So, Yeah.

Yes, I am a slacker. When it comes to some things, I am all up on it. Blogging? Not so much. I will try to change that. 2011 will be the Year of My Blog. Or not. We’ll see. The problem is that not a lot happens in my life. I don’t have young children who do cute, funny, or horrible things. I cook and I knit, but this is not a cooking or craft blog, yo. My dogs love road trips (those of you who read Hyperbole and a Half know what I am talking about).

I do read–generally a great deal. I have a long history of reading. Some of my best friends are in books. When I was very young, reading was simply fun. Once my dad married my stepmonster, it was an escape–I could travel down the Mississippi with Tom and Huck and ignore the crazy anytime I felt like it. I lived for the library’s Bookmobile. The summer between fifth and sixth grades I read ninety books and I’m not talking children’s books.  I mean real books. That summer I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for the first time.  I think it was then that I realized what a book could really do. A book can change your life. Seriously, it can.

Books teach you. They open up the world in a way that most other things simply can’t. I’ve learned so much from books that it’s hard to really quantify their impact on my life. I was trying to figure out how many books I’ve read over the course of my life. Right now, I average about 50 books a year. Even if I cut that number in half to compensate for years when I didn’t read as much, and start counting from 1972, when I was 12, that still puts me at nearly 1,000 books. I know I’ve read more than that–probably at least twice that. There have been times in my life (pregnancy bed rest and such) when I’ve read a book a day. It was during that pregnancy when I read all of Agatha Christie’s Poirot mysteries. No, Agatha Christie is not Great Literature, but the books are good, entertaining, and they are just the right length for knocking out one a day when you aren’t being allowed to do much else.

I’ve gone through numerous phases in my reading life. As a teen, I read a ton of historical romances. There was the above mentioned Christie phase. I’ve read Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman, and Dean Koontz. I still love a good mystery and read anything Ruth Rendell; I also enjoy Elizabeth George. That’s all fluff. It’s fun. It has its place. As one of my professors said this past semester, concerning fluff reading, “There’s nothing wrong with eating Oreos as long as you don’t think they are real food.” The problem is that sometimes, people (myself included, at times) get stuck eating nothing but Oreos.

People often tell me that I am a book snob. I guess nowadays I am, to a degree. At this point, Harry Potter and Twilight just aren’t going to do it for me. Here’s an experiment. Think about some food you loved as a kid. Not real food, but some candy or other crap that you really liked. Go out, buy it, and eat it. Go for something like Necco wafers or Ding Dongs. Does it taste as good to you now as it did when you were seven? Probably not. For me, at nearly 51, reading most of what is on the NYT bestseller list would be like eating Necco wafers. I have no interest in Necco wafers when I can have wine, Gruyère, and some lovely chocolates. So, yes, I am a self-admitted book snob. I want a book that pushes me out of my comfort zone. I want to read a book and have it resonate, sometimes for years after I’ve completed it.

So, what do I read? I read Jane Austen.  I read José Saramago and Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami. I read Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I read many Latin American authors, including García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Roberto Bolaño, and Carlos Fuentes. I read the Brontës and George Eliot. I devour Salman Rushdie and Gayle Jones. I read Nabakov. In short, I read a very wide variety of stuff–not a Necco wafer among them. I still like an Oreo now and then and at those times I read Terry Pratchett or Ruth Rendell or some impulse read from the library.

I hear what you’re thinking. “When I read, I want to be entertained.” You think that you can’t be entertained by something that is not a Necco wafer or an Oreo? You think Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor are not entertaining? I challenge you to read As I Lay Dying and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and come back and tell me they aren’t entertaining. Really. I dare you.

I am not one of those traumatized, whiny, bitter former Catholics. Although today I consider myself to be an atheist, if I were to somehow suffer a head injury and decide that Christianity really is The Way, I would become a Catholic again. Protestantism seems so sterile and lifeless. Well, I suppose those churches where people speak in unrecognizable languages and fall out in the presence of the lord are kind of jaunty, in their own way. But, for me, a church should contain proper and restrained ceremony, pretty things to look at while your mind wanders during the homily (sermon for you heathen Protestants), incense, gory stories of saints’ lives, and the consumption of the actual body and blood of Christ. No matzo crackers and grape juice for me. When I drop my offering in the basket, I want to get the most bang for my buck. I want a show.

The one thing that would be a disappointment is that the Mass is in English. Back in the day, I enjoyed many a High Mass. Latin, FTW. I’m also not sure about confession. I hear that in some quarters it’s done face to face these days. Something just isn’t right about that. I want the box with the curtain, the screen, and the anonymity. I mean, really. I can just see myself looking Father Nguyen (they’re all Vietnamese in New Orleans these days) in the eye while I regale him with tales of self-abuse. Not going to happen.

I wonder if Father Nguyen takes himself down to the local neighborhood joint for a beer or a cocktail the way Father Gautreaux used to when I was a kid. Probably not. I’ll admit, that was a little traumatizing. Oh, I should mention that I grew up in the 1960s in New Orleans when parents of a certain type would cart their kids along to the restaurant/bar with them. My father and stepmother were those kinds of parents. So, we sometimes ran into Father Gautreaux at the Edgelake or G & Lil’s having a little aperitif. I wasn’t upset that our parish priest was in a bar, nor was I upset that he was having a drink. You may have guessed given the fact that my parents took small children to bars that seeing someone having a drink wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence for me. What upset me was that he wasn’t wearing his black clothing or his collar. There was Father Gautreaux in an open collared plaid sport shirt and regular slacks, sipping his whiskey and soda or whatever he was drinking and looking like a regular person. This totally threw my eight year old’s view of the right and proper WAY THINGS SHOULD BE out of whack.

So, Father Gautreaux in his sport shirts and the time in first grade when I peed on myself during the Stations of the Cross and I had to go to the office and change into a uniform and panties that did not belong to me (who knows where that stuff had been). Oh, and the time during third grade when Mrs. Hunt busted me for having completed my entire math workbook before Halloween. I’m pretty sure that had more to do with Mrs. Hunt not knowing how to deal with a child like me than it did with it being a Catholic school. So, yeah, I came out pretty much unscathed.