Every Friday was book day in our house. Well, not for anyone else, but for me. Every Friday my Dad would head off to work, like he always did, suit and tie, polished shoes, moustache blazing. And every Friday afternoon he would come up the driveway, tie a little loosened, moustache a little awry (it was a magnificent mo’ and probably deserves a blog of its own) with a brown paper bag tucked under his arm. I would watch him from the front room, trying not twitch the curtains too much as he came up the path with that slow loping gait of his. Unhurried, unflustered. That was my Dad.

He would come in the door, put his bag gently down, acting as if there was nothing unusual happening. He would continue on with his languid movements, kissing my Mum hello and pretending that he didn’t have a bounty of adventures under his arm. Meanwhile I would be hopping from one foot to the other, almost peeing my pants with excitement, and trying to act nonchalant (this was part of the charade we played) waiting, waiting. Hoping the paper bag was book-shaped and for me, and not Darrel Lee chocolate-shaped and for my stinking little brothers. Spoiler alert: it was always book-shaped.

I don’t know when bookdayFriyays started, but I lived for them.

And I don’t know if my Dad knew how much they meant to me. I wish now I’d told him. I wish I’d told him how I would wake up on Friday mornings with the delicious hope that today I would get a book. For it wasn’t like Christmas, when despite the threats of parents about good behaviour, we knew deep down that we’d at least get something. Bookdays weren’t guaranteed. Bookdays were a treat. And there is no day in the world that isn’t improved by having hope.

Eventually he would do that little cough he did before all important conversations, and say, “What’s in this bag, I wonder?” By then I’d be ready to lose my mind, but instead I would say, “Um, is it a Trixie Belden?” And for thirty six amazing weeks it was. Apparently as Trixie gained popularity among girls of a certain age, some of the books became difficult to source. So not only did he have to remember which one I was up to, but to find it in the bookshop after his “Friday business lunch” (it was the ’80s remember, and Bob approved of such things), no matter how elusive volume fourteen was. As the years went by the books changed, but to be honest, it’s the Trixies I remember the most.

And though I know that bookdays can’t possibly have been every Friday, when I rewind through the years, it feels like they were. It feels like I spent hours waiting by the window, and then even more hours reading on my bed, then later, under the covers, binge-reading by torchlight. I’d read it cover to cover on Friday, and then again over the rest of the week, savouringly. My Trixie addiction taught me to read for content and then for context, where on the second read I’d notice language constructs and finer details that I’d missed the first time. I still do that now, dog-earing pages, underlining, re-reading, and looking for treats that some authors leave for people like me who love the way words are put together.

People sometimes say I read a lot, and it makes me tilt my head to the side as I wonder what they mean. Compared to what? Compared to whom? Reading does so much for me: it’s where I learn, it’s how I make sense of the world, it’s my form of mediation, it’s where I make new friends and catch up with old ones, it’s where I go on adventures and lose my sense of self. I’ve lived a thousand lives through words laid carefully on pages, honed by wordsmiths. To read “a lot” is to live fully.

I do wish I’d had the chance to tell my Dad about the lives he’s helped me live. It’s been a wild ride: it’s been big and bold and full of bright colours. My lives have stretched through the centuries and even through the worlds: “there are other worlds than this.”* and my Dad gave them to me in a brown bag.

I hope he knew.

*From the Dark Tower by Stephen King

She’s had a life..

One rainy Friday afternoon, my Father, Peter brought me a book home. I think he grabbed it on a whim, but it started something. The book was this one:

Trixie Belden, The Secret of the Mansion.

I don’t think he knew it then, but that quick little purchase started a ritual that changed my life.  I remember ripping that bag open, and scanning the first sentence “Oh Moms, I’ll just die if I don’t get a horse”.  I ran to my bedroom and didn’t come out until I’d finished the last words.  For I too, would die if I didn’t get a horse.  I had no idea who ‘Moms” was.

And then I flipped it over, and I read it again.

The following Friday, another brown paper bag from the bookshop, another Trixie.  And so the habit was born.  I don’t think Peter knew just what he’d gotten into, for author Julie Campbell and then mysteriously after book six, Kathryn Kenny, were prolific.  They wrote thirty-six Trixie Belden books. THIRTY SIX.  At a book a week, that’s nine months.  In the time it would take to grow a human baby, my Dad grew a monster.  A reading monster.  It was voracious.

And so that is what happened.  Every. Single. Friday.

Some Fridays he would have “lunch meetings”.  It was back in the 80s, before everyone got a work ethic, and when long boozy lunches were an accepted and expected part of business.  When he got home he’d be so “tired” from his busy day that Mum would make him go straight to bed.  Yet still the brown paper bag.  Still the book.

He never forgot.

Of course, eventually we moved on from Trixie, and through other catalogues: Dahl, Tolkien, Twain, Steinbeck.  Then later; King, Hornby, Bryson.  And finally, right near the end, Nick Earls.  By the time we got to Nick I’d long since moved out of home, and so we would have quick chats over the phone or send emails about what we were reading.  We had lots of cross-overs, but our tastes diverged at Peter Carey.  I couldn’t do Carey.

In the later years, we had switched roles a little, I didn’t do it every Friday, but I did sometimes buy my Dad a book.  The last one I got him was The True Story of Butterfish, by Nick Earls.  He never finished it.  Before he could, the cancer devoured him, from the inside out, and Butterfish was left sitting on the bedside table.

A few months later I was sitting at my desk, reading Butterfish, and I came across a passage I particularly liked.  Forgetting my Dad was dead, I absent-mindedly picked up the phone and called his office to discuss it.  A woman answered, and the pain and the sad came over me in a hot and cold wave.  I hung up quickly, without telling her I was calling to speak to my dead father.

My Dad always thought I’d write a book one day.  I don’t know if I have a book in me, but I do have a blog now.  And for now, that is enough.  I hope my Dad would like reading it.

…From The Ashers xx

What book memories do you have?

Did your Dad do cool stuff for you when you were a kid?

It’s book week in Queensland, and the culmination today at the children’s school was a dress up parade.  Come as your favourite character.   I was seriously tempted to join in, because I does love me a good bit o’ fiction.

It was a close thing, but I didn’t know if Annie Wilkes from Misery (remember the sledge hammer?) was appropriate for the Prep to Year 5 demographic.

And that got me thinking about all things bookish.

So here goes, confession time: I’m a book nerd.

The proof is as follows:

• I have four bookcases of grown up books, that are overflowing, and stacked in all directions.
• I write my name and the date in all my books.
• They are put away alphabetically.
• I do not borrow books, nor do I lend them.
• I still have my first ever “proper” book, Fox in Socks. It’s from my second birthday, I know this because my Mum has written 1973 inside the front cover (!)
• I have one bookcase full of children’s books.  These books do not belong to my children.
• Once upon a time, a particularly shithouse boyfriend threatened to burn all my books, and I thought I might die.
• Sometimes I just sit and hang out with my books… Okay, that’s probably enough right there.

Over the years, I’ve read a few books, but more interestingly, I think they’ve read me.  I like to underline passages, and when I go back and peep at my scratchings, it’s like I’m gazing back, at the me of back then.  Remembering what moved me and grooved me.  What I thought was clever, or funny, or the perfect sentence.  I’m always in search of the perfect sentence.

It’s fun to go back and try and imagine being in love with Edward from Twilight all over again, or to go further back and see myself distraught and blubbering over The Bridges of Madison County.  Not my finest moments.  But there’s so much more.

Pissing myself at Nick Earls, (any book, they’re all hilarious).  Freaking out at Pennywise from ‘It’. Finding a voice speaking to me from the pages of ‘Catcher in the Rye’.  Getting lost in Middle Earth on a quest for the One Ring.  Deciding to defend my virginity at all costs after reading ‘Forever’.

And then further back again, to simpler times in the Enchanted Wood, or hanging out with The Famous Five.

I don’t know when my book addiction first began, but I do know that it was nurtured and grown by my wonderful father, Peter.  But that’s a story for another day.  Maybe tomorrow.  Pop in, I think I might tell you a story about an amazing bloke…

What books do you love?

Do you lend your books out?