Years ago at my job, the head of one of my work teams at the time had the idea to start our weekly meeting by giving someone five minutes to share something. The initial concept was that it could be anything. For example, the most creative use of this time was by the coworker who chose to poll us on what her roller derby name should be. However, since the intent was for everyone to get to know each other beyond the context of our work, most people created a brief slideshow about themselves, their interests, their personal history and—in this city full of transplants in which we live—where they were from and the journey that brought them here.
When my turn came around, on the heels of a cinephile who used his five minutes to talk about his favorite movies, I decided to share my personal history via my favorite books. Starting from childhood, I talked about the books that had been meaningful to me at a particular time in my life1.
Here’s a condensed version of what I shared:
As a little kid in Colombia, I loved a random little story about a tiny elephant and whimsical, rhymed children’s poetry:
As a slightly older kid in Watertown, New York, I was lucky to have a fifth grade teacher with excellent taste whose faves became my faves2.
In high school, I got my first taste of pretentious English major stuff3.
In college, I read more books than I could possibly remember, but a couple managed to stand out4.
By the time journalism school came around, I was reading fiction mostly for fun5.
At this point in my 5-minute presentation to my colleagues, I shifted gears. Having covered my formative years, I started into my adult life, which was at first also marked by a particularly nomadic existence. The rest of my slides were not about my favorite books as an adult, but books that had some relationship to the place I was living at a particular time.
The Orchid Their by Susan Orlean, in honor of the summer I spent living five minutes from the ocean in Palm Beach, Florida.
The Brothers K by David James Duncan, in honor of the first year in lived in Denver, not because the book has a connection to Denver but because in that year I met my husband, who recommended this work of art to me when our relationship was young and impressionable.
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, in honor of the three years I spend in Chicago before I returned to Denver.
Obviously, there are infinite books and stories that center on place and the characters’ relationship to where they live or grow up or where they happen to find themselves. But whether place is important to readers and whether it affects how we absorb a story is a different thing.
Take Pride and Prejudice. Austen’s English countryside is not a place that I have a specific physical connection to. I can picture Jane Bennet walking to Netherfield in the rain, and Elizabeth following in her footsteps once Jane has caught her fateful cold. But the specific visual of that path that my mind conjures only exists in my imagination. The grassy meadows, the trees, the mud, the slant of the sun in the sky—those pictures in my head carry no connection to the reality Austen was bringing to life in her books.
Having spent most of my reading life in the United States, and being assigned “the classics” as a young person, I didn’t have the opportunity to realize this kind of connection to a work of fiction—having an intimate knowledge of the physical landscape of the story—until I was a senior in high school reading Love in the Time of Cholera. The delta of the Magdalena River? I have seen those waters. I have smelled their smells. I know and am closely related to the kind of people reared by that geography.
I thought about what it meant to be pulled into a place I know as I retraced the steps of my life path through books for this 5-minute work exercise. But when I got to my current tenure Denver, I couldn’t come up with a favorite book about the city where I had already spent more of my life than anywhere else. It hadn’t really occurred to me to look for such a book in all my time here. And when I did, there wasn’t anything that sparked my interest. So it was a specific kind of thrill to begin reading Sabrina and Corinna by Kali Fajardo-Anstine in January of this year.
Fajardo-Anstine was born in Denver6 and she describes the city, the corners of it from which Latinos and others are being pushed out, with such painstaking specificity, that I sometimes felt compelled to put the book down, leave the house and go walk the steps her characters take. Staking a claim to this place, the landmarks and neighborhoods she names—not the ones manufactured from gentrification and real estate investment, but the ones she and her characters know—was part of her intent. For someone like me, who has lived lived here long enough to see and likewise bemoan the change her stories document, but who also arrived in this city with the endless wave of newcomers that dates back to the first white settlers here, Fajardo-Anstine draws lines around experiences I can only imagine.
What is it like to live in one place your entire life? What is it like to see it slipping away?
I have always thought about how books can connect you to where you are. Having moved so often in my life, they were often the only connection I had to where I was at a given moment in time. I am now more rooted in Denver than I have felt much of anywhere else—not just because of how long I have lived here, but because this is the birthplace of my children. The only place they know as home. Maybe they will know the answers to these questions.
What are you favorite places about where you are from or have been?
Many of them have been referenced on this blog before, in case they look/sound familiar.
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is the only good book in the Chronicles of Narnia. I said it.
Reading Austen is not pretentious. The literary bros who think they are too good for her, on the other hand . . .
I read Wide Sargasso Sea for a Caribbean lit class, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for a class on the “mystery and romance” of the American West. I miss being an English major.
I finished Kavalier and Clay laying on the empty floor of my first Chapel Hill apartment the afternoon I signed the lease, while sobbing through the last two chapters. Daniel Wallace was a UNC professor while I was a student there. The only assigned book of this era that I loved was the Obejas book, which was assigned to me by a Latino lit professor, a petite yet intimidating Harvard-educated lesbian who served on my thesis committee.
Others might use the phrase “Denver Native” in reference to her and as a Chicana with indigenous ancestry she probably has better claim on that title than most. I hate that phrase, though. I have hated it since I moved here because of how often white people use it to weaponize their tenure as if colonialist nativism isn’t a terrible thing.