Another interesting bibliomemoir but it felt a little different this time as I was actually not familiar with the main books under discussion, nor had I had any prior awareness of the author herself who I understand to be well-known. Perhaps because of this, I did not feel the same connection to the writing that I typically do when reading a bibliomemoir. The author had a pleasant narrative voice however and I will always think positively about other readers so this was an enjoyable enough read just the same. I will definitely look out for writing by Ann Hood in the future and wish her all the very best.

Wonderful, short, look at the books that influenced Ann Hood's development as a person and as a writer. Great starting point for book clubs and a perfect pairing for her novel, The Book That Matters Most.

This was good for an easy read. The progression confused me a bit. I expected the essays to be chronological, but Hood approaches each book more from a “this is what I learned” standpoint. It confused me about the chronology of her experiences, and I felt that she kept relearning the same or similar lessons. The parts about war and family were great. The parts about sexuality, not so much. Good for an in-between read.

A charming look at the transformative power of reading. This is an evergreen book I will read again and again. It reminded me of so many of my own personal milestones and paradigm shifts that occurred between the pages of books. In addition, I'm looking forward to reading many of the books she read, as I've never heard of many. So a bonus is growing your TBR. Thoroughly enjoyable, simply engaging and very soul-fulfilling. Those that love books will recognize a kindred spirit in Ms. Hood. An instant classic!

This delightful little book tells of Ms. Hood's coming of age and how reading shaped her. She breaks the book into ten chapters or lessons -- each centering on a book that changed her outlook, built new dreams, or taught her valuable lessons.

The first chapter, or Lesson 1, is entitled How to Dream, and centers on Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk. (Thus the title "Morningstar".) Ms. Hood read the book as a teenager trapped in a Rhode Island mill town. Marjorie Morningstar allowed her to dream of something bigger. She re-reads it every year:

Maybe that's why I reread it every year. Maybe, as time beats me up and grief or loneliness or a new kind of bittersweet melancholy take hold, I need to remind myself to keep going, keep reaching, to not forget the girl who believed she could have everything and anything at all.

I felt a kinship Ms. Hood, because of our similar ages. I found myself recognizing her descriptions of growing up in the 60's & 70's -- with the Viet Nam war on television, girls-only home economics classes, and listening to Simon and Garfunkel. There was the confusion of the world breaking open with the women's movement, communes, hippies, civil rights -- all contrasted with our girl scout activities and mothers having dinner ready for dad's homecoming each day. We were both girls who hid from this confusion by escaping into the other world(s) of books.

Upon being discovered secretly reading Little Women during class, her elementary school teacher asks her to stay at recess:

"You're reading Little Women?" she asked, looking at the book in my hands. I nodded. "And you understand it?", she asked. Again I nodded. Then she asked me tell her what the book was about. At this, I began to talk, about Marmie and the March sisters the plays they put on, about Laurie next door and vain Amy and Jo who wanted to be a writer and how Beth died. I told her it was about family but also about war and dreams and writing and..."And", I said, "everything. It's about everything." Now it was Miss Nolan who nodded. She paused, then pointed to the books that lined the bookshelves in the back of the classroom. "I don't want you to go out to recess anymore", she said. "I want to you to stay inside and read all those books".

(I never had the fortune of such a teacher letting me skip recess or P.E. - sighs of envy.)

Ms. Hood grew up without books at home, and she tells of going to the local library and checking out whichever books were the biggest, (Anna Karenina, Les Miserables) so she could get the most reading per book. There's a section where a bookstore opens in a mall close by and she revels in the possibility to buy and own a book of her very own.

In Lesson 8: How to Have Sex, Ms. Hood recounts reading The Harrad Experiment which opened her mind about sex and the sexual revolution -- where sex didn't have to become intertwined with love and marriage.
Ms. Hood could be describing many bookish children growing up, we all felt this way at one time or another:
How can I describe what reading gave to me? An escape from my lonely school days, where girls seemed to speak a language I didn’t understand. A glimpse into the possibilities of words and stories. A curiosity about the world and about people – the young Amelia Earhart seeing her first plane, Helen Keller’s silent world, Nancy Drew solving mysteries, David Copperfield surviving the streets of Victorian London.

But, fear not, the author enjoys pure pleasure reading:

Even now I like to sometimes indulge in the guilty pleasure of reading a book that literary snobs would never consider reading. And I enjoy them, those paperbacks I don’t mind leaving behind on an airplane. They make long flights pass pleasantly. I don’t have to marvel at the use of language or metaphor or puzzle over how the author pulled off such a mind-bogglingly intricate plot. I just read it and forget it, perhaps a habit I learned back in high school when I read any book I could get my hands on.

Morningstar is a lovely book and it reminds us that books can form a childhood - give escape from confusions - spark dreams of bigger things and open us to other worlds.
See more at http://www.bookbarmy.com

A digital advanced readers copy was provided by W.W. Norton & Company via NetGalley.

As a Rhode Islander who has been lucky to hear Ann speak a number of times, I was especially excited to read her introduction which, in part, was the same talk she gave in late May 2017 at the 15th Anniversary of the RI Center for the Book's Reading Across Rhode Island.

The RI references are beautiful but everyone who has grown up in a small town anywhere in this country during this era will appreciate all that she has to offer about how she discovered books and what they mean in her life. As a young person, I also read extensively and no one censored what I read and it wasn't until high school that anyone really influenced my reading.

Unlike Ann's home, mine did contain books and my parents read but the choice of books was mine. I'm glad I chose this one!

Morningstar was one of those books that sank right into my soul while I was reading it.~ I felt a loss when I turned the last page! I want every book lover, from my family to every librarian I see, to read this.! Thank you and kudos to Ann Hood. It was stunning and I loved it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and a view into the thoughts and memories of Ann Hood. One of my favorite authors, it was almost like have a sit-down visit for tea with her.

Loved this book and Hood's descriptions of how books she read shaped and influenced her life.

I think most passionate readers can relate to this memoir. Perhaps our personal choices would be different, but reading as a child forms us in a way. We learn about the world outside our family, we learn about unspoken topics and we learn to cope with disappointment and sadness. What we read is who we are and it's a pleasure that Ms. Hood shared her life with us.

"Morningstar: Growing up with Books" by Ann Hood tells of the authors' love affair with books as a child and the books that shaped her.

Each chapter tells us about a book that impacted the author in her life and how it shaped the way she saw the world. We are told of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" and John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

In reading "The Grapes of Wrath" the author learns about writing. Through books the author learns how to love language and how to see the world among other things. This book is beautifully written. I would recommend it to anyone who loves books and memoirs about them.

I acknowledge that I received this book free of charge from NetGalley in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.

I really enjoyed this book. I've read many of the books Hood writes about so it was like sitting around a kitchen table with an old friend discussing books we've loved & that have shaped who we are. I'd recommend it to anyone who loves to read, especially readers born in the 1960's or early 1970's. There are many memories growing up in the early 1970's that are quite touching.

I love reading books, and I love reading books about reading books. As an amateur reader I am fascinated by bibliomemoirs.

Some writers concentrate on a memoir of a single year or period of personal reading; others focus on a gimmick (reading all the books on one library shelf, or a book a day) or a single author’s influence . One of my favorites is Susan Hill’s “Howards End Is on the Landing,” a brilliant book about her year of reading only books on her shelves. When my mother was in the hospital in 2011, I was so inspired by Hill’s chapter about Iris Murdoch that I dashed around the corner to Murphy-Brookfield, a used bookstore, to find a copy of “The Bell.” And that kept me going through a couple of days when my mother lay in bed watching TV at the loud level she needed to hear anything at all.

In “Morningstar: Growing up with Books,” the novelist Ann Hood has written a graceful, inspiring memoir of her childhood reading. (The book will be published Aug. 1.) And she has me searching for my copy of “Marjorie Morningstar” to read this weekend. (It’s here, in a box, somewhere.) She grew up in an Italian-American working-class family in a small town in Rhode Island. Although her parents didn’t own books, her aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at the kitchen table on weekends and told stories. She learned “that you had to earn your place at that table. Your story had to start with a hook, include vivid details, have strong characters, and be full of tension or someone who talked louder and could tell her story better would overpower you.”

But Ann was bookish, and she wanted literary stories, too. She didn’t have access to many books: the Italian neighborhood’s library was in a moldy basement, and the school didn’t have a library. When her cousin lent her a copy of “Little Women,” it changed Ann’s life. She lost herself in the story. She writes, “All these years later I recognize how magical this experience truly was. I wanted to live inside a book, and this was the first time I really did.”

Ann and I are of the same generation, and my parents didn’t read books, either, so I understood her experience perfectly . One thing we absolutely agree on: it was necessary to read the yellow-spined Nancy Drew books. Ann saved her allowance and spent it on the Nancy Drews at the second-hand store, much to her mother’s disapproval; and after my mother had a showdown with a librarian who refused to order “badly-written” series books, my mother was determined to save money so I could gradually acquire a nearly complete set.

As adolescents in the early ’70s, Ann and I, in our different parts of the U.S., listened to Simon and Garfunkel, strung beads, and were fascinated by the counterculture. Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” had a powerful effect on Ann . I love her delicate description of the book’s design.

She wrote,

“The summer of the beads, I read ‘The Bell Jar.’ I remember the cover. A pink so pale it almost looked white. The black letters with their curlicued T and B and J. The red rose stretched across the edge. Unaware as I was of things like book reviews, I didn’t know that the book I’d plucked from the library shelf was a new one, just published in the United States. I didn’t even know—though surely this was in the author’s bio—that Sylvia Plath had committed suicide on February 11, 1963, just a few weeks after ‘The Bell Jar’ had been published by Harper & Row in Britain under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.”

With just a few strokes of the pen she describes a book cover I had forgotten, though I had the same edition, and I was able to identify it on google immediately. Plath’s heroine Esther, who won a contest to be a “Mademoiselle” writer, may have inspired Ann, who became a Marsha Jordan girl, one of eight models for a Boston department store, and then won a contest to be a teen editor for Rhode Island for “SEventeen.”

But of all the books she read, Herman Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar” was her touchstone. She read it when she was 15 in 1972 and reads it every year. Marjorie’s big Jewish immigrant family reminds Ann of her big emotional Italian immigrant family. Marjorie defies her parents by becoming an actress and embarking on a sexual relationship with the director, Noel Airman. Ann understood Marjorie’s longings, as Marjorie stood in the snow staring at the apartment of the man she loved. Ann’s heart had been broken by Peter Hayhurst, and she sometimes stops the car and looks at his house.

“And I have reread it almost every year since. As an adult, I saw the similarities between the Morgensterns and my own family. Marjorie’s father had come to the United States at the age of fifteen, “a fleck of foam on the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe.” I lived with a dizzying array of Italian immigrant relatives. In the novel, Mr. Morgenstern owned the Arnold Importing Company, “a well-known dealer in feathers, straws, and other materials for ladies’ hats.” Like my own father, who commuted several hours every day to his job in Government Center in Boston so that we could rise above our blue-collar immigrant roots.”

I am posting this too early–consider it a pre-review–but it really is the perfect book to read on a holiday weekend. I also very much like her novels, which are hard to classify. I think of them as women’s novels, but my husband enjoyed her latest novel, “The Book That Matters Most” (more or less about how reading saves a grieving wife and a drug-addicted daughter). I have followed her career from the ’80s, and it is always a pleasure to read a new book by her.

Book nerds unite! Ann perfectly captures the magic, the allure and the special place that certain books play in our lives. Like a song, they can call to memory a particular moment in time and shape an entire lifetime. Ann Hood illustrates the special role books have played in her life on every page.

4.5 blissful reading stars!

This book reminds me of my childhood, just four years earlier. Almost everything Ann remembers reading, or doing as an adolescent in the awkward years of tweenager-hood, I can recall as well. My parents weren't Italian immigrants, but one generation removed, so not far from some traditions. This book may not be for everyone, but if you grew up, loving to read books, loving libraries, (and I suspect there are a few on GRs and Netgally), then you'll enjoy this book. Ann is so in tune with her emotions when reading each book, whether she's home in her room , where her "parents could never understand her," or in her dorm room in college. I can remember thinking at 18 or 19 years old, "I'm the only person who truly understands this book!" Or, "this author is speaking directly to me." Was it just women who thought this way at this young age? Maybe not. I highly recommend this book to ALL who love books.

In this memoir-through-books, Hood discusses her life as a book lover in a family that didn't value books or reading. She takes a look at the books that have been most formative in her life and the ways in which they shaped her as a person, as well as relating stories from her life that connect back to books and reading. Recommended for bibliophiles.