CHIMACUM – Nancy Pearl is a spark plug bursting with joy, so it comes as a surprise when she says she grew up in a house where she didn’t feel safe.
That unhappy environment drove her out, even as a grade-schooler, so she found refuge at the public library in her Detroit neighborhood.
“On Saturdays, I would wake up early, pack a lunch and be there waiting for the doors to open,” remembered Pearl, who went on to become a librarian in Seattle, author of the best-selling Book Lust — and inspiration for a librarian action figure.
But just when some 170 people who came to hear her at Chimacum High School on Wednesday night may have thought Pearl was about to tell a sad story, the tiny woman at the podium went careening down another path, into a kind of Oz where she’s frolicked happily since.
“I’ve had a wonderful life. Reading has brought me enormous pleasures, enormous opportunities,” Pearl said.
As a very young girl, she read dog and horse stories; on her 13th birthday she was allowed to venture into the adult section and immediately seized Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
Book Lust buds
And then, early this decade, Sasquatch Books’ Gary Luke asked her to write a collection of 200 “quirky categories,” as he put it, of recommended pleasure reading.
She produced Book Lust (2003), then More Book Lust (2005) and Book Crush (2007), which offers 1,000 book recommendations for children and teens.
‘Superstar librarian’
Today, Pearl is a “superstar librarian,” in the words of Jefferson County Library director Ray Serebrin.
She’s a National Public Radio commentator and traveling lecturer who, after her talk in the high school auditorium, autographed not just her books but the action figures created in her image.
The long-skirted figure’s action is one of shushing, yet the life-size Pearl doesn’t seem like the type. Instead, she urges everybody to give in to the pure delight of reading one novel after another — and if the book doesn’t rivet, she says, toss it aside.
Here’s Pearl’s policy: If you’re 50 or younger, give a book 50 pages to get good. At the bottom of page 50, ask yourself if you care about the characters and if you’re savoring the prose. If not, blithely find something else to curl up with.
But then, “at age 51, I realized that time is short and the world of books is really, really large,” Pearl said.
“My way of dealing with that is if you’re 51 or older, subtract your age from 100 — that number gets smaller every year — and that is the number of pages you should read before you can legitimately stop reading.”
So when you reach age 100, “you can legitimately judge a book by its cover.”
Of course, Pearl hopes people will find not only books that enchant them but also stories that spark discussions.
She was an originator of the “community read” concept in which the people of a city or county read one book during one time period and meet to talk about it at the library or other public space.
Such get-togethers show how people from differing backgrounds can be moved by the same stories. They can agree or disagree over meanings and motivations, “and that’s fine,” Pearl said. “From learning to disagree civilly, great things will come.”
Pearl ended her talk by quoting another woman who lusted for the written word.
“When the Day of Judgment dawns,” Virginia Woolf said some 77 years ago, “the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.'”
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Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@ peninsuladailynews.com.