May 24, 2006

Contemporaries


Over the course of the past several days I've experienced varying degrees of emotions, ranging from whole happiness to flushed anxiety to flurried panic (the latter two are quite close to one another) to sadness and back to happiness again, a full circle. One of the ingredients of my constant fluctuation has been my inability to focus on any one thing, much less on reading. Yes, I'm bidding farewell to book club, but yes also, my friends and fellow book club participants are going to accept my book reports which I will either send via blog, e-mail or typed and folded into an envelope and mailed. This means I do not stop reading their selections, rather I read along with them keeping the same time and they will share my written thoughts with the group when they meet. I'm already sentimental and nostalgic about their next meeting June 20th at Sette. Anyway, I've been trying to cram room into my day to read Never Let Me Go. Alas, I've only completed one chapter. I already like the book - its quiet tone, its pensive flow. But I need to really concentrate in order to have - to make - time to read and, again, complete my essay or review before June 20th. With all that will be going on with us in New York, I hope I can stay on board with this, if not forever, for a while, at least. The way I see it, my commute to and from Queens will afford me a minimum of one hour of reading per day, give or take depending on train transfers and time slotted for people watching. This means completing far more reading than I've been able to do since I left college. My stack is already elbow deep: finish that awful Queens Julia Child fanatic book, Four Corners by Krista Madsen, which Craig's parents bought me for my birthday, The Twenty-Seventh City, which LC bought me for my birthday, and the aforementioned Never Let Me Go. Yesterday I probed the Amazon website for book titles to give to my mother, because she has a Borders certificate that she wants to spend on titles we both might enjoy so that she can pass them along to me when she's finished (she is not a book collector, whereas I can't even bear to part with my copy of Heart of Darkness much less any book I've ever read or purchased!) While I was browsing, I developed a thick lump in my throat, an old familiar feeling I'd get when I had English Major Envy post-college (since I only dabbled in Literature courses) or even before that, the same choked emotion when I would see a shelf lined with titles I just had to have but couldn't afford to splurge on. The first title I found which seems interesting enough is a book called Wonder When You'll Miss Me by Amanda Davis. Tragically (and an unfortunate coincidence with the title of her novel), Amanda and her parents were killed in a plane crash in 2003. I only learned this by further researching her as an author. Not to shed feeble light on Amanda Davis, because I've not yet read her book, but her novel might fall slightly under the contemporary genre of chick lit (not that chick lit is feeble - okay, okay, yes it is, sorry to offend, especially when the only type of novel I'd ever be capable of writing would be of the same variety). Additional title investigation led me to Middlesex, which I added to my mother's list of possible purchases. Of course I had to include Myla Goldberg's Bee Season, as well. And yesterday LC sent the book club ladies an article about the book nominated Best Fiction in 25 years, which happened to be Beloved by Toni Morrison, which was followed by an article in praise of great 'small' works of fiction, including such titles as Housekeeping and The Things They Carried. Some more perusing and I ran into Joan Didion, whose name I've seen plenty but have never read (and so I suggested to my mother The Year of Magical Thinking, which sounds desperately hopeful and tragic all at the same beautiful time - I can hardly wait to read it, too!) Basically, the amount of time I have on my hands to panic about New York, I need to spend buried in a book. It appears as though I've already got several on the list of want-to-reads. And these selections should be only the proverbial tip of the literary iceburg, because having fallen so far from reading over the course of my time out of college, time has come to faithfully and completely revisit one of my dustiest hobbies, clear the cobwebs, and read, read, read - not read occasionally because it fills commute time or because it is a discipline for book club, but because it is a filling, swelling love that grows sweeter with each good book that gets read. I consider reading an old friend I stopped calling for no reason. I've missed her quiet company. And with a major move to a noisy city, no better time to rekindle an old friendship than now.

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