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Old Friends and New Acquaintances
Sunday, March 05, 2006 I've always been a reader. Bookish. You know the type: quiet, introspective, feels a certain kinship with librarians. Uses a book as a shield from the world, literally (on the subway when you don't want anyone bothering you, but you don't feel like feigning sleep) and figuratively (can you say escapism?). I've spent entire weekends wallowing in bed, unbathed and hair ratty, reading until I felt physically ill. I've been scolded for reading non-school books in class. Once I was actually yelled at by my grandmother to "stop reading so much--it's going to ruin your eyesight!" My own husband nags me because I read ebooks on my Palm Pilot. He says, you guessed it, "you're going to go blind." Frankly, I don't see the difference between staring at a computer all day, every day and reading large, bold text on a PDA, or reading text printed on a page. It's just a bunch of words, strung together in a pleasing manner, conveying ideas and bringing to life characters you get to know so well that by the time you reach the last page, you want to cry because you won't be hanging out with them any more. Unless, of course, you're reading a series, then you just have to wait until the next book comes out. I've gone through many genres, such as my macabre stage: Stephen King  and his imitators, Anne Rice and her Vampires , gothic novels like Frankenstein and Dracula and Carmilla and Uncle Silas , psychological manipulation like The Turn of the Screw , The Yellow Wallpaper .After college I went through a phase where I read all the books you're supposed to read in high school, but for some reason, I hadn't: Animal Farm  , 1984 , Brave New World , Lord of the Flies , The Catcher in the Rye , I even read A Clockwork Orange , though I highly doubt any teacher would assign that one, especially in this day and age of zero-tolerance to ultra-violence. I have to admit despite Malcolm McDowell's bad-boy charm , I liked the book better.Then I went through a classical period. Jane Austen  : most people don't realize she's excessively funny. Thomas Hardy : who else could turn milking cows into the pinnacle of romantic foreplay? Edith Wharton , The Brontës , E.M. Forster , Henry James . Anything that could be made into a BBC miniseries or a film by Merchant Ivory was good enough for me.Then I segued into the land of the trade paperbacks. Suddenly, everything I read was set in the deep south, full of dirt poor folk  and girls being molested by their step-daddies . Then there were the memoirs. I especially liked Mary Kerr's The Liars' Club and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life . The last one of those I bought was that Dave Eggers book about raising his brother . I bought it after September 11th and I just couldn't force myself to read it. Something strange had happened to me: I was too freaked out to read anything other than books I'd already read and knew the ending of. I went through an intense period of rereading the classics, especially Jane Austen. I spent a lot of time visiting my old friends, traveling back in time to the days before terrorists crashed planes into skyscrapers. Kyle was beginning to worry about me. I was worried about me, but I needed time to escape and I figured it didn't really matter what I was reading as long as I wasn't obsessing about the void downtown. I still haven't read that Eggers book and I probably never will. It's sitting on my bookshelf, coated in dust.Lately I've been reading young adult novels. Not Judy Blume  (who, needless to say, is a genius), but the new stuff. I think YA is going through a golden age as the kids who grew up reading Judy Blume write their own YA novels. A lot of these books are cross-overs, you can find them in the teen section and in the regular fiction stacks. Some of the really good ones I've read recently are The Pursuit of Happiness , Born Confused , Sloppy Firsts , Second Helpings , and Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot . These books are well-written and not juvenile at all. I have a hard time convincing Kyle of that, but oh well. He makes fun of me for reading vampire detective novels too, but since I'm kind of writing my own YA novel at present, I can chalk it up as research.Maybe next year I can even write them off on my taxes. posted at 9:02 PM . link to this post .   .
(1) comments
1 Comments:
Rather scary to meet someone with the same taste in books. I made it to the classics stage though (animal farm and such) and then feel back into the anne rice stuff (lived in new orleans, who could resist) who's next book will be about Jesus because she found religion.
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