Of Butts and Bulgakov: A Librarian’s Thoughts on the Magic of Reading

A man approaches the reference desk looking guilty, like maybe he stabbed someone in the parking lot.

“Butts?” I ask. There was never a face straighter than mine.

“Yes, ma’am.” David comes into my library and shyly requests this oversized photography book called Butts: A Coffee Table Compendium every few months. We don’t own it, but we can get it via Interlibrary Loan from somewhere in Oklahoma. He smiles – relieved, maybe, by my casual agnosticism – and walks towards the stacks, where he’ll find enough steamy, butt-centric romance paperbacks to hold him over.

As a librarian, I’ve witnessed the private reading habits of thousands of people. And while librarianship is probably not what you think (there are more bodily fluids and Marvel movies), it is a romantic profession. Yes, there is poop on the floor outside the men’s room and yes, there are hours-long conversations with lonely widowers about Ronald Reagan and yes, there is Butts: A Coffee Table Compendium, but beneath the mundanity there is that magic kernel of truth: you’re dealing in stories, and stories change lives.

Books don’t have power over everyone. If you hand a Judy Blume novel to one hundred 11-year-olds, only seven will dog-ear their copy, and only one will decide they are a writer, too. The magic of the written word is kinetic – a certain kind of person is required to activate it. Many people live their entire lives without discovering a sacred personal text.

The handful of readers whose lives change course the moment they meet Blume (or whoever) crave something, and they find that thing in books. I’ve met people whose only friends are the sexy were-leopards in Christine Feehan’s fantasy novels, unhoused people who devour Kurt Vonnegut while wearing gloves so they don’t smudge the pages, miserable teenagers transcending public school offerings and finding their own teachers in Marge Piercy and Mervyn Peake. (Miserable Teenager, you’re going to be SO COOL one day. Please hold on.)

It doesn’t matter which book captures you, it only matters that you are captured.

All these people, regardless of what kind of story resonates with them, or why, are connected to each other by a unique quality that only capital-R Readers have, something that causes them to see the world through a certain imaginative lens, and it is my theory that this added richness supports one through difficult times the way a robust group of friends or a functional, loving family might.

My personal holy book? It’s a tie between Roald Dahl’s Matilda and a surreal picture book called “The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon.” These aren’t the most profound titles I’ve read, but they both suggest that magic is real – a foundational belief I’ve been unable to shake in the intervening decades, and which led me to become a writer and a librarian.

When someone asks for help finding a book, I find equal pleasure in connecting them to Butts as I do Bulgakov. Magic is magic, after all.