I've always been such a fool for a book. I grew up in a household that devoured them, leaving stacks of them book marked - never dog earred - on the coffee table, bedsides, and book shelved. Books came for Christmas and birthdays, always. The silence of a hot December afternoon, stuffed with leftovers, and a new read was one of my highlights of the year.
My mother would take us to the library once a week, where my sister and I would come away with stacks of Enid Blyton until we were forced to read something else. Like I'd eventually do with my own son, she'd read the young adults with me, talking about the characters and stories over hot nettle tea. In her own library sat Wyndam, which I feasted upon - the Day of the Crysalids and Sofie with the six toes telling of her mutation stick in my mind vividly to this day - and other science fiction too, from Asimov to Heinlein and Clarke.
My parents still buy books, and I still thieve them off them when they're done. 'Got anything to read' always follows 'I'd love a cuppa, thanks', when I visit. We jokingly argue about who's next..
'Your father is still reading that one' she'll say, bringing out muesli cookies and coffee. 'We haven't bought much lately'. Yet I still leave with little stacks, which sit unread, until I return them.
One of those books ended up my favourite this year - 'Leave the World Behind' by Rumaan Alam, another apocalype book from the 2000's, published the year of the pandemic. I adored it. It made me wonder why I don't read anymore. I haven't enjoyed a book as much since Station Eleven or Charlotte Wood's 'The Natural Way of Things', a feminist horror set in the Australian outback, or Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, which had the wonderful premise of reintroducing wolves to the Scottish Highlands.
Perhaps I'm fussy these days. I've read alot, after all. A lot. Perhaps one gets a quota. The books I do read, I often get impatient with, discarding after a chapter or two. In the old days, I'd persist, feeling guilty if I didn't finish. Now I think life is too short.
Perhaps I'm suffering from attention deficit like everyone seems to be in the digital age, glutting on 7 second reels. Perhaps it's because Netflix and other video on-demand over-the-top streaming services feed my need for stories - there are so many fantastic series out there that mainline into my story brain.
Perhaps I don't have time, because I've filled my life other things - the things I want, and the things I don't want. Perhaps I spend too much time on social-fi.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Marquez skilfully sets the tone here, immediately hinting at both the mundane and extraordinary, and the dramatic fate awaiting the Colonel.
I was hooked, then, on literature - it was not so much the story, I realised, but how the story was told. The deliciousness of a well constructed sentence was addictive. Thus I could not possibly choose one novel that changed me, but many that I read in my early 20's that just opened me up.
I travelled in literature, both in time and across continents. I fell in love and learnt about love in Kundera's 'The Unbearable LIghtness of Being', discovering how a very particularly time and historical place can be brought alive in an novel. I loved the story of the French resistance in Beauvoir's 'The Blood of Others', another existential novel, and found myself enraptured by Portuguese writer Saramego who, in his novel 'Blindness', wrote an allegory for the breakdown of social structures as the world is hit with a blindness epidemic. I travelled in books to America, too, rushing down mountains with gravel flying with Kerouac and reading over and over and over the catyclysmic imagery of one of the final passages in Steinbeck's 'To a God Unknown':
“I should have known,” he whispered. “I am the rain.” And yet he looked dully down the mountains of his body where the hills fell to an abyss. He felt the driving rain, and heard it whipping down, pattering on the ground. He saw his hills grow dark with moisture. Then a lancing pain shot through the heart of the world. “I am the land,” he said, “and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.” And the storm thickened, and covered the world with darkness, and with the rush of waters.” ― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown
I wondered at the sparse beauty of Hemingway's sentences, particularly from 'To Whom the Bell Tolls', because the literature of war seem distil human behaviour so evocatively - later, I'd love Sebastian Barry's 'A Long, Long Way', 'Suite Francoise', Pat Barker's Regeneration series, Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried', the war poets such as Owen and Sassoon. Of course, I'd already been horrified by Orwell and wrung out by Atwood and 'A Clockwork Orange'.
Perhaps that is why I don't read much anymore - it is a rare thing for a novel to pluck at me these authors did back then. It takes me a long time to find a book that makes me feel the way those early books made me feel. Maybe I'm jaded. Maybe I just haven't found the right books. Because they are out there - over the years, I've been totally in love with Australian author Richard Flanagan (particularly Death of a River Guide and The Narrow Road to the Deep North), Cormac Mac Carthy's 'The Road', Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'. There's books I've read and reread the last chapter, read sections to my husband aloud just to feel the sentences hot and round in my mouth.
I have read enough in my life time to wrap the earth in a string of words many times over. I am still in love with reading, I realise, as I write this post. It's just I have forgotten how much. I make a vow, therefore, to go find myself a stack of books, and a few afternoons to soak in them.
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