Gratitude for the Books That Changed Us

A Thanksgiving post from my family

I was thankful this weekend to have most of my extended family home for Thanksgiving. I spent time with my daughters, my brothers, my parents—all a blessing that I don’t take for granted.

After a Friday dinner of pulled pork, corn bread, cole slaw, kale salad, roasted potatoes, and eight kinds of dessert, we sat around a fire in the living room at my brother’s house in upstate New York, not far from where we grew up, and talked for hours. Actually, “lounged” might be a more appropriate word than “sat”—my brother and sister-in-law have the most amazing family-sized couch unit ever. Furthermore, as my younger daughter pointed out, we conversed only when my one-year-old niece was napping. While she was awake, we mostly watched her. She is the bonus baby of my brother’s late-in-life first marriage, belonging to a generation that is otherwise mostly grown up, and we all just want to drink her in.

So, as we lounged around conversing when-we-weren’t-watching-the-baby, I tossed out a question inspired by Diane’s Wednesday post: What book have you read, at any time in your life, that made you grateful to have read it? The answers were windows into our interests and concerns.

My younger daughter chose a book she’s mentioned before, Heartstopper by Alice Oseman. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you will, because it’s been turned into a critically acclaimed Netflix series with two seasons so far. Heartstopper offers both much-needed queer representation—characters who are Black and trans, demisexual, nonbinary, etc.—as well as a friendship and romance plot line that “a lot of teenagers need because… it gives teens a lot of credit and takes teens seriously without making them like adults,” my daughter said. “I’m grateful on behalf of teenagers who need to see that, but also queer adults who needed something like that when they were teens.”

My 13-year-old niece cited the historical novel The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen. She said it was “a reeeeeeeally good book,” and when I pressed a little to find out why she was grateful for it, she added, “I guess I learned something.” That’ll shut the adults up. But I suspect if you check out The Devil’s Arithmetic, you’ll find it more compelling than just an educational read.

My mom was the only other one to offer up fiction for her gratitude, specifically biographical fiction. She’s read pretty widely in this genre, so she didn’t mention a particular title, but she did say she enjoys when an author takes the biographical facts, fills in some assumptions, and draws out a story based on them. “It makes a good read,” she said.

Beyond that, everyone turned to non-fiction. My older daughter cited a book that I now want to read, The 5 Personality Patterns by Steven Kessler. She was quick to explain that it’s not a book about pigeonholing people into types like some popular “personality tests.” Rather, as she explained it, “Here are five different ways people tend to act when they’re stressed out, and here’s what they need in order to be able to relax… Then you start to see patterns in people and interact with them, knowing what they actually need when they’re stressed. And you also start appreciating the skills that come with those patterns.” It also helps you recognize your own patterns of behavior, she noted, and “more quickly realize when you’re stressed out what you can do to help yourself… Rather than being about how to categorize people, it's about learning these patterns in order to recognize them, and through recognizing them, be stressed less.” Sounds good to me!

On the topic of self-actualization in groups of five, my sister-in-law said she and my brother both liked The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman, which everyone in our generation was familiar with—it was a #1 bestseller—and therefore set off quite a conversation. In case you’re not familiar with the premise, the book’s description says it’s about “learning to express love in your spouse’s language,” and it lays out five common ways in which different people find expressions of love. Not everyone “hears” it the same way. My brother and his wife said they read it out loud to each other, which I found touching. “It’s definitely a good book to read to each other rather than by yourself,” my brother said. “You get a lot more out of it because you discuss it as you go.”

My own choice was also a book meant to help people with a major life need: sleep. I have become such an evangelist for Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker, that people are sick of hearing about it, but it was definitely the most important book I read this year, and it has given me much more respect for the importance of getting a full night of sleep every night—or at least giving myself and those around me an eight-hour “sleep opportunity.”

My brother—the one who read The 5 Love Languages with his wife—said he was grateful for the history he learned from The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto, which is one of my favorite history books, too. It tells the “lost” story of the Dutch settlement of Manhattan, before the English took over and forever changed the narrative. When it was published in 2004, The Guardian wrote that The Island at the Center of the World describes “in its elegant, vivid pages the first 40 or so years of the European occupation of Manhattan, and in so doing it brings to speaking life the native Americans, the first English explorers, the Dutch colonists, the polyglot settlers, and finally the advance guard of the British empire as it seized New Amsterdam at cannon point...” The book taught my brother, as promised, “the history that I never knew.”

My other brother—the one with the fireplace and the comfy couch—cited Thoreau’s Walden as the book he’s most grateful for. “When I read that book, years ago, it changed my life,” he said. “It spoke to something I had been thinking about for a long time. It was like I had found a partner in thinking about those things.” I was surprised by this, not because it didn’t fit with what I know about my brother—it does—but because Walden is one of the books I’m most grateful for myself, though I’m not sure we’ve ever spoken of it.

In fact, I was astonished that both of my brothers chose books that are probably in my top 20 of all time, which tells you, I guess, that the acorns don’t fall far from the tree or from each other.

We three acorns agreed on something else as well. After our pulled pork, potato, and pie-palooza, we took a 20-minute tromp through the woods behind my brother’s house with my husband and daughters, climbing over fallen ash trees—the emerald ash borer continues to wreak havoc in our woods—and swooshing through ankle-high leaf litter to the creek, which we all said looked cold but which was too far down the bank to dip even a brave hand into. We watched the water push past for a few minutes in the dusky light. Past the creek’s edge, the path was pretty well blocked—at least until my brother can get out there with a chainsaw and clear some more of the fallen trees. We turned back, and at a junction in the trails, my New York brother said to my Florida brother that when they were teenagers, they would have decided this was a great night to sleep out in the woods. My Florida brother agreed. Now, my New York brother went on, I have a really nice king-sized bed. He gestured up to the house, and my Florida brother laughed. He was wearing a borrowed winter hat, huddling his shoulders into his leather jacket. I thought about the proclamation I’d made a few years ago myself, after two decades of family and Girl Scout tent camping trips: I was done sleeping on the ground.

We tromped out of the woods, over the half-constructed stone bridge my brother will keep building next spring, and made a stop at the chicken coop, where he picked up three eggs—two small brown ones and an impressively large green one. As we hiked back up the lawn toward the house and the fire and the comfy couch, I was more grateful for my long down coat and for my family than for anything Thoreau had written.

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash