― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
I don't really understand people who don't read books, or who don't, at all times, have a reading list -- fluid, ever-growing, ever-changing. I'm so excited about my list for 2019 that I'm writing about part of it before I read everything on it, and about ten months before my end-of-the-year book review. And it's not just the books on my personal reading list; I have the extreme privilege to teach literature in an IB school. About every seven years, each subject area goes through curriculum review and program changes, and the changes coming for literature starting next year are pretty exciting to me.
What I'm telling you is that my work wife and I armed ourselves with with index cards, stickers, and markers (all in different colors) and met at Starbucks on our day off to start working on our vision board. I have never made a real vision board in my life, but I am joyfully and unironically making one now. We are that excited. Today I skipped around my classroom singing softly about changing the world through literature. I don't think my students noticed anything out of the ordinary.
*
Last weekend I made my annual/semi-annual pilgrimage to Powell's Books in Portland. We plan a family trip there every winter, because I like to have something to look forward to in the slog of January and February. We work in activities for everyone, it's not just books -- folks want to eat and things, I guess. So we do that too. But this trip, I explained to my students this week, is really a spiritual experience for me. I work in at least two visits to The Bookstore in a 24-hour period (but I've been known to squeeze in more).
The first time, I take my list. We drive down sometime during the afternoon, check into our hotel, and head downtown. I have an agenda for that visit. At some point, Matt and the kids will wander across the street to put in our name for dinner at Deschutes Public House; the wait on a Saturday night is always long, so I can linger at the bookstore for anywhere from forty minutes to an hour.
(I should point out how absolutely wonderful it is to have children who a.) love to read and b.) are old enough for me to deposit in the enormous Children's/Young Adult section and leave them while I browse. These trips were more challenging when they required direct supervision, or carrying, and I will forever love my husband for taking on a great deal of this responsibility when they were little.)
On the second day, we do a Family Activity (OMSI, the zoo, etc.), followed by lunch at Laughing Planet, and then we return to the bookstore, and this is when I allow myself to wander through the stacks and let the books call to me. I don't know how else to describe it. Sometimes I discover books I didn't know I needed. Or I find a beautiful signed hardcover first edition of a book I've wanted for a long time at an absurdly cheap price. Often my family grows restless, so Matt takes them to a nearby park. He takes them to another brewery he wants to try, and the kids eat pretzels and drink root beer while he orders a beer sampler. They collect me in the late afternoon before we eat an early dinner and begin the drive home.
*
During our Portland trip three years ago, I learned that my very favorite writer, Pat Conroy, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I wrote about it here, even:
Dear Internet: I do not know how to express my actual, real-life devastation. Pat Conroy changed my life. I never met him, but I fully intended to. I thought I would fly to Minneapolis if I had to the next time he went on tour (his tour for The Death of Santini didn't bring him to Seattle but it did take him to St. Paul) and I would tell him this. And then I would have him sign a book to one of my truest and dearest friends, a coach, because Pat Conroy made the word Coach so beautiful to me...I thought of her last weekend. I walked by that coffee shop, even, but I didn't take the time to stop.
...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.
I wish I would have. I had things to write about in the journal I always carry with me.
*
I bought eight books last weekend. At least one of them I won't read right away. I am slowly collecting every single book Brian Doyle wrote; he is my second favorite author, after Pat Conroy, and he died of brain cancer a little over a year after Conroy died and almost exactly a year before my oldest friend's husband died of brain cancer, and seriously, just fuck all of that cancer. I will ultimately read all of Brian Doyle's work, but I can't bear to read it too quickly.
I don't buy an obscene amount of books, ever. And I don't have books piled in corners all over my house. I do own a lot of books, and I think I reread books more than most folks, and sometimes even when I don't reread an entire book there are books I need to keep because sometimes I need to reach for them and swim in their sentences. I need to immerse myself in the "texture and cadence of the language" (as I tell my students). But I don't hang on to books I don't love or won't return to. I have a lot of credit built up at Pegasus Book Exchange in West Seattle. I've also worn the same pair of shoes for the past, like, hundred years, because I don't care about shoes. (And if I don't need to own a book but still want to read it, I use libraries. I almost always have something on hold there.) That's my answer to the "How do you keep up with/how do you afford" folks. I buy books and I read them because it matters to me, a lot. It's what I do.
Anyway, whatever, I bought eight.
I absolutely knew I wanted these:
An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma: I read Obioma's first novel The Fishermen a few years ago and it was absolutely stunning, and the reviews for his new novel suggest that this one absolutely measures up to that expectation.
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli: After I read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, an essay structured around the forty questions asked of migrant children facing deportation, I'd follow Luiselli anywhere.
All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cancer and Cooking, by Karen Babine: Fun fact -- I graduated from Concordia with the author, which has nothing to do with anything except that I was lucky enough to attend a college that fostered and produced (produces) some great writing and an enduring love and appreciation for stories and language. Anyway. The only reason I didn't read this book in a single night is because I picked it up at nine o'clock on a school night, after my children were in bed, and I finished it the next day. It's SO good. It's a book that will resonate deeply with anyone who has a strong sense of place, of family, for anyone who understands how both food and language have the power to heal and connect us. It's beautiful. This is a book that will likely be categorized in the health/wellness/illness section of the bookstores, depending on which bookstore you're in, but that's a mistake. It should be front and center with any other memoir, because what she writes about is human experience and human love. And she does it in absolutely gorgeous sentences. I couldn't put it down.
Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, by Nadia Bolz-Weber: I'll read every book she publishes, because I love her, but I am all about dismantling conservative Christians' toxic obsession with sex and sexuality. (And I hope everyone who mailed her their purity rings has experienced some sort of healing.)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James: I'm admittedly not a devoted reader of fantasy, but I am a devoted reader of Marlon James, and I am so here for this book, described as a sort of "African Game of Thrones." (I am 100% willing to bet it's better.) I still think it's tragically unfair that Marlon James was in Portland when I was in Seattle and Seattle when I was in Portland.
The next day, after much wandering, after much carrying books around the store to see how they felt after an hour, after much deliberation, I settled on these:
Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry: This made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize in 2017 (a year which yielded a really spectacular list in general, in my opinion), and it also comes highly recommended by some folks whose literary opinions I deeply respect. I found a beautiful used hardcover in impeccable condition, so it felt like a sign.
Parkland: Birth of a Movement, by Dave Cullen: I read Cullen's book on Columbine several years ago, and it was truly excellent. I absolutely trust him with this subject matter. If he'd chosen to write about Sandy Hook, I might have given it a pass -- I still can't read a complete account of that day, however condensed, without a stab of panic and grief threatening to choke me. Sandy Hook destroyed me in ways I still can't write about, because I identify too much with the mothers. Parkland destroys me in a different way, but as a high school teacher, and as a passionate advocate for AT THE VERY FUCKING LEAST sensible gun legislation, and as a person deeply privileged to work with passionate teenagers, I think this is one I need to read immediately.
The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Brian Doyle: Because this is the last of Brian Doyle's novels published before his death in 2017. Because every sentence he writes is magic. Because. I won't read this one right away. I have collections of his essays, prose poems, and stories that I also dip into here and there, slowly. I can't bear the thought of reading the last of his words, knowing there will never be any more. It's also hard to come to terms with the knowledge that at some point, I will have bought them all. So I collect them slowly. Powell's is a good place for this; he was an Oregon writer, and they loved him well.
*
I carried some books that ultimately went back on the shelves, as I always do. But I need to save something for my birthday next week. All I ever want for my birthday is this: a day to write and drink coffee by myself in the morning, to take myself to lunch and read and sip a glass of wine on a weekday at noon, to take a walk through a certain neighborhood with the trees I know are about to burst with spring cherry blossoms, to look out across Puget Sound, and to go book-shopping and out to dinner with my family at night. It's my perfect day, always, and it's more than enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment