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.