Hot fiction

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One of the benefits of being a University employee is access to the library’s enormous collection of books and other media.  I passed most of yesterday with the online catalogue, searching for books I wanted to read, copying down the call number, figuring out which to prioritize and which could (or should) be saved for later.  I began to think about how well this was going to work out — over Halloween, I would read something suspenseful, like The Historian; over the holidays, A Christmas Carol by Dickens; maybe something romantic like Gone with the Wind or The English Patient during the Valentine’s Day season; or a classic bildungsroman like Great Expectations just in time for my birthday.

But how to begin?  What book will set the right tone?  What will be illustrative of my intentions with this project?  I have always had trouble with this sort of commitment to a value judgment.  If you look through my notebooks, dating back from my first diary, through all my school notebooks, and even to my present journals, I find it impossible to write on the first page.  I never knew what was significant enough to merit belonging there.  The first page is the place for the title, the sum-uppance of what’s to follow, and I suppose I could never really figure out what that was.

After the first, it doesn’t matter so much.  The pressure is off.  In one childhood diary in particular, I remember skipping the first page, preserving its sacred whiteness, its perfect, parallel lines unadulterated by my eight-year-old scribble, merely to write what I had eaten at brunch on the second.  It seemed that while nothing was good enough for the first page, nothing was banal enough for the second.

I spent hours weighing the options for my maiden voyage.  I could begin with a classic, but this isn’t a project about classics, or even great books.  It’s about saving my own literacy and brain function.  If some classics should fall in here and there, all the better, but if something new and avant garde should cross my radar, who am I turn that book away?

I decided on Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the companion to her earlier, award-winning work, Gilead.  Of course, I haven’t read Gilead, but I did read Housekeeping, another book of hers, and when I think of Housekeeping, I think of cold, damp air, and the smell of wet leaves, and I think Marilynne Robinson might just be the perfect writer to take me into fall.

Home was just published in September, so it’s as contemporary as it gets, which I liked.  But has gravity to it, perhaps due to its companionship to Gilead or its acclaimed and very serious author, that it feels inherently worthwhile.  I checked Home out of the library yesterday, along with White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Good Kiss, a poetry collection by George Bilgere, and a book that I fear will be reminiscent of the worst of my undergraduate workshop experiences called We Could Be Like That Couple by Sarah Steinberg, a self-proclaimed “amateur designer, dilettante stop-motion animator, imaginary comedy writer, and all-round very mysterious lady.”  I wish I would have read that before picking it up.

I rode my bike home, my backpack now pregnant with the next few weeks of pleasure reading, with stories I haven’t heard, people I’ve never met, and worlds drawn from phrases that I, for free, will have the delight to slip into after a long day’s work.

C was out studying for the night, and when I had finished everything I had to do, I put the kettle on for some vanilla almond tea, rested into the couch, and opened the heavy, hard-bound novel.  I was met by the crackling noise and ink-and-paper smell of a brand new book, and, by the end of the first page, I knew I had made the right choice.

"You are what you read."

Proverbial?  Yes.  Hackneyed?  Sure.  It’s also, if true, a little frightening, as it means it is only a brief matter of time before I turn into a work e-mail, the ten-day forecast on weather.com, or a food blog.  Truly, the thought of this phrase is unsettling.  It haunts me.  Something must be done.

Exposition: I am a recent graduate of Indiana University with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing.  I am living in Bloomington for a year, standing still, catching my breath before graduate school.  When choosing between applying to Starbucks or for a desk job at the University, I picked the latter, and wound up as an administrative assistant.  I live with my significant other, C, an economist, and our cat, H.  C will earn his B.A. in May, and my envy of his student status is never greater than when I’m at work—the place where my brain does the majority of its rotting (but more on that later).

Due to my brain rot “at-risk” status, I have decided to create a treatment plan in the form reading, with the regular dose of a book a week.  The journey will be reported here, in this space, a travelogue, a criticism, a working list, and, with any luck, a place to find a good book.

On the list at this moment:

No one belongs here more than you. Miranda July

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, Stieg Larsson

The Coast of Utopia, a play by Tom Stoppard

More to come.

J