Hi, Friends,
I’m a strong believer in finding the books that speak to us even when we are not looking for them. Many of us have experienced this bit of magic that can happen to readers. Welcome to our new regular feature where bookish folks from all over weigh in on a special book that found them at exactly the right moment. You never know, this may be how you find what you or someone you know most need to read right now.
Today we hear from Kolina Cicero, who writes fiction for adults and children which is to say she writes stories for humans. I learned about Kolina during a workshop we both attended with Leigh Stein. I found a kindred spirit: we both love and write about books and life and we both study Italian. Kolina, however is fluent. I’ll get there someday.
Above all, I am drawn to Kolina’s voice and sensibility - she writes about books the way I think about them as she does in her post, The Burden of Reading Books in the Current Conversation. Perhaps my favorite, though, is her most recent in which she describes the setbacks that led to her working as a substitute teacher for special ed students. After rejections from writing jobs that made her question her competence, she was called to substitute in a nearby school.
“I don’t have a degree in education, I’ve never taught in a classroom, and I have no special ed experience. There were more weird things about me having this job than there were normal things about it. But the principal assumed my competence. He told me on Tuesday that on my first day subbing, he popped into the classroom to check on me and saw that I possessed something you can’t teach: passion. He saw something in me and decided to provide me with the opportunity to live into it, and I really, really did.” - Kolina Cicero
She became “Ms. Cici” to the students who learned to read better because she assumed their competence, a lesson that has spread to the rest of her writing and and working life.
What book found you when you needed it most?
This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page
When and how did it find you (or how did you find it)?
Don’t hate me! I am sent a lot of galleys from publishers. It’s an incredible privilege, but it can also be a bit overwhelming. I only agree to be sent books that I actually think I would read, but they still pile up quickly, making my TBR shelf (yes, I have an entire shelf of to-be-read books) challenging to pilfer through at times.
This year, I decided I would do some damage on that shelf. I probably have 30 titles on there just waiting for me to choose them. One morning I was sitting at my desk in my office, trying to write something, when I looked over to my bookcase – not to be confused with the bookshelf in my bedroom, which is home to my TBR. I noticed a book lying horizontally atop a row of vertically shelved books. It was This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page. I pulled out it of my bookcase and moved it to my TBR shelf. It has a colorful stack of books on the cover and I figured it would be an uplifting read.
When it came time to pick out my next book, which I needed to be light and uplifting, I knew which one to grab.
Why it mattered
Minneapolis, where I live, is climbing out of a really rough time right now. When we were in the thick of what is now known as Project Metro Surge, I could only read the news for five minutes per day, some days less. I refrained from any type of social media (aside from Substack because my feed is mostly optimistic and always bookish), and I was trepidatious about reading any new-to-me book because I didn’t know what triggers could be inside. I thought This Book Made Me Think of You – a book about books and booksellers – was a pretty safe bet.
It was absolutely the right choice. And, in hindsight, I think it was the only book I could have read at that time. It’s about a woman whose husband has recently died, but before he did, he worked with a bookseller to handpick a book for her to receive every month for a year. Before the protagonist’s husband got sick, she was an avid reader. Once he became ill, she distanced herself from what mattered to her. With these 12 books, which she had to visit the bookshop each month to receive, her husband hoped to encourage her to reacquaint herself with the woman she once was.
With its throughline of a grieving widow, the story dove below surface level, giving it enough of an emotional arc for me to remain interested. But it was balanced with the kind of levity I needed at the time. It’s a jolly book set in a bookstore in jolly old England. And it was indisputably the right book at the right time.
Would you read it again?
Absolutely! But not for a while. I worry that reading it would bring me back to this particular time in my life when I needed it to escape.
What about you?
What book did you find when you wanted to escape? Did it work?
More on Kolina
Kolina Cicero is a writer of fiction interested in how absence shapes our lives. Her newsletter, The Underlined, celebrates what we love about literature. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, two human children, two geriatric cats, and a 100-pound puppy.
I love this series. Adding to my TBR.
Thank you for letting me rave about a book that spoke to me! I hope others read this book at the right time, too.