Don't Bother

Somehow Sideways Stories from Wayside School got knocked into the bathtub tonight, although how it even got into the bathroom is a mystery. This event is a fair synecdoche for how my life feels at the moment: hectic, illogical, all elbows, and damp. I have 8 of 11 grad school applications submitted, 22 recommendation letters outstanding, 5 days of work until a Mexico vacation, 3 snot-filled persons in my house, 17 holiday gifts to buy and/or mail, 2 cars that require inspections, 10 place settings worth of dishes waiting to be washed*, 8 books that I want to read on vacation but can't bring myself to purchase on the Kindle because I'm more of a checker-out than a buyer by temperament, 100 songs to put on the iPod for my husband becaue if I don't this will be the 2nd year in a row that I failed to really give him a Chanukah present, and 0 items packed.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this above-listed numerical impossibilities, I spent the 45 minutes I had free today during Nora's nap skimming The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. My intention was to read it fo reals, but the author, Aimee Bender, did me a huge favor by overwriting up some unfocused Los Angeles magical realism so that I wouldn't have that time commitment, at least.

*I mentioned to one of my students, in passing, that I don't always get to the dishes after dinner. She gave me a squinty look, so I said "Don't judge me." Her instantataneous response: "Too late."

Philistines

I'm starting to get really resentful of my carpool-mates due to their INEXPLICABLE refusal to listen Middlemarch on CD on the drive to and from school. It's like Valium with an accent, and it reminds me that there are in this world people capable of complex thought and copious mental retention, and it makes me feel that those 45 shoulder-tensing minutes behind the wheel aren't an utter waste of life.

Confession

I'm having some trouble quitting P.D. James. I usually like to vary my reading, hopping from popular nonfiction about condiments or unlikely professions to Victorian novels mostly of interest only to women's studies majors to the kind of unabashed chick lit that heavily features brand-name shopping, if only to keep my Goodreads followers guessing.

However, I have read almost nothing but Adam Dalgliesh mysteries for the last month and a half, and I have gone through eight of them, which I think is officially compulsive. I am kind of diffidently an Anglophile, super-excited about the royal engagement, etc., and James' mysteries are so British that she's been made a baroness by the Queen just for writing them. But they're British less in a charming, country cottage, God Save the Queen kind of way than in a deadpan, dirty Thames, National Health Service kind of way. And our hero is a lugubrious policeman/poet who is not very likable, although he's very good at figuring out what's afoot. He himself is often afoot.

This whole Adam Dalgliesh situation is wreaking havoc with my plan to take nothing but the Kindle on our winter vacation to Mexico. Only the last four are available on the Kindle, so I need to get through two and a half in the next 10 days while applying furiously to grad schools, raising a child, and stamping out ignorance 40 hours a week.

Light My Fire

So, I like to think I'm still a hold-out. I still pause to bury my nose in the smell of whatever book I'm reading, new and old alike. Bookstores both soothe me and make me slightly manic (as all the best addictions do, I imagine, at one stage or another). Some of my fondest memories of college are sitting in the absolute silence of the Grad Library stacks, getting gloriously distracted from the books I meant to find for my thesis amid the walls of books, the ranks of buckram spines, the pop of a new publication, the grab of an odd title in the corner of my eye. All this is to say that I feel deeply (if resignedly) about books as physical books. I love them in a way that I don't think they can be loved if you separate the words from the paper, glue, string, old annotations, spots, signs of care or carelessness, slow fading, decay.

However, Jake got me a Kindle for Chanukah. He likes books qua books, too, if only because he is a piler by nature, but he also makes a slight fetish of efficiency in spatial dynamics. Since the baby was born he has railed about the sheer amount of stuff that we have to pack to go anywhere for any period of time, and especially to go for a week or more (this railing is mostly inward, I should note, except in those exquisitely frustrating moments intrinsic to traveling -- which are, incidentally, the times in my life that I least want to discuss our penchant for overpacking). I generally take six to eight (to, ahem, ten) hardback library books on just about any trip that requires a plane, and Jake would have spent more than $189 to eliminate that weighty inefficiency. Also, we had a warm moment on a commuter train in New York this fall, me reading Stephen Ambrose's The Victors aloud to him from a sample on my Droid, as we rocked from Katonah back to the city, the baby asleep on the seat across from us.

So I just finished reading my first ever Kindle book: Lily Burana's I Love a Man in Uniform. I can't quite get over the fact that I've now read a book that I've never seen or touched (some distinction seems to be required now, right? A conceptual book vs. a physical book? Oy vey.) You don't really realize how much reading a book is a physical experience until you're reading a "book" (can someone please make a decent distinction here stat). It's delightful, but bizarre, not to have to hold the book open with your hand or the blanket or the edge of a plate, to be able to turn the page with the tiny motion of any smallish and reasonably coordinated body part. It's bizarre and not delightful not to be able to flip pages past your finger to find something you half-remember, and when you do find it, it's highly disconcerting to find it on a different part of the page from where you remember seeing it (I have a weird, and fairly useless, version of photographic memory where I can visualize what quadrant of a two-page spread a quote or fact I've read can be found; the last time I recall this making a major impact on my life was on U.S. history tests in high school).

I'm sure there'll be more on this later.

The Victors so far: I'm not sure Ambrose isn't plagiarizing himself, but we liked it the first time so hey.

I Love a Man in Uniform: Quick, enjoyable prose by a mostly sympathetic memoirist, writing about two experiences that fascinate me (stripping, which she writes about a little, and being married to the military, which she writes about a lot). I don't know about her "PTSD" freakout, but this happened in the book around the same time that I Googled the author's picture, and for some reason I liked her less after seeing it, so maybe I was just feeling ornery about that. Does this happen to other people? Discuss. Anyway, after reading this I would/will read her first memoir about stripping, I think.

Reading Life

The other day, I bought my daughter who as yet can neither read nor speak clearly, the following books at a book sale: Caddie Woodlawn, Mary Poppins, Ballet Shoes, and Misty of Chincoteague. I'd be delighted to discuss with you the absolute necessity of these childhood classics, but the fact remains: if I am purchasing a certain consumer good for an occasion six to seven YEARS in the future (and an occasion that, given GameBoys and Kindles and people who like to play outside more than they like to read, may or may not come to pass) I seem to have a peculiar, not to say pathological, relationship with said consumer good.

In this light, I calculated (using the, again possibly pathological, list I keep) the books I've read in the past four years (well, 3 years and 11 months). The total is 546, to date. To me, this explains why trying to keep a blog about anything else, with any other organizing principle, is a disaster. Aside from peeing, which I'll leave to another (no doubt more popular) blogger, I can't think of anything else that I do without exception each and every day. I'm bad with routine -- I forget it or revise it or avoid it or insist on breaking it for "special occasions" -- but I never go a day without reading or out of my house without a book. I forget the diaper bag, the grocery list, my wallet, but never something to read (or, in fairness, the baby).

Moreover, I remember my books and my life together. If I flip open to a page of a book I've read before, I can often remember where I was and what I was doing when I read it; thinking about my daughter's first months, I also think about David Copperfield, which I devoured in the exhausted blanks when she was napping or nursing. I try not to think about the 12 or so newborn how-to books that I anxiously picked at during the same time period, alternating between a need to know and a terror that I couldn't, ultimately, know (or prevent) anything. David Copperfield was an escape from all the parts of new motherhood that were tiring, frightening, uncertain, uncomfortable, and (frankly) boring. It is easier for me to remember these sensations insofar as they kept me from (or drove me to) my snatched moments with a book than it is to remember them in and of themselves. When I had a miscarriage a year and change later, I spent that whole awful day reading the entirety of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, page after page with no thoughts allowed in between. My mind remembers the book as charming and well-written; my body remembers with a tugging warmth the real kindness that book did me.