the family fang by kevin wilson and defying the family it's about parents who are performance artists and their children who have to grow up as being part of the family's perform says and now the kids are grown up and they have to figure out what to do on when their lives are coming to kind of each of them each of the lives the brother sister come into a dead end and they both go home to the family's house and again get caught up in kind of the ultimate performance at their parents are doing so these are just you know canceling asked me to do ten blocks and it was very hard and i think i wrote and said oh i wanted this winner take all that wine and so those are just a just a little example of that but i do want to talk about the perils of a life of

breeding because as i said theyre very important one of the perils of a life of reading is that you especially if you if you learned your vocabulary from reading is that you never know how to pronounce as anna ok it i cannot tell you for how long i thought that when things went wrong they win already you when i'm i i it now i still believe that my pronunciation is correct but i am not of ari i know it's a riot but i mean when when somebody gives you the wrong information i have always believed that they have a missile deal now now there are there are people who are who do pronounce that myself but i think gets upended north south distinctions you know those of us in the north say ms olden the south's as myself and there are few

people in the world who still all mistakenly believed that that word is pronounced misled that i think actually they had been ms old and it is really misled and luckily i'd worked with somebody early in my library career who would who would come to everything in egypt talks that i gave and she would hopefully hopefully your shout out the correct pronunciation of anything i mispronounced so i learned that on you know we didn't have any music in my house any classical music really and so i tried and i never knew that refugee we was not pronounced for glue we knew how or that s e g u e is not secure we i mean how could it be sad way and then you run into these words and you think what you now like colonel i was denounced colonel column know now and then somebody says so

people always say to me oh my god yes you read so many books how community how to pronounce anything and i say well in fact i have a reading vocabulary and not a speaking vocabulary and so feel free to borrow that said that is one peril of a life of a breeding is that you tend to look like an idiot even though you do um i'm not harold the life of reading is that i am and i don't know about you but when i'm reading a book that i'm really enjoying and i run across a word that it i know what it means but i don't exactly know what it means i'm more often than not too lazy to get up and look it up you know go down the dictionary and look it up so i always think to myself oh i'll get the meaning from the context well you know i knew when i was ten years old that you cannot get the meaning from the context it just doesn't work and hear and i know it because when i was ten i was reading all of the hand of green gables box and my favorite the end of green gables books was an of the island and that's someone

working and goes to college and she comes home back to prince edward island because one of her best friends ruby gillis is dying an anise coming back to say goodbye to ruby that's a very very emotional scene because she goes to ruby what will be rubies deathbed and she says her final farewells to ruby and and has always been really jealous of ruby envious of rubies straight hair and her serve alabaster white skin you know and it's freckled and as all that wild red hair ruby is dining indiana's going to say goodbye to her so in this crying and i'm crying and i'm sure that lucy maud montgomery was crying and she wrote at st ann then says goodbye to ruby and leaves and there's a line in the book that says and that night ruby died of consumption and i remember thinking well who so if i start trying to

find it gives china as a whole new meaning to fast food like al hakim consumption so you know so that's another that's another from a third a third peril of a life of breeding occurs when i you know for many of us if we discovered after we want to read the books from the beginning right to the end and with this series say like to sue grafton mysteries a is for alibi and he is now for vengeance young that theres no perils involved in and just read and nothing's going to happen to you but when you read say a historical historical fiction that's in a long series or you spend a lot of time reading say the regency novels by georgette heyer or as i did i read all of the master and commander series by patrick o'brian the match or an anthem aubrey unnatural series i read them just in a row all twenty three i mean i've put down one pick up another and put finish that just and i was like transported back to the early nineteenth century i mean i was a they asked dean in a

hole it everybody you know i would just chalk knowingly about letters of marc and kevin everything on there and p and people of course would just like look at me like i was nuts but it really a one one day i mean i know that i realize i had gone too far because when they got a little bit of that very annoyed at a friend of mine and i said to him david you have blotted your copy book with me for over my land and he said what so those are three doesn't read perils of a life of freedom that you have to watch out for now the fourth earl of the life of reading is the most serious and i know we been really funny about the other perils and they are they are humorous but this one is really serious and you not when you when you go home to many whites and pick up the book you're going to read i why you think about

about on this particular pair if you are a reader you never know whether your memories are really your memories or if you have borrowed them from a book that you've read now let me give you an example my and my youngest daughter is a freelance theater director and she travels around showing them a home base she just really lives out of a suitcase and she goes wherever there's a job and directing and she and i are very close and we talk all the time and and i've been doing a lot of traveling and for she's been doing a lot of traveling so most of our conversations have been on cellphones issues and one airport and i'm in another airport and we only talk about the most important mother daughter things and one day we were talking and i said katie did i ever tell you about the dress i wore to my junior prom in high school and she said you went to your junior prom and high school what i don't like that

set the tone i said yes i went to my junior prom in high school i wanted someone named mike and she said oh really well what was your dress like i said oh okay haiti as it was an absolutely beautiful i said it had was very pale green and it had a tool skirt now in years past i would have said a tallie skirt and no doubt that it is the belly of the ball that i know it's pronounced to what i said it had a tool skirt and a couple an artist and katie said oh what's kept one as it was really hard to explain katie but i think there's something to do with pipe cleaners or something like that i was once telling this to somebody who was a seamstress and nephew dressmaker an endowment of the program in eugene oregon and she is sitting like right in front and when i said that about the pipe cleaners she like fell off her chair just a delight to see or so i said well you know i can't really explain about it i think the problem has to do with pipe cleaners and and then they're in kitty

said oh and as she said all pale green kaplan bought a stool skirt and then there's this long silence on the phone and i thought that you know that that call had been dropped because the silence went on for so much and i said i like a screen tv or you hear and this voice came back the kindest most loving voice that you have ever heard the kind of voice that you wish that your grown daughters would talk to you and kept waste all their lives katie said oh mommy i don't think that was your address and i said what was stress was set and she said if i'm not mistaken it was penny howard stress and rosenman to jordan's double date she said don't you remember her twin sister ping and more of the same dressed in the yellow well it's you know it's embarrassing to tell you

that i owned the book double date and i went and read it and not only was that penney's dress and not only did her twin sister pam were the same dressed in yellow that penny went to the prom with mike holmes she later married and double wedding after after breaking up for a little while in double feature i i own all of those now i know i didn't marry my dad still you know that's very clear to me i know why marry then it isn't mike but aside from that long little fact that i know for sure i had no idea what my wife in high school it was like anything as far as i'm concerned could have happened and probably did and so when you read it you have to be aware of that fact when you think about your past on an end when

it i've i frequently have to stop myself and say is this from other book that i read or did this really happen and a lot of times i'll never know because i remember the book if i did read it so those are the perils of the life of reading i'd shared with you the pleasures of a lifer reading i think he will agree with me that despite those dreadful perils that go along with a life of reading there is not one of you who probably would not opt as i would for a life of reading thank you very much you've been listening to nancy pearl author of book lust more book lust book christ and book lust to go see the frequent guest on npr's morning edition pearl spoke at the lawrence public library on nov second two thousand eleven for a complete list of books she referred to enter top visit our website k pr that hey you got

edu and go to the k pr prisons page and now for an up and coming off their she's not yet on nancy pearl's radar burbridge she notes arroyo of a late that caught the attention of amazon dot com serai one the amazon breakthrough novel award competition in a young adult category for her book on little wings on little wings will be published in the summer of two thousand thirteen by viking books for young readers a division of penguin books penguin books co sponsored the national competition along with amazon create space and publishers weekly regina joins us in the k pr studios want them thank you on little wings as about sixteen year old jennifer who discovers she is an aunt she's never before heard of she heads off to maine to discover this part of her family would you know take it from there jennifer it has huge decision to make when she finds out that her mother never told her about her and one and only relative thats levine hands she decides that it's an incident

cannot go unknown and so she makes the journey up to maine to meet her and to see as it quick report where and they're in the town she starts to unravel one piece of the time what it was that took her mother away from her home and caused her to deny it so completely that she never even told jennifer where she was from who these people were and believe the premise of the book is that it takes the entire village for heard uncover the true story what people in that village is a woman named oddly enough little regina to tell us about her well as they each year old ex movies starring hugh is in charge of the entire town no one in the town process little into a little says they see as ace wonky old woman who knows everyone and says the truth no matter how kohl's or giraffe navy and does it with a lot of humor and little

brings a lot of joy and levity to the writing because when no one else can just cut through the nuances and say it like it is little welt am still do it no matter who's there what the occasion there's a sixteen year old she's going away for the fervor and so of course you know there's gotta be a little summer romance has to be and for our young adult novel about a little romance but it is a very little romance it goes against really bad trend this young adult romance right now where it is something to see feels for this boy and that really is a common man he's about to turn eighteen years old and he's a prodigy and intelligent sensitive young man hands when they feel for each other never sparks into a physical relationship that like most young man's changes her family there might be one of the kind of

the little made numb to jennifer the protagonist bed that the real love stories are young love story's best was aligned to the herring in his own eye sees says that line really came for my own life i a memory has been i was seventeen we sell much in high school and i i remember like you know am one game thinking oh young love just never gets old what a really beautiful things about this book is every night jennifer and her aunt sarah and this young man nathan get together and dewit lines don't sweat that's about undone and how you selected the lines for that too read each night that is pivotal to the story and sat is the mother of the literature and it may end as a young boy's you where's ed seniors had trouble expressing himself and it often quote people to be able to say what he needed to say and to help him and tangled up thoughts of others from

his own she started a practice were once every day he could say what someone else had sad and what it meant and there is the time we have to speak for himself and that turned into their ritual of nightly mines near neighbors and every day he would come over and they would say a line of something that they will read that day that meant something to them and when jennifer comes to town they include her and the nice thing about doing mines is they can open up and say things that they're feeling without having to admit that it's their own words are exactly and but so it opens up a conversation on the butt and i've actually had several people contact me saying that they're now doing lines of members of their family today it helps it helps you express something holds you say something more intimate because you can kind of hide behind the other person saying that and although some of the lines are and classical poetry everything from the longfellow to billy collins there's also the ones that are just you know something i read on us cereal box today exactly and that's the rule

anything you read mandate be a cereal box or shakespeare if it if it tickles you if it insures you if it makes you remember it the concern for months and say well i didn't see that they how did you select the lines that they would say was a painstaking process just like really i minored and poetry and so i had a background with that if you could have seen me a look like i was living in a fort of poaching is stacked up all around me they were a letter in my house i was in the middle of the mall and i would flip through in no no no that's the wind and i would go to book after book looking for the words to express what that character was hearing and that's a painstaking whether beautiful thing to happen or that that's just a minute about the title on the lanes and little weems is italy says several things in the bike that little of course is the main character who is eighty years old

psy has a special tattoo on her back when it is an old tattooed from when she was a teenager and leans on her back it applies to little's means that it also there's a part in the berkshire a little as talking to jennifer about the trouble we get ourselves into a knife and she reminds her that we all have little wings but we're a little too so our wings a hyatt they're strong enough to desperately need to go and that's really one of the messages in the bike we have these little problems in life we also have little means that all of disappointment i'm visiting with regina so roy of a later she won the amazon breakthrough novel award for her debut novel on little wings pretty nick can you read an excerpt from a little wings for us the dna of mice and humans is a ninety percent identical ninety eight and somewhere in that two

percent is the difference between whiskered commenters and the people who read shakespeare and steady ptolemy we spent four days talking about an advanced placement biology <unk> johnson was convinced that all the secrets of the universe hid inside that tiny fact that two percent i believe in the secret of two percent my home and constance nebraska is ninety eight percent identical to the stoic thomas smith our main small homes tough country people who scraped together a modest living is raw scenery and cable television to make up for the isolation but so many things fit into that unpredictable two percent the entire atlantic ocean for instance not to mention an octogenarian movie star a secret my first heard eight other than those things mostly identical and the day everything changed the day finally knew how much i never knew follow the rule of two percent ninety eight percent normal i would have missed it altogether had i not called animal the paperback from my mother's book self ball working on an english

assignment i almost never saw the dog eared photograph stuffed deep in the crack of the bat cover almost didn't look twice at the end and face and so i did and it has this face wasn't known not entirely sea had the same freckles same golden olive skin i put down the mirror for sixteen years from the kitchen the smell of grilled onions wafted on the air and use drone from the living room the phone rang everything the same except the two percent that meant nothing would ever be the same again that's regina psoriasis reading from her debut novel on little wings regina thank you so much thinking instant pleasure again on little wings was the winner in the young adult category of the amazon breakthrough novel award competition on little wings will be released in the summer of two thousand and thirteen you can find out more every genus arise website regina steroid dot com i'm kate mcintyre kbr percent of the production of kansas public

radio at the university of kansas