After the Readathon
I completed Black Beauty.
Reading this, I was at turns introspective, moved, tossed into a tempest of giggles (mostly at Merrylegs), and plunged into a lake of philosophical disturbances that manifested as lip chewing. Yes, Black Beauty did what I hoped it would: Bring me closer to my mother, as this is one of her favorite books. There is a lovely window that comes with the memory of childhood, what we read, what we adored, what shaped us. Black Beauty was a portrait of a young reader with a tender heart for the sufferings of others, even if those others are not even human. In short, my mother is a soul after soothing others.
Kindness in a book.
What is our responsibility toward one another? What must we do to extend our humanity and empathy to a creature without comprehension of words but every comprehension of actions, of spirit, of meaning? I was never drawn to horses, but my favorite book (The Call of the Wild, of course) was a nest of thoughts of a dog becoming a wolf. The animal protagonist is an excellent one because it is inevitably moral, determined to survive, and eternally puzzling over the nature of the humans in their midst. It is akin to looking in a mirror but the mirror is the soft eyes of Buck or Black Beauty.
During my readathon, this was the only book that I completed out of my deck of three, which included The Starless Sea and Don Quixote. Of course, I knew that I would not finish Don Quixote in a single day. A person would have to be a fine-tuned locomotive for that to happen, capable of plowing across forests of words and continents of paragraphs. I am no locomotive, and rather am one who ambles slowly down streets, fancying the sound my brown boots make on the cobblestones. I meander through pages with time to stop and admire an adjective here or there.
Nonetheless, I have picked up a few impressions of this book along the way. I am pleased to report that it is tracking to be a new favorite read, something I can act smugly about finishing. I can picture my insufferable self now, waving my annotated copy in people’s faces. “This is a classic,” I will drone on. “It’s, like, the defining work of Spanish literature.”
My future arrogance slotted aside, I chortled through Harold Bloom’s introduction because, like all people who wondered what literary critics would make of them as a routine thought exercise growing up, I could not help but roll my eyes at the fact that Bloom had to tie everything about Cervantes to Shakespeare. For Bloom, all roads led to Hamlet. As a teenager, I confess that I did dream about what someone like Bloom would think of my chunky little novel, if he would excoriate it and I would be left with a sense of humor about the whole thing. Obviously, Bloom has left us and I am sort of sluggish about Hamlet (in my humble opinion, Faust is the superior play) so the entire matter is moot.
I have spoken less here about Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. My initial impression of the first section was ambivalent. I made it about a quarter of the way through the book before I really started to get hooked. The pacing and the mystery are spectacular, but the themes are being hammered with a heavy fist. I don’t think that the philosophy of the work is gently threaded in so much as imposed on us readers. It is an engaging book, albeit I am still only 26% through (per my Kindle). As I was walking on my treadmill, the Kindle propped up on the dashboard, I read the introduction of Dorian with excitement. This is intended as a compliment to the book, because, fundamentally, that is what makes a good read, that you want to turn the page, even while you are sweating and listening to Lana Del Rey and staring angrily at the time snailing away on the control panel.
All of this is to say that my first ever readathon was informative. I pushed my fragile attention span to the shadow of its limits. It spread out before me with crumbling reach, thin fingers fighting to turn the page just one more time. I want to consider here what I learned about myself and I think that the answer is simply that I am falling back in love with reading. Having been in a bruising, punishing reading slump for over a year, I feel the tingle in my hands again as literary circulation returns to them. What a thrilling feeling!
And I know that when I cast my words upon this humble webpage, I will go back to Cloud Atlas and others, my annotating pen my companion. There is always a good book to go home to.
