by Kristi Southern, Book Review Editor
“New library card” has been on my to-do list for a few months now, and just last week, as summer is winding down, and many are facing the impending doom of getting back to reality, I finally crossed it off.
In January of this year, I relocated, perhaps temporarily but currently indefinitely, from Greenville, NC, to Atlantic Beach. I had only one elective left to complete before earning my MBA from ECU, and after a significant life change last year, I thought maybe staying at the family beach house could help me push through and finish up that last course – and that finishing up the MBA program would be a healthy accomplishment that I certainly needed. I had sort of lost my ability to focus, had definitely lost my ability to read and comprehend and enjoy plowing through books in the capacity that I had been used to before. So, off to the beach, a healing place for many.
I don’t care how cliché that may sound; there’s certainly something to it. Being alone in a new place in the cold months of January and February, walking on a mostly empty beach in my puffy ECU parka and legwarmers (that I keep thinking I’m going to bring back in style) was absolutely a start to healing. So much so, I suppose, that I didn’t leave, as planned, at the end of February when my eight-week elective ended. I decided to stay on at least through the summer – prime time for the beach, right?
So as much as the ocean is associated with healing, it is also associated with those beach reads. I mean, if we’re going to sit by the water all day, we for sure need a book in our hands or at least in our bag within easy reach. By March, “new library card” had made it to my to-do list.
Growing up, I was an avid reader. By high school, admittedly, reading was replaced with hanging with friends, and then by college by classes and studying. Just kidding – during college, reading was still replaced by hanging with friends, but by graduate school, any reading for fun was replaced with four novels a week for my literature classes. I had a different perspective on school by then, so there was actually an element of fun to it: it was fun to read and fun to discuss in class. I had evolved. Once I began teaching, though, reading for fun was out the window. My reading consisted of student papers and required a pen for comments. Is it dramatic to say that the thought of reading an actual book was temporarily ruined for me at that stage? It feels true. Luckily, it didn’t last.
When I taught at Edgecombe Community College in Tarboro, NC, my office was located in the campus library, and I discovered reading for fun once more – and it was on. I was checking out books from that library and taking advantage of interlibrary loan services, and I am proud to say that the pace didn’t slow. I was addicted again, and I became addicted to Goodreads and completing – and surpassing – my annual reading goal. When I left teaching and opened a restaurant, (quite a pivot, I know) I moved from the campus library to Greenville’s Sheppard Memorial. I would walk out of there once a week with a stack of books, feeling like I was leaving the mall with bags of purchases – but even better, because it was all free. I couldn’t check books out and read them fast enough, and I wasn’t picky or hard on myself for not being so. I had read plenty of “literature” in grad school, so I wasn’t afraid of fun popular fiction in the vein of Gone Girl that seemed to be everywhere. The television was off, and I considered anything I read to be smart entertainment. This lasted for years, which you can verify via my Goodreads account and yearly reading lists – passing my goal by 45 books in 2019, I might add.
That changed last year when a significant loss changed my life – and, it seemed, my brain: I couldn’t read a thing nor did I have any desire to do so. The television came on, and the television did not go off. For months.
Margaret, our fearless NCLR leader, was never out of touch with me, though. She was there to check in, and she was there – somehow at just the right time, in retrospect – to nudge me back to the computer for a few small NCLR tasks. Before too, too long, I was able to get my brain to work just enough to email a reviewer or request a review copy from a publisher here and there. By the end of 2024, I was able to ease back into a role with NCLR and was prepared to take my last MBA course in the new year. By the time that course ended, I was settled into the beach house and ready to re-read some Joanna Pearson selections for my return to review writing. Mission accomplished. Plus a handful of other books since. And finally, last week, I went and got that dang library card, from what I think is a quite lovely library right near the Morehead City waterfront.
Walking through the stacks of fiction, though, I realized I was facing a dilemma. I wanted to start checking books out that very visit; however, I was already sitting on two collections of short stories by North Carolina authors for NCLR reviews, and I had my eye on several others on our list of new NC books that I was hoping to get to before another reviewer reached out to snatch them. I was back – maybe not fully back in beast-reading mode, but I feel like I’m getting there. I went from zero desire to even think about reading to worrying that I have too much I want to devour, and our community of NC authors just keep pumping them out.
The library card helped me see this, but I think it’s NCLR and such a lovely community of authors and educators and students and all our other contributors who have really helped me get here (well, that and the beach). The television is once again off. There’s always a book in my beach chair’s back pocket. There’s a stack of books to read on multiple tables in the house. Every morning, I am checking in with y’all via email – our reviewers, authors, and publishers.
Yes, I get that I am an extreme case, that maybe NCLR or the library isn’t going to necessarily save us all, but it certainly can help. Whether you use reading as an escape or a way to heal, or whether you can’t read at all for certain windows of time, I hope that you have a literary community in some capacity to turn to or participate in. Start with your local library, of course, but I’m not afraid of a shameless plug, suggesting you consider turning to NCLR for that literary fix.
I’m still at the beach. Here’s where that “indefinitely” comes in. If the summer is good, the fall must be pretty good, too, so I only owe it to myself to stick around and find out. What better place to read, right? May you all find your “beach” and your literary community as well. I’m only an email away if you want to join mine. There’s a whole world of NC authors for you to check out, and I promise they can at least give you a reprieve from getting back to the grind this fall.