After my September column about Linda Lightfoot, a retired Louisiana journalist who’s kept a record of her reading life since 2005, I heard from Tricia Day, who thought I should know about the reading journal kept by her late mother, Kitty Day, from 1937 until her death at 89 in 2007.
Kitty’s legacy lives on through Kitty’s Books, a book club with half a dozen members who read and discuss titles from Kitty’s reading journal.
The club meets regularly in Baton Rouge, home base for much of the Day family. Tricia Day and her sister Susan Crowther are members, and they like to keep the group small to encourage good conversation. Another sister, Jane Edwards, might start her own version of the club where she lives in Montgomery, Alabama.
I recently met Tricia, a retired dyslexia specialist, and Susan, a retired educator, at Tricia’s home to talk about their mother’s journal. Jane, a retired nurse, happened to be in town, so she joined us, too. Gathered around a coffee table with Kitty’s reading journal in the center, they recalled a mother of 11 who counted books as a ruling passion.
“She didn’t cook,” Susan told me. “She didn’t garden. She didn’t have a sewing machine. But she read all the time.”
Kitty’s other passion was record-keeping. As Susan pointed out, her mother became the secretary of every club she joined.
“She kept a scrapbook of every trip she took,” Tricia added.
For Kitty, reading was a part of, not apart from, an active life.
“She could strike up a conversation with anybody,” Jane mentioned. “She loved to travel. She was athletic. She was a wonderful diver. She was the most eclectic reader I have known.”
“She read everything,” Susan explained.
Tricia told me that another sister, Beth Gerhart, had recently reminded her how Kitty’s reading journal got started. While living in Chicago as a young woman, Kitty took a college class in which a professor assigned his students to begin a journal of every book they read. That was in 1937. Kitty, who eventually returned to Louisiana, worked as a teacher before her marriage to John Wilton Day, an engineer.
She kept up her reading journal for the rest of her life.
“Most of the entries include a brief synopsis of the book,” Tricia noted. “She often reread books, and her favorite by far was ‘Jane Eyre.’ She read fiction and nonfiction, lots of biographies, and, of course, many classics … it’s a like a short history of literature for anyone who reads it.”
The journal, which chronicles thousands of books, includes everything from Zane Grey Westerns to John Grisham thrillers to Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter.”
Recently, Kitty’s Books tackled “‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips” by James Hilton, “read by my mom in 1940,” Tricia said.
What would Kitty think of the Kitty’s Books?
“She’d be a member, for sure,” Tricia told me.
Email Danny Heitman at [email protected].
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
