The root of it

Retrospectively, this year has not been a good one for writing. I have written but one poem and half-a-handful of journals (in a real journal, with a real pen). I purchased a tiny notebook in order to force myself to write down the poetry that inevitably comes to me at the most inconvenient times, in hopes that I might return to the way I was in high school. I have a thousand notebooks. I used to have a thousand tiny notebooks, and would fill them with poetry and prose until, brimming with my adolescent spirit, they would fall apart and the wire spiral would be squashed in an accident. The notebook would be dropped into a drawer of other old notebooks which I painstakingly looked at a few months before marriage, after which they were packed away indefinitely.

In other ways, in regards to literature, and finding my "muses", this year has been a good one. I have squandered hours of sleeping time reading instead, pouring over the pages of books that I would prefer to leave alone. Russian literature, Daniel Defoe, whatever the assignment is, they are just not interesting to me right now. I have spent the last eight years of my life reading beautiful books with worn pages and written on classics and epic poems and now... now I have somehow fallen out of love with the whole concept of reading something "because it's worth it" or because I "should" because I'm an English major, or because it's "good for me." I have no inclination to let myself be pretentious and give insincere critiques of a critique of some novel that was written about 150 years ago. This is the first semester since my freshman year that I am not taking any education-related classes--all I do is read!--and I don't even want to read what I'm supposed to.

Rather than continuously make myself bored by feigning interest, I feign interest on the surface, in the classroom, in conversation with other English-y people, and when I am at home with my husband we read other things.

In the last two weeks we read The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Fighting Ruben Wolfe by Markus Zusak. The last few books we read together were things that Joey pretty much picked out, and he read them to me almost in their entirety. So I decided to take charge and do something different. Joey had never read The Giver, but I had. Four times. It was nothing like the first time I read it, or any of the others, because I had this other person listening in and feeling everything beside me--and of course, I had forgotten a few things. And the book is full of those shocking moments, sometimes I wanted to just skip over them because they are actually quite horrible.

Reading the Zusak book was another adventure. It's already established that he is my favorite author. Joey and I read his best novel (The Book Thief) over Christmas break, which he, of course, read to me. I tried to get him to read Fighting Ruben Wolfe right after and for some reason it didn't interest him. Reading it to him was the best option. What guy wouldn't want to hear his wife read a story about two brothers beating each other up?

Now we're moving on to A Wrinkle in Time. It's been about ten years since I last read it. I remember only feelings and impressions, and scattered details. I had forgotten how long the chapters are. We only got through the first one before I got tired.

It's been a nostalgic trip through these books, I can at least say that in all honesty. In a time when I have all these feelings about rushing into the future and starting new things, the words that keep me going are not translated from Russian or turned into films. They are words that held me aloft in other times of change and transition. I reveled in them once, I appreciate them now, and someday I will probably need them again.

Perhaps we'll read The Chosen next...