#the shell seekers

It was good, and nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person,

becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me.

It’s that time of year at Island Books when all our customers are looking for the perfect book to give to friends and family. When all of us behind the counter are focused on finding the best of what we’ve read this year to fit the eclectic interests of your nearest and dearest. We love to send you on your way with a bag full of brightly wrapped packages, carefully and thoughtfully chosen. It’s challenging and invigorating and incredibly satisfying to come up with that one special volume. December at Island Books demands that I search my memory of books read to come up with something to meet the unique requirements of each recipient. I am myself reduced to seeking out the vague clues from my memory, recollections of the the cover or a fragment of the title.

And every December I find myself looking to my personal shelf of unread books with lackluster interest. During my break time, or at the end of the work day, I instead want to reach for something familiar and comfortable, revisiting old friends and familiar faces in the pages of books read and reread.  It is a relief to sit down with words I’ve read before, characters I know, and a story where the ending is not in question.

My first holiday season at Island Books, despite having years of experience in retail, I was unused to the demands on my energy and inventiveness. To my surprise I found myself reaching for the same book during every work break, Carve the Mark, by Veronica Roth. A YA novel, of the fantasy/SF genre set in a world where a force called the “current” gifts nearly everyone with a unique expression of ability. The central characters, a Romeo and Juliet of sorts, are a teen boy and girl from two vastly different cultures, one kidnapped by raiders and trained as a warrior while still being shunned for his race, the other, the daughter of the ruler, debilitated by the personal pain her current gift gives her. Once I got to the end, I started again. I kept it at work and got it out for every break, retreating into its now familiar pages. With each time through I appreciated more and more the nuance of the story, the journey of the main characters, and Roth’s exploration of what a person does with the parts of themselves they can’t escape. 

Rereading is nothing new to me. The result of being a child who read voraciously yet didn’t always have something new to hand when a current book was finished was rereading one of the many books on my shelf. All of L. M. Montgomery, Pippi in the South Seas, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain , the Melendy Quartet, and on and on. We got books from the Scholastic book fairs at school and used bookstores, and new books from time to time. My mom put clear contact paper on my paperbacks to give them longer lives. And I read them over and over. I didn’t get bored, I found it comforting to go somewhere I knew, among people I was already friends with, on a journey to which I knew the ending. As one of those people who always needed to have something with her to read, books have been a kind of a security blanket. Rereading a book I’ve already enjoyed is a known quantity, an assured positive outcome. The ones that I turn to again and again always seem to have an element of strong and ultimately loving relationships, people who are loyal to each other, who are allowed to grow and make mistakes, find redemption and family. 

In times of insomnia and seasons of stress I often return to Rosamund Pilcher, The Shell Seekers and Winter Solstice. My copies are worn, the pages soft and yellowing, the bindings creased. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read them, or the passages I most likely know by heart. But whenever I reach for them, I always find the quiet family dramas, the cozy atmosphere of English country life. I can read a few pages and feel an internal sigh of relief. Here are people I know and a story I’ve been told. These are gentle narratives, filled with well meaning characters, who love and support each other as they go through life. While The Shell Seekers is more of a sweeping generational saga, Winter Solstice takes place over the waning days of autumn and into the holiday season. Both of these have lulled me back to sleep in the wee hours, or been a kind companion when my life has been chaotic.

When I discovered The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater, it soon after it was published. I know because I had to wait for each subsequent book in the series to come out, giving me ample time to reread every installment. It wasn’t the kind of book that I was reading then, but I couldn’t help being charmed by these teenage characters, despite the fact that they aren’t particularly charming. Each of them is very much themselves, with quirks and rough edges and blind spots and watching them develop both as individuals and in their relationships with each other over the four books of the cycle was a delight. I fell in love with their friendship and was willing to follow them to the very end, even though the last book in the cycle got the closest to horror that I could absolutely stand. Each time I reread one of the books I saw something new, because Maggie Stiefvater is an author of extraordinary narrative abilities. Her word craft is impeccable and deliberate. This series rewards the rereader. It was only as I kept returning to the pages, to the small town of Henrietta, to Gansey, Blue, Ronan, Adam, and Noah, that I saw how invisibly she wove in every emotion and foreshadowing. 

I may also lean towards rereading particular books because of their seasonal appropriateness, something to get me in the mood for a time of year. One of my favorites to turn to in December is Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. Set in a snowy winter, on his eleventh birthday, Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son, finds out that he is the last of the Old Ones, the ancient bastions of the Light against the Dark. He is set a task, to find and bind together six signs of power in order to push back the Dark for a time. Will is an ordinary boy, from an ordinary family, in an ordinary English town, so the juxtaposition of this normality against his otherworldly quest grounds the story in a way that appeals to me immensely. Just like Rosamunde Pilcher, I relished the cozy descriptions of his family traditions, the caroling and tree decorating, choosing gifts for his many siblings. Yet I also loved the connection to history and magic that Will explores as he finds the signs one by one. Perhaps it is counter intuitive for a book of this sort to be “seasonal” reading, but for me it will always be one of my personal holiday cornerstones.

For all of you I wish you books that will bring comfort and rest in the midst of the bustle this time of year. Perhaps it’s time to dig out that old favorite and give it another read!

irene worth as dolly keeling in the shell seekers