branta

by Kirsty Logan

When I was four years old, my father sat next to my bed and read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ aloud to me as I fell asleep. His voice got deeper and quieter as he drifted off, the poem so familiar he didn’t need to refer to the book in his hand. I thought that the ‘Michaelangelo’ the ladies talked of referred to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I liked to think I was the only four year old in the world who could recite reams of Eliot.

When I was eight I sat in a deckchair in the back garden in the rain, holding an umbrella and a paperback. My whole world was the patter of rain above me and the chill of my feet on the wet grass. My father told me I could read anything in his library; I read Stephen King’s The Shining because it had a bloody axe on the cover and J.G. Ballard’s Crash because it had a half-naked lady. Both seemed like things I should not be reading, and I barely understood a word. I liked to think I was the only eight year old in the world who read books about axes and naked ladies.

When I was twelve I had my first secret girlfriend; we exchanged closed-mouth kisses and our favourite books. She gave me illustrated hardbacks on revolutions, executions, and hundred-year-old jails; I gave up my Mallory Towers series and all my secrets. It lasted a month before she ran off with an older boy. I liked to think I was the most heartbroken twelve year old in the world.

When I was sixteen I only read books by and about sad girls: Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Susanna Kaysen. I thought that Virginia Woolf, walking into the lake with her pockets full of stones, made suicide romantic. I wrote my own sad-girl poetry and performed it to my cat. I liked to think I was the most misunderstood girl in the world.

When I was 20 I spent my days in the university library with Proust and Pound, prowling between the stacks until closing time. On weekends I worked in a local bookshop, putting discount stickers on the covers of endless crime thrillers and Booker winners. After a few years I graduated with a hangover, a broken heart, and a back bent from carrying armfuls of books.

Now, at 24, I have more books than I could read in a lifetime. I keep books at my house, my mother’s house, my father’s. My girlfriend jokes that she needs to buy me a bookcase for the stack I keep next to her bed; I take it as a personal slight and resolve not to let the pile get taller than my knee. I tell myself that books are a vital part of life. I tell myself that education means reading. I tell myself that literacy is a sign of intelligence, and intelligence is attractive.

It’s 8pm on a Thursday night and all I have touched today is books.