The first book I ever read was Fun With Dick and Jane. I spent weeks sitting next to my grandmother working through each page, one sentence a day. As soon as I finished that book, I immediately looked for my next one. And the next. And the next. I wanted to read every (picture) book to prove how smart I was to all of the adults I knew. 

I eventually graduated to reading chapter books, which was just another bragging opportunity until other kids my age could do the same. My first “book club” was formed in the middle of my second-grade lunch line when I would bond over the Junie B. Jones series with my crush who stood behind me. 

I could say I began to love reading from the moment I finished my first picture book, but that would be a lie. I realize now that, back then, I only loved the validation I received from learning how to read. 

I really began to love reading when I was in the fourth grade and a few boys in my class introduced me to the world of Percy Jackson. Being ten years old and not knowing how a book series worked, I started by reading the third book in the second series – a fact that drives me crazy to this day.

Enter: my second “book club.” I was one of six kids reading the series together, and we all assigned ourselves to a hero.

I credit Rick Riordan for showing me that reading can create communities. Bonding with people over the enjoyment of a fictional world and its characters is the best feeling reading has ever brought me.

I proudly became a secondary library to my friends. If our school library didn’t have the book they wanted in stock, I would eagerly offer one of mine to them and ask them for reading updates so we could talk about it. When I graduated high school and lost an outlet for sharing my favorite books, I started an Instagram account where I reviewed books. It desperately needs to be updated. 

I grew up in a family that made fun of Harry Potter fans, so I was alone in my love for books. My parents would dread driving into the city with me because they knew I would beg to go into Books A Million. I could have spent hours in the store, taking every single book off of the shelf just long enough to read the blurb on the back page or the inside of the dust jacket – which is something my family learned very quickly. I would be given a time limit to browse the shelves before I had to leave, a new book in my hand or not. 

Knowing that I will never have enough time to read all of the books written in my lifetime haunts me more than any ghost ever could.

In my childhood bedroom, I have a bookshelf that is organized by genre. In my college apartment five hours away, I have miscellaneous books stacked against a wall. If I tried to organize them by color or author or genre, it would be like a Jenga game that ends with my roommates thinking we’re under attack. I kind of like the disorder anyway. 

It’s always been impossible for me to tell people about my favorite book or my favorite author. I have so many favorites that make me feel a myriad of different emotions. My favorite school-assigned read is Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. My most tearstained book is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. My favorite romance is Happy Place by Emily Henry. My favorite mystery is The Maidens by Alex Michaelides. If you ask for the book that made me love reading, I’ll tell you it’s The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan.

---

Lyndsey Summers (she/her) is from the small town of McKenzie, Tennessee, and her grandest experiences live within the pages of her favorite books. She is a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in journalism and minoring in English and advertising/public relations. She has worked as a general news reporter for her local newspaper, The McKenzie Banner, and is a social media intern for her university’s Student Life department. In her free time, you’ll likely find Lyndsey reading, adding to her Pinterest boards, or curating new Spotify playlists.

My bookshelf is young, vibrant, and hopelessly romantic. As a child, my elementary school enrolled every student in Accelerated Reading. In the program, students read books and took tests on them to receive points toward an overall goal. Every child was given a level that reflected their reading abilities. My level was concerningly low. Because of my AR results, I had to spend my free time in a classroom with a reading coach while other students played computer games and watched The Game Plan starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for the seventh time. I was furious. AR was over in middle school, but I continued to be separated into an extra reading class. I was confused and angry. I knew I didn’t belong there, but I couldn’t get out. One day, my English teacher told me to pick any book from her bookshelf to read for fun. The book I chose was an ambitious novel far beyond my reading level. That book was Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

I will never forget the experience I had reading Twilight for the first time. I was transformed into an alternate universe I couldn’t escape from. At that moment, I discovered I wanted to create worlds of my own for others to read. During the pandemic, I returned to Twilight as a familiar place, yet an escape during a time of chaotic uncertainty. It was because of my return to my favorite book that I was inspired to write How to Write a Book. All I wanted to do during the pandemic was live out my dream of traveling to the real Forks, Washington, seeing the country, and writing a book. So, I created a world where I did just that. 

Another small spark of joy during the chaos of the pandemic was my rabbit Bumbles. A fair warning, rabbits are extremely difficult pets to take care of. They eat three different types of meals every day, do everything you ask them not to, and must be read to every night. Going into high school, I realized there were a lot of books I missed out on as a kid because I was told I wasn’t smart enough to read them. One of those infamous series was Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling. I borrowed the first book from a classmate and decided to read it out loud to Bumbles. He loved it! Each night, he sat patiently beside me as I read, giving each character their own voice and personality. We read every book in the series together and bonded in a way I would have never thought possible, if not for Harry Potter.

I owe myself to the books I have read. They have shaped my confidence in myself, my dreams of being an author, and my relationships with those I love. I continue to read every day whether they are bedtime stories to Bumbles, escapes from reality, or a way to connect with other people. A book is read differently by everyone, but it brings us all together to explore the unknown. I hope to create and explore hundreds of the world’s books have to offer within my lifetime.

---

Hannah McInturff is an independent writer studying Cinema and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. She enjoys all forms of storytelling and shares her love of reading with her rabbit Bumbles who has inspired many of her works. Apart from writing, Hannah paints portraits and landscapes and participates on her university’s ultimate frisbee team.

When I sat down to write this post, my first thought was “Oh, I don’t have any pictures of my bookshelf.” The second was, “My bookshelf looks a bit odd right now anyhow.” There is a small selection of my Redwall books (ever-precious childhood loves), and my large collectibles—those I deemed too fragile or valuable to risk in boxes and packed in suitcases instead. Or too sentimental. During Mom’s fire evacuation drills when I was a kid—the forests of the California mountains are particularly prone to burning—Italian Folktales was always, every time, the first thing in the laundry hamper-cum-emergency suitcase.

My bookshelf is less a bookshelf, and more a scattered collection at this point in my life. It is in boxes and suitcases, with only a few unpacked onto random shelves in my parent’s house. I moved only a couple of weeks ago, coming back home to California for a brief while after two years away. I started those two years with only a careful selection of my books—those in progress, those most dear, those most likely to be useful (I was there to study, after all). I try to limit myself, during each move, to only ten or fifteen books, but the collection inevitably grows and grows. Some, I gain because of classes. For my Master’s alone, I probably grew my collection by almost twenty or thirty books. Others are gifts, or irresistible bookstore finds, or recommendations from friends.

I shipped five boxes of just books here to California (USPS Media Mail is a fantastic resource, I’d have spent a fortune on overweight suitcases without it).

Many of the books that come with me every move are the heavy ones, ironically enough. My two copies of Shakespeare’s Complete Works (one decorative, one for notes), my one-volume copy of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, Italian Folktales, of course. My collectible Illiad and Odyssey. The fantasy novels closest to the top of my to-be-read list. There are others too, though, that always make the cut. Imaginative Writing, and Tell It Slant, and On Writing. Flash Fiction International has gone with me everywhere since sometime halfway through high school. Castaways of the Flying Dutchman since sixth or seventh grade. I can be so horribly sentimental.

I think that’s part of the beauty of books though, the sentimentality. My childhood favorites have irrevocably shaped the way I see the world and how I approach life. My favorite books continue to have a huge impact on how I go about my life, my craft, and my perception of people and the world. So of course they are sentimental, are precious. They are pieces of me.

One day, I hope to have a library of bookshelves to organize my collection. No books relegated to boxes, or being hidden in double-stacked shelves. No precarious piles, or mix-matched sorting due to lack of space. I want one of those rolling ladders, and a window nook, and plenty of pillows and blankets. A little table for tea and chocolate. We can’t forget the chocolate.

---

In her chapbook, In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022), Valyntina Grenier explores the destructive human impact on the environment as well as society’s inhibiting effect on natural human freedoms. Drawing on current events and creating deep environmental allegories for our world, Grenier simultaneously chastises our ways of life while espousing a deep sense of hope for the future.

The strange, disjointed structure of Grenier’s poetry allows for a free-flowing structure, one in which the tone and feelings of the words carry just as much weight as the narrative they tell. As she notes in the introduction, Grenier dictated much of In Our Now into the Notes app of her phone, creating typos and unexpected meanings that led her to favor “sound over sense” (vi). Grenier’s poetry breaks spontaneously in the middle of lines, attaching slashes to the ends of words in order to equate many things at once without breaking stride. When she discusses police violence, Grenier notes:

This structure allows her to put emphasis on every word without breaking up the thought, allowing everything to flow together. In other places, she uses made-up words like “unself-conscious” to illuminate her points, despite their occasional lack of grammatical sense (Grenier 3). Finally, she writes the word “with” by putting the shorthand “w/,” which creates a sense of urgency throughout and emphasizes the currentness of the issues she discusses (Grenier 6).

Throughout In Our Now, Grenier harkens back to historical events and criticizes modernization as throwing a false blanket over the past’s natural truths. In “Important Classes,” for example, Grenier notes that “precious history paddles a canoe” while “corporate engineers are reinventing love” (2). While the past floats along at its own pace, Grenier demonstrates that modern day invention and manufacturing (through corporate means) are eager to place their own visions on the world. This modern vision, she notes, creates a new sense of order in life. It kills off the “strong desire to / live to / lounge in queerness / with no address,” a luxury of previous times (Grenier 9). While Grenier is also a LGBTQ+ rights advocate, she uses “queerness” here to more broadly regard non-conformity as a whole (9). Queerness becomes her counterpoint to a world “sweetened beyond recognition[,] a blemish free plastic dimension” (Grenier 9). Modern advances in everything from manufacturing to social norms only obscure the messy, strange business of authentically living.

In her collection, Grenier highlights the inherent sexuality in nature as something which we’ve obscured in our drive for progress. In “The Flower’s I,” she refers to the pitcher plant’s “arc of corseted breasts / crowned w/ clitoria,” turning a solitary flower into a veritable factory of sex and life (Grenier 12). Grenier urges us to “call the flower sex-worker,” pointing out the shameless counterparts to stigmatized positions in our own society (13). In the garden of life, nature’s sex drive “match[es] the / symbiosis of desire / in the garden on fire” as it was long ago (Grenier 13). Modern day prudishness, then, stands in stark contrast to nature, where sex is not only destigmatized, but glorified.

Grenier goes on to speak on the selfishness of human nature, mentioning the way that flowers take part in every creation around them and yet humans seem trapped in helping only themselves (Grenier 7). As she notes, “cost and taste make us mortals risk covid for a burger and fries,” which are trivial and short-sighted compared to the “trial and error” and boundless joy of haphazard creation which the rest of nature seems engaged in (Grenier 7). Once again, we see human selfishness contrasted with the creative impulses of the natural world. Grenier points out that human drives for success actually lead us further into error than following our natural selves. Much as she mentions Covid, Grenier discusses a variety of current events, from climate change to race riots. Speaking on American civil unrest after George Floyd’s murder, Grenier reflects that “we make disasters,” humans harming one another more than disordered nature ever could (5). Thus our order becomes not only artificial, but actively malignant.

While she explores current events, though, Grenier never loses sight of human ties to nature. Equating pollution directly to race riots, she notes that “people see nature’s peaceful stirring as a riot of spring cities” (5). Questioning her own complicity in such issues through white privilege, Grenier calls on us to “protest / Harvest/ raze/ torch / the garden” and “plant again,” recreating nature anew (6-7). This of course has something to do with nature, but it also says something about what we as humans must do to our society if we wish it to recover. The artificial structures we’ve built up, she argues, will only stand as long as we are unwilling to create structural change. Just as we must turn back to nature to find the good in life as a whole, we must remake racist structures in order to find the good in ourselves.

This is Grenier’s central point in her chapbook: that we can always make things better. We can absolutely burn down unwieldy structures, destigmatize sex, and bring back the gorgeous disorder of life that nature promises us. Our modern lives don’t need to be handicaps to our happiness, but we have allowed them to be. In In Our Now, Grenier masterfully renders the fact that we can shake off all our artificially-constructed woes, but we have to take up the shovels ourselves.

In Our Now is available from Finishing Line Press

---

Scott Sorensen is a junior at Dartmouth College studying English while performing standup, writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern satire magazine, and helping edit the Stonefence Review. Scott dreams of becoming the first Latvian man to win an MMA championship, which is pretty unlikely given the fact that he is not Latvian and has no idea how to fight.