Reading Right and Meaningfully...

I finished "The Year of Magical Thinking" in less than a day. It is not the fact that I read fast (although I suppose I did), but the real and tangible experience it was to absorb every word, to take in all of its messages and enjoy one of the most productive reads I have had all year. Joan Didion is a great writer. Her emotions translate on the page as if they were happening to us in real life. She confronts the loss of her husband with courage and determination and could be seen as heroic in her efforts to restore normalcy to her life. The book is not depressing, although it deals primarily with the consequences of death to those who remain living. This is one of my top recommendations for this year. Excellent book.

What strikes me odd was the way I came across "The Year of Magical Thinking." I bought a couple of books at Amazon last year while we were still living in the apartment. Over the course of the year, I have gone back to Amazon to check reviews or information related to several books I have purchased elsewhere. The algorithms that select "recommendations based on what you have purchased or on the basis of what other people who purchased the same book have also purchased" seems to me sort of horrific. Nevertheless, one day, up comes "The Year of Magical Thinking" and I took it up to read it because the subject matter attracted me. I didn't get the book at Amazon. I went to "Half-Priced Books" and after a couple of fruitless searches, I found it on the fiction section under "Dickens." I didn't read it right away, and I am glad that I waited. The fact that at first seating I read over 100 pages is a testimony (from a slow reader like myself) that the books is an engaging piece of genius.

The next selection on my reading list is "The Myth of the Sisyphus" by Albert Camus. Now, now... it's not that I am in a binge of depressing books--far from it. I am reading these in preparation to a larger topic in both my fiction and non-fiction reading: that of the meaningful life and how to live it. The center piece of Camus' book is the question of whether or not life has to has meaning in order to live it. Moreover, if life does not seem to have significance or meaning, is it worth living or would it be much better to commit suicide? These are difficult questions, of course, but from what I have read from Camus before I know he will deal the subject with intense passion and scrutiny. What else could we ask for?

Sebastian Knight and The Year of Magical Thinking

I finished "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight." Between yesterday and today I read over 180 pages or over 2/3 of the book. The story continues from where I left off: the narrator seeks to put together the last year of his brother's life in order to compose a biography. He finds out very little but in the course of the search he is confronted by the fact that his brother might have had an affair during one short summer stay at a hotel in France. The narrator seeks for this woman to be able to better comprehend his brother's last year. The novel is well-constructed, with animated and very alive characters (even the minor ones). The language is all Nabokov, pure genius.

Why am I reading so fast? I finished Sebastian Knight this morning (I had two chapters to go) and immediately started Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking." Today was all-school testing so all I had to do was sit there administering the tests. I read voraciously all morning while the students slaved over the test. I assume it was about two and a half hours but I am presently on page 101. Why did it go so fast? I have never been a fast reader, but I think only when I am completely lost in a book can I achieve so much in a single seating. Didion's book is a non-fiction account about how, while her daughter is in the hospital seriously ill, her husband faints during dinner and dies of a massive heart attack. Didion captures well the events, surprisingly so for someone to catch so much detail in such a terrible event. She details her relationship with her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, over the forty years of marriage and collaborating together. It is needless to say a very painful book, but one filled with fine passages and intense emotion. I found an awkward sentence: "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade Center. I don't know but it seems strange to me... "got flown"... of course it is indeed what happened.

About her writing process, she writes:

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.

This is comparable to what Nabokov's narrator states about the writing process, no? I love it when writers impregnate their work with their working habits and techniques. I don't know how long it is going to take me to finish this book but I might take a break tonight (although I know I can't). This is how I love to read... forgetting everything in the daily ordinariness of my life and immersing myself into someone else's world. Escapism?... touche!