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.