The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares

I own the whole series of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares. In hardcover. I really like the way they look on my bookshelf—their sherbet colors, jaunty font, smooth, rounded spines. I really like the idea of the series too, since it reminds me of me and my two best friends from high school. We were like that back then.

Given my terrible memory, I can never recall the details of any one book, but overall they give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, and I have a particularly vivid image in my mind of the night I finished reading the first book, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

I was living in a studio apartment in Oakland near Lake Merritt. The one room held, on one end, my bed, nightstand, and dresser. On the other end was a futon, a coffee table, and a television set. While lying in bed, I could reach over and touch the arm of the futon. The kitchen was in fact a separate room that utilized the narrow space along the front of the building that bordered the stairwell. It was no more than five feet wide, but it felt luxurious.

The image is simple: me, sniffling into a wad of tissues in a small pool of light cast by my IKEA bedside lamp at three in the morning.

I try not stay up reading. I often force myself to put down a really good book because if I finish a great book at night, I can’t sleep. I’m so hyped up, or still weepy, that it just compounds the problem. Funny how I don’t remember what happened in the book, but I can picture myself reading in bed as if I was a bystander in my own life.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares

Tags: children's books reading in bed Ann Brashares