Passionate Reading

The yellow crocuses are up in the corner of the yard where we plowed under the flowerbeds for more grass. M says they’ve been up for a while, but I just noticed. Still, it snows every day and the skies are a never-ending gray. The girls are still in parkas, though I defiantly wear a fleece, or even a sweater if I’m running out for an errand. I think this is the winter that will never end, but I keep reminding myself that March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. We saw seven lambs yesterday at the Maple Syrup Festival at a nearby farm.

I finally finished a book. I’m in the middle of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, Michel Faber’s The Courage Consort, Meg Wolitzer’s The Position, Nancy and Lawrence Goldstone’s Used and Rare, and I’m sure there are lots more that I put down too long ago to remember I’m in the middle of them. And the thing is, each of those books is perfectly good and I’m enjoying them all; I just don’t seem to pick them up often enough.

I want from books what I long since realized was not so great with men: to be swept away in a devouring passion, the kind where you don’t think about anything else, where you can’t sleep or eat, where you sneak away from your responsibilities to grab a moment that stretches into way too long because you just can’t get away. Those relationships never quite worked out for me with men, but they have with books.

I think the last book I fell for so hard was Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White: 920 pages and I must have read them in half a week; then I gave the book, hardcover, to J for her birthday; then I recommended it to everyone I know who has the least interest in brilliant writing and Victorian London; and I still look at it on the shelf and sigh in recollections of pleasure. Now that’s a book relationship.

But then there are the books that I devour and they’re over and that’s it. I read The Time Traveler’s Wife in two days, after a number of people told me it was the best book they’d ever read, but mainly I read so fast because there was so much plot, and when it was over I wondered what the big deal was. The writing was sentimental, the characters were pedestrian, and the plot was dazzling, but mainly in a technical kind of way. Clearly just a two-night stand.

This weekend I read Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty: A Friendship in 24 hours, sneaking a few paragraphs when I went upstairs to get the laundry, and finishing it in one burst sitting at the kitchen table yesterday afternoon while M read Searching for Laura Ingalls: A Reader’s Journey and E pored over Franklin’s Halloween. The book is a memoir of Patchett’s friendship with Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, who died at 39 in 2002 from a toxic combination of depression, heroin, and alcohol, following a thirty-year struggle with the after-effects of childhood cancer. Patchett’s a great writer, it was a compelling narrative, and it pushed my buttons, since I’m obsessed with both writers and untimely death. But there was something lacking: Patchett communicates her passionate love for Grealy in a way that makes you remember how significant women’s friendships can be, but Grealy herself comes across as a neurotic, impossible brat. The reader has to take her incredible appeal--which must have been incredible, given the incredible number of devoted friends she had--on faith, and ultimately that seems like a failure on the book’s part (I’m not the only one who felt this way). So I’m glad I found something I wanted to read, but this one will not be a lasting passion.