::: sixth generation: marginalia

::: before the to-do lists, there were library cards

Mary Kaye Chambers — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:24:08 GMT

You used to know exactly what you were reading next. Somewhere between work, the carpool line and after-school , you stopped disappearing into books. Let’s find our way back.

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When I was a little girl, I knew exactly where I was headed every Saturday morning.

The public library first. My mother would drop me near the Hardy Boys shelf, and I would settle in like I belonged to that row of books and they belonged to me. I knew every spine by heart. I could tell you which ones I’d read and which ones were still waiting, patient and certain, as if they understood I would get to them eventually.

There was something almost sacred about standing in front of all those books with the whole morning stretching out ahead of you and absolutely no reason to rush. No clock pressing in. No one needing anything. Just the quiet, steady promise of story.

After the library, we’d stop at the grocery store. I’d spend my allowance on Archie comic books and use every last cent without regret.

Then we’d ride home in our pink Cadillac. To a girl who loved stories, it felt like the height of glamour. As soon as we finished unloading groceries, I’d carry my stack out to the pecan tree and read until supper.

That was my whole plan every Saturday.

::: the summers we were allowed to disappear

Reading in childhood is its own freedom.

Nobody is making you take notes. Nobody is asking what themes you identified or whether the narrative arc satisfied you. You open a book and leave your life for a while. That’s not only allowed, it’s the point.

Summer made it even better. No bells. No stopping points. No reason to put the book down unless you wanted to.

You could read the same book twice in a week if you wanted to, or start three new ones and abandon them all for the one that finally grabbed you by the collar and refused to let go.

Some of us had bookmobiles — those improbable, beautiful library trucks that arrived like grace in neighborhoods and parking lots like some kind of literary miracle. If you grew up anywhere near one, you remember the way it smelled inside. Paper and dust and something almost like magic. Something you’ve never quite found again.

And then there was the personal pan pizza.

If you were a certain age in a certain era, you know EXACTLY what I mean. 😁

Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! program launched in 1985: read a certain number of books, earn a free personal pan pizza. I watched it work on kids year after year when I became a literacy specialist.

The pizza was never really the point.

What children wanted was to be seen for what they’d done, to have someone notice that they’d gone somewhere and come back changed.

Because that’s what reading does. It takes you somewhere and you don’t come back the same.

::: how life quietly takes your reading life away

It doesn’t happen all at once. That’s what makes it so easy to miss.

You don’t wake up one morning and decide to stop reading. Life simply fills the space.

A new baby, a new job, a classroom full of children who need you. Dinner to make and papers to grade and a to-do list that somehow multiplies overnight.

The book on your nightstand moves from the pillow to the end table to the shelf, and one day you notice you can’t remember the last time you finished one.

I spent years teaching children to love books. I helped them find the ones that fit. I celebrated their reading milestones. I believed in what books could do for a life.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, between the teaching and the mothering and the keeping of everyone else’s world running, I stopped reading.

It is a quiet loss, the kind you don’t grieve because you’re too busy to notice it’s gone.

::: coming back to books in the second half

Retirement hands you back your time and then waits, almost politely, to see what you’ll do with it.

For a while I didn’t know.

The quiet felt unfamiliar.

This year I went back to the Hardy Boys with my grandchildren. The same series that first captured me as a girl. I sat on the front porch with one and remembered, within a few pages, exactly what I had been missing.

Writing the marginalia column here at ::: sixth generation has brought me back to the literary world in a way I didn’t expect. It has given me a reason to linger over sentences, to notice what moves me, to write down the lines that refuse to let me go.

To pay attention again.

The Bible has done that for me more times than I can count. More than once, I’ve opened to a psalm at two in the morning and felt, with some relief, that someone had already said what I couldn’t.

Books are still the best escape route I know. They don’t help you avoid your life. They help you understand it. You come back from a good story slightly different than you left.

That hasn’t changed since I was a girl under the pecan tree with a Hardy Boys mystery and the whole afternoon ahead of me.

::: you are still that reader

For the women who remember what it felt like to read three books in a week but now can’t remember the last time they finished one: you didn’t lose your love of reading. Life just buried it under everything else for a while.

Summer is a great time to dig that love back out. Not because you have to earn the rest. Not because you’ve checked everything off the list. But because you are allowed to return to something that once made you feel fully alive.

Because there’s still a girl somewhere inside you who knows where she wants to be on a Saturday morning, and she hasn’t forgotten the smell of library books or the pure pleasure of a story that makes the whole world go quiet.

She isn’t gone.

Find her a book.

Sit somewhere you love.

Let the afternoon do what afternoons were made to do.

There’s no pizza this time.

But there is this: a good book, a quiet hour, and the steady, surprising recognition of yourself. The version of you who reads, who lingers, who remembers how to disappear and come back changed.

And that’s more than enough.

What’s the book that made you a reader? Or the one you’ve been meaning to get back to? Tell me in the comments. I’d love to know!

If you’re new here, welcome home. Pull up a chair. The coffee’s always on.

::: why i read the books i read

Mary Kaye Chambers — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:34:52 GMT

I carry books everywhere. I read while I’m waiting in the car, during my coffee, in the margins of ordinary time. I read poetry one week and cozy mysteries the next. I’ve read scripture and contemporary fiction and children’s classics and literary memoirs and romance that makes me blush. Some of the books on my shelf have language that would make the church ladies uncomfortable. Some have themes that don’t fit neatly into the boxes we’ve been taught to stay inside. And I don’t apologize for any of it. Here’s why.

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::: the girl with the dozen books

I was six years old when I fell in love with reading. Dick and Jane, Run, Spot, run. The pictures were bright and innocent, and the stories were simple, but they cracked something open in me. Here was a whole world that existed on the page. I could disappear into it anytime I wanted.

By high school, my local librarian knew me by name. She knew I would come in on Saturday mornings and make a beeline for whatever section called to me that week. She knew I read fast and voraciously and without apology. So she made an exception to the checkout limit and let me take out a dozen books at a time. A dozen. I would carry them home like treasure, stack them on my desk, and spend the week plowing through them.

Between the dinner dishes and before bed, under the pecan tree on our homestead with the light falling golden through the leaves, I read. I read like it was prayer. Like it was breathing. Like the worlds inside those books were the ones that actually made sense.

At the end of the week, I’d head back to the library with my dozen ready to exchange for the next set of glorious worlds.

That librarian never questioned what I was reading. She never steered me toward certain books or away from others. She just kept my library card active and my stack full.

It may have dented corners and worn pages, but this Dick and Jane edition that I bought for my honeybees is one of my most prized books. 💕

::: what a literacy specialist knows

I loved college because of books. I became a literacy specialist because I believed then—and I believe now—that reading changes people. It expands the way you see the world. It teaches you empathy. It lets you live a thousand lives instead of just one. I wanted my first graders to experience the same joy I felt with reading.

In college, I took a class on classic literature that made me feel alive in a way I can’t quite describe. We read Austen and Brontë and Dickens. We argued about symbolism. We parsed sentences for meaning. We sat in a circle and talked about what it meant to be human in the way that only literature can teach you. I was the nerd in the back taking notes and wanting to discuss it further.

That class changed something in me. It showed me that reading wasn’t just about entertainment, though entertainment matters. It was about encountering different minds, different worlds, different ways of being. It was about becoming more yourself by understanding how other people become themselves.

And it taught me something crucial: I don’t have to agree with every idea in a book to learn something from it. I don’t have to believe everything a character believes to understand why they believe it. Reading isn’t about finding books that confirm what I already know. It’s about finding books that challenge me, stretch me, make me think harder about what I believe and why.

::: the uncomfortable truth about Christian reading

I’m a Christian woman. I read scripture. I pray. I believe in grace and redemption and the way faith orders a life.

I also read books that the church questions.

I read contemporary fiction written by authors who don’t share my faith. I read memoirs by people who have left Christianity or never found their way into it. I read poetry that grapples with doubt. I read novels that contain language that would get you sent to the principal’s office in the 1960s. Some of the books on my shelf explore sexuality and struggle and moral ambiguity in ways that don’t fit into the tidy categories the church has taught me.

For a long time, I felt guilty about this. I thought it meant I wasn’t faithful enough. I thought it meant I was letting the world creep into my spiritual life. I thought my bookshelf was evidence that I was compromising.

But then I remembered why I read in the first place. I read because it expands my world. Because it teaches me to see through other people’s eyes. Because it makes me more human, more compassionate, more capable of understanding the people God has called me to love.

A book with a few instances of profanity doesn’t shake my faith. A character who makes choices I wouldn’t make teaches me something about what it means to be human. A narrative that challenges my assumptions doesn’t mean I’m abandoning my convictions. It means I’m thinking seriously about what I believe and why.

That’s not rebellion. That’s integrity.

::: what’s actually on my shelf

My reading list on any given week looks like a library that forgot to organize itself. This week I might read scripture, a contemporary literary novel, a cozy mystery, a book of poetry, and a picture book with my grandchildren. I don’t read by genre. I read by invitation.

What does that mean?

It means I follow what calls to me in the moment. Sometimes I need comfort, so I reach for a cozy mystery—something that promises a problem solved by the last page, a world ordered and safe.

Sometimes I need to be challenged, so I pick up something literary and difficult that makes me work for the meaning.

Sometimes I need beauty, so I reach for poetry.

Sometimes I need to be reminded of truth, so I open scripture.

What I don’t read are books that delight in cruelty for its own sake. I don’t read horror. I don’t read graphic descriptions of violence or suffering that exist just to gross you out. I have boundaries, and those boundaries are real.

But within those boundaries? I read widely. I read books that surprise me. I read books written by people who see the world differently than I do. I read books that have uncomfortable language or uncomfortable themes because I believe that encountering complexity is part of becoming a thinking person.

And when I recommend a book to someone, I try to tell them what they’re getting into. I mention the language. I note the themes. I don’t pretend that something is safe when it isn’t.

But I also don’t apologize for recommending it, because I believe that adult readers can decide for themselves what they want to read.

::: permission to read

If you’re a Christian woman who has felt guilty about the books on your shelf, I want to give you permission to stop. If you’ve been told that certain kinds of reading are dangerous or faithless, I want to challenge that.

Reading widely doesn’t make you less Christian. It makes you more thoughtful, compassionate, and less judgmental of people who see the world differently than you do, because you’ve been inside their stories. You’ve lived their lives for a little while. You understand them.

That’s the opposite of faithless. That’s bearing witness. That’s loving your neighbor by actually trying to understand them.

So pick up the book that intrigues you. Read the author whose beliefs don’t match yours. Don’t apologize for the novels on your shelf.

And if someone questions what you’re reading, remember that librarian who knew me by name and never once asked me to justify my choices. She understood that a reader who thinks for herself is doing the most important work there is.

Your reading list is yours. Read widely. Think deeply. Become yourself through the thousand lives that books offer you.

What kind of reader are you? Do you read widely, or do you tend to stay inside one lane?

::: from the teacher’s desk to the front porch

Mary Kaye Chambers — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:22:28 GMT

You spent years at small desks, steadying pencils in children’s fists. You knelt beside them, watching them puzzle out letters, sound out words, coax sentences from silence. Over and over you murmured, “Say what happened. Write it down.”

If you’re a retired teacher, you know this life by heart.

Days inside someone else’s classroom, someone else’s curriculum, someone else’s expectations. You showed up with a lesson plan and the quiet hope that a few kids would feel truly seen.

Now, in this slower, fuller season, someone needs to say it to you:

You get to write this now.

Not in a classroom. Not with a red pen. Just a softer voice whispering, “You don’t have to live in the margins of other people’s stories anymore.”

You were the steady one—the dependable colleague, the calm presence at home. You read aloud, coaxed courage from shaky voices, and helped others to tell their stories while your own stayed half-written.

You knew how to help a child begin in the ordinary and notice what matters. You knew how to say, “Try again.”

You rarely gave yourself that same permission.

The invitation has shifted. It’s no longer “Help them find their voice.”

It’s “Find your own.”

Not in a rush. Not for applause. Just slowly, like afternoon light across the front porch.

You don’t need to write a novel or reinvent yourself. You just need to pick up the pen and begin.

Start small.

The stories that shaped you long before you taught anyone else.

The child whose courage taught you something about your own.

The way the house sounds now when it’s finally quiet enough to hear yourself think.

You’ve spent a lifetime helping others decode confusion, name hurts, and shape joy into words. Now it’s your turn.

You don’t need to erase the first half of your life. Just add yourself back in—as the author this time. The one who says, “This is what really happened.”

You already know how. You taught it for decades: how to begin, revise, and keep going when you want to crumple the page.

Now live it for yourself.

Sit down with a notebook or blank screen. Write the quiet years and the loud ones. Name the moments you felt most like yourself and the ones where you disappeared.

Then add the new sentence:

“It’s my turn to write now.”

It’s not rebellion. It’s a return.

You’re not leaving your calling behind. You’re extending it—teaching yourself how to read and write your own life in your own voice.

You’re not asked to be louder or braver. You’re allowed to be quiet, to be uncertain, to be yourself. You just have to become the author of your story instead of a supporting character in someone else’s.

You spent years handing others the pen.

Now pick one up for yourself and begin.

Cross things out.

Try again.

Keep going.

And in the second half of life, that’s more than enough.

What’s one part of your life you’re ready to start writing (or rewriting) in this next season? Drop a sentence in the comments.

If you’re new here, welcome home. Pull up a chair. The coffee’s always on.