Moving into an apartment that puts you one short subway stop away from work is a surefire way to slow down your reading progress if you're used to the trip taking an hour. In the past five months, I've managed to make it through a few great books, though. Unfortunately, the closest I've gotten to blogging about them is the automatic Goodreads updates that tell you things like I'm on page 100 of "Comic Book Tattoo," a Tori Amos collector's item I got for Christmas, and will likely get into here a little later.
The first book I started after Olive Kitteridge, I believe, was Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I was heading back into my nonfiction stream, and I wanted to wax philosophical. I didn't quite make it all the way to the end, though the 225 pages I did read were amazing, and I plan to finish it off in the not-so-distant future. That book is best read in long sittings, and after August and September I was quite short on those. But I can say I underlined in red something on almost every single page of that little 380-page pink book. I'd like to do a more in-depth post on it one day when I start reading the end of it. But I'll grab a random snippet: "She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before." How appropriate.
"Zen" was too heavy for short sittings, but I wanted to stay with the "inspirational" nonfiction, so I read "On Writing" by Stephen King. And it was very inspiring -- it made me want to write both fiction and memoir (and even read more memoirs of authors). I've always been a King fan, though I've barely put a dent in the 10 or so novels of his that I own, my favorite being "Dolores Claiborne," of course. Anyway, I liked "On Writing" for its honesty. You got to see Stephen at home, letting his wife make sweeping literary decisions for him, and him being perfectly happy to have it that way. He made me want to get on paper every potentially silly (read: groundbreaking) idea that pops into my head. I'll have to spend some time identifying my Ideal Reader, though. Maybe it's him. I feel like I could go to "On Writing" with a question, and Stephen would answer it. Reading that book is like having a conversation with the man. He made himself the protagonist of a plotless narrative, and I felt I knew him pretty well by the end.
Inspired by King's "Carrie" confessions, I decided it was high time I read that classic. I can't remember why, but I was quickly distracted from it. There's a mysterious black hole in my memory (well, that's not so mysterious if you know me), where I might have picked up something else, but eventually I ended up cracking another author memoir, this time A.M. Homes's "The Mistress's Daughter." I put a short review of this one on Goodreads, where I express my desire for "more narrative and less fact-spewing" about the adoptee's reunion with her biological parents. I hope Homes writes another memoir, and I'd hope for something under the category of "more personal," but you don't get much more personal than your search for identity. And the drama isn't missing. On page 60 Homes drops the drama into one succinct sentence: "Ellen thinks I'm her mother, Norman thinks I am Ellen, and Norman's wife thinks I am the mistress reincarnate." But it's interesting to watch Homes dig into her ancestry, more so on the reflective side than the genealogical analysis. When her biological mother dies, she goes through this relative stranger's things and finds pieces of herself: "It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine" (page 98). You don't have to be adopted to appreciate her words. "Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel--on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?" (page 117)
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