DAD'S BOOK LIST

“Over 45 years, my father read 179,484 pages. What a silly, wonderful thing to know.”

My dad was a mechanical engineer and quality improvement manager. He carried a briefcase, wore a tie and sometimes used flip charts he let me make. (I was the only kid who knew the phrases “paradigm shift” and “think outside the box.”) He was a member of the school board, an instructor at the community college, a skilled woodworker who designed and built a balance beam for our backyard, nightstands for my bedroom, a hidden desk in my closet. But other than at breakfast with his Bible and the local newspaper, Dad never struck me as a reader—until the day he showed me this spiral notebook, his running list of “Books I’ve Read.”

That was in 1992, when I was 18 and about to head off to college. He’d started the list in June 1960, the summer before he left for college himself, filling the first page—29 entries—with every book he could remember reading at McKinley High School in Niles, Ohio: the month and year he read it, the title and author. For a time, I tried to keep up our newly forged connection by reading whatever John Grisham novel he’d just finished, but my college assignments quickly took precedence.

In 1999, when I was 25, Dad was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, and given a life expectancy of five to seven years. He asked everyone in the family to read Love, Medicine and Miracles, by Bernie Siegel, a book full of stories of medical cases in which positive attitudes seemed to lead to treatment outcomes that defied doctor’s predictions. Given Dad’s work in quality improvement, it wasn’t surprising that he wanted to optimize results. And in fact his treatments were effective. In the end it was a heart attack, not cancer, that took him. He died in May 2005, at the age of 62.

The week of his funeral, Mom asked us if there was anything of his we wanted. I asked for the notebook. She was shocked I knew it existed and said no. I suspect she'd never thought to study the list herself and now wanted the chance to do so. Fortunately, my husband decided to sneak the notebook out of Dad’s top dresser drawer and make me a copy, which he surprised me with before we returned home.

The list included 412 books—spanning college, business school, 36 years at the Dow Chemical Company, 44 years of marriage, four children. There were classics (The Scarlet Letter, The Grapes of Wrath), bestsellers (Ordinary People, Catch-22) and, after his diagnosis, inspirational titles (The Five People You Meet in Heaven). About a year before he died, he began reading biographies of all the U.S. presidents from his lifetime, starting with Truman. He made it only to Clinton. His final book was Secret Servant: My Life with the KGB and the Soviet Elite by Ilya Dzhirkvelov. I assume he’d have chosen differently if he’d known it would be the last.

I still have many things my dad gave me. The flannel shirt he bought me so I’d stop wearing his. The letters he wrote me when he traveled, often noting turbulence by drawing a stick figure tumbling from an airplane. But the book list was something by him, for him, as unique as a fingerprint. When my mother passed, three years ago, I found the notebook still in Dad's dresser drawer. It’s been opened to the list for so long that I can’t close it without tearing the yellowed pages. I love seeing his block-letter handwriting in different colored inks. I love crunching the data.

Over 45 years, my father read 179,484 pages. What a silly, wonderful thing to know. The author he read most—19 titles—was Robert Ludlum, creator of Jason Bourne. The last full year of his life, 2004, he outdid himself by reading 30 books. Most years he averaged 12, but between 1970 and 1975, he read only three total. Was that because my brother and I, his third and fourth children, were born in that time? Why did he read 1984 in 1979, and Roots in 1988, a decade after it aired on TV? I don’t need the answers; I just like playing with the questions. They make the list interactive, letting me read with my father alive in my mind.

—Jen Machajewski

Dad reading The Brazosport Facts—local paper for Brazoria County, TX—at breakfast with my brother and me, 1980.

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Jen Machajewski’s work has appeared in Hippocampus, Multiplicity, 5 Min Lit, The Brevity Blog and elsewhere. She lives in Central Texas and is writing a memoir-in-flash about ears, teeth and a medical mystery.

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