Pulp Novels

Sitting in brown paper shopping bag, somewhere in the garage of my memory

My mother was a constant reader. She still reads a lot--more than I do--but when I was a kid, she was a constant reader. She used to watch TV with a novel at her side, and would read during commercial breaks. She read pulp novels and stories exclusively: mysteries, pot boilers, fantasmagoric tales, gothic romances, and the like with breaks for magazines like Red Book, McCall's, and Reader's Digest. I'd rarely see her open a hard cover since they wouldn't fit in her purse, and she couldn't crack their spines into submission.

As a kid, I thought reading a book was akin to running a marathon: a measure of one's discipline and endurance. I read well for my age, and I read often, but to finish a whole book in less than a week (with more than 100 page and no pictures!) was a pretty awesome feat, indeed. If anyone was the champ at reading, it was my mom.

It seems to me now that she would go through one a day, but that's likely an exageration. She ofthen bought them used and, despite their almost disposable nature, she never wanted to give them up. She would stack them in window sill, as if it were a bookshelf, or stuff them into brown paper shopping bags and stash them in our garage. She even boxed some up and stored them under her bed.

I was surrounded by the lurid covers of all these books. They run together with menacing typeface titles, half-nude women with faces fixed in terror or desire, decrepit sea mansions facing a midnight storm, a green mist. I judged all her books by their covers and never tried to read a single one.