Morningstar: Growing Up With Books

by Ann Hood

Overview

“[An] enchanting journey through Ann Hood’s early fascination with reading.… Book lovers will find Morningstar irresistible.”—Lynn Sharon Schwartz, author of Ruined by Reading

Growing up in a mill town in Rhode Island, in a household that didn’t foster a love of reading, novelist Ann Hood discovered nonetheless the transformative power of literature. She learned to channel her imagination, ambitions, and curiosity by devouring ever-growing stacks of books. In Morningstar, Hood recollects with warmth and honesty how The Bell Jar, Marjorie Morningstar, The Harrad Experiment, and The Outsiders influenced her teen psyche and introduced her to topics that could not be discussed at home: desire, fear, sexuality, and madness. Later, Johnny Got His Gun and Grapes of Wrath dramatically influenced her political thinking while the Vietnam War and Kent State shootings became headline news, and classics such as Dr. Zhivago and Les Misérables stoked her ambitions to travel the world. With characteristic insight and charm, Hood showcases the ways in which books gave her life and can transform—even save—our own lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355567
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	595,529
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ann Hood is the author of eleven books, including the best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most and The Knitting Circle, and the memoirs Comfort: A Journey Through Grief and Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Growing Up with Books 13

Lesson 1 How to Dream 33

Lesson 2 How to Become a Writer 45

Lesson 3 How to Ask Why 64

Lesson 4 How to Buy Books 80

Lesson 5 How to Write a Book 91

Lesson 6 How to Fall in Love with Language 107

Lesson 7 How to Be Curious 121

Lesson 8 How to Have Sex 139

Lesson 9 How to See the World 157

Lesson 10 How to Run Away 172

Acknowledgments 185

Editorial Reviews

"[These essays] are exquisitely written and moving, reminding the reader of how impactful books can be, and how they shape our lives and teach us about love, sex, and language, and seeing beyond our own skin."

Colorado Book Review

"Not many people could point with such specificity to books that have imparted valuable life lessons, and Hood shares beloved works with an affecting and inspiring reverence."

Booklist

"As a childhood reader myself, I loved this enchanting journey through Ann Hood’s early fascination with reading and how it shaped her life and sensibility. Hood is a delightful writer, wise, charming, and lucid, and book lovers will find Morningstar irresistible."

author of Ruined by Reading Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"Steinbeck once encouraged aspiring writers to ‘spread a page with shining.’ Ann Hood has certainly done just that with this slim but substantial book."

BookReporter

"What a mighty little book, so full of heart."

Dani Shapiro

07/10/2017
As a child, novelist Hood (The Book That Matters Most) had an insatiable appetite for reading, a preoccupation disdained by her large, no-nonsense Italian family in 1960s Rhode Island. For Hood, as she lovingly recounts in this ode to the power of words, books were an escape from the dead-end mill town, West Warwick, where she lived. Books guided Hood through her outsider youth and helped her to define the “yearning” for something bigger that she knew wouldn’t be found on West Warwick’s small, ordinary streets. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was the first book to transport Hood away from West Warwick; the next was Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. Marjorie Morningstar brought Hood enormous pleasure because of its heft but also because Hood thought it was as if Wouk were writing about her family’s immigrant story. Morningstar (and later Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar) captured what Hood was feeling but could not express or share: dissatisfaction, anxiety, sexual curiosity, and the aspiration to write for a living. In adulthood, books such as John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath taught Hood how to be a writer and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago ignited her desire to travel. Hood has beautifully crafted a very convincing case for discovering literature and getting lost in the pages. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"As a childhood reader myself, I loved this enchanting journey through Ann Hood’s early fascination with reading and how it shaped her life and sensibility. Hood is a delightful writer, wise, charming, and lucid, and book lovers will find Morningstar irresistible."

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

06/15/2017
This book is author Hood's (The Book That Matters Most) tribute to the books that shape us, those we find exactly when we need them, and those that take us beyond our own lives. The child of immigrants, Hood describes growing up in a dying mill town, in the Italian enclave of Natick, RI, during the 1960s and 1970s. A reader from the moment she picked up her older brother's book, Hood was a quiet child who found solace in the titles she devoured—the bigger, the better. From Herman Wouk to Sylvia Plath to John Steinbeck, Hood admits to reading widely and without discernment, the length of a volume her marker for satisfaction. Each chapter here revolves around a memorable title, detailing how it inspired Hood's early understanding of the world, war, sex, love, and life. The stories are poignant, touching, and enlightening, revealing just as much about America as they do about Hood's reading habits. VERDICT While there is a tradition of memoir told through a love of books, Hood provides a new, rich glimpse into an Italian American childhood. A treat for bibliophiles and readers of all genres. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]—Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib.

Library Journal

Narrator Donna Postel gives the listener the feeling of lounging in a comfortable room while talking about books with a fellow bibliophile. She narrates Ann Hood’s memoir of her early life with books in a conversational tone, praising the power of reading to expand a young person’s horizons. Postel’s steady pace leaves room for listeners to recall their own relationships with characters from their childhoods and to acquire leads on books and characters yet to be met. Coming from a home that did not have books, Hood, nevertheless, was bitten by the literary bug. Public schools and a local library put her on the path from her small community to the wider world, and gave the world a wonderful author who continues to pay that gift forward. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile

2017-04-23
A novelist chronicles her life through the books that shaped her.Like most writers, novelist Hood (The Book that Matters Most, 2016, etc.) loves books. An avid reader since the age of 4, she grew up in a small Rhode Island town in an Italian immigrant family that did not own books. Her school did not have a library, but in second grade, she discovered Little Women and was entranced. Encouraged by her teacher, she was working her way through fourth-grade books by the time the school year was over. Books, writes Hood, gave her "an escape from my lonely school days, where girls seemed to speak a language I didn't understand," and inspired "a curiosity about the world and about people." Although her mother thought that buying books was a waste of money, she saved her allowance for the Nancy Drew series and was elated when a Waldenbooks opened up in a mall nearby. The right book seemed to come at just the right time: when she was 15, for example, Hood first read Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar and felt that the author "had somehow climbed into my brain and emerged with my story." Although she only once had met anyone Jewish, she completely identified with Marjorie: "Slightly spoiled. Boy crazy. Curious about sex. Terrified of sex. Raised by prudish, old-school parents." In The Bell Jar, Hood discovered a girl who wanted to be a writer, just as the author did, and who "expressed the very things I worried over." Discouraged by teachers and family, though, Hood became a flight attendant, working on a novel in hotels on layovers. The author's literary taste is eclectic; Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Dickens, and Frost as well as Irving Wallace, Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, and Rod McKuen are among the writers who invited her into a "big, beautiful world." We read, she writes, "to know the world and ourselves better. To find our place in that world." A charming but hardly surprising homage to the power of books.

Kirkus Reviews