Before the Readathon
I have never read Don Quixote before.
This is a gaping hole in the fabric of my literary quilt, a tattered maw flapping in the winds of my celestial bookcase. But tomorrow, Tuesday, is all about sewing a patch over this hole with fine green and orange threads. In addition to Don Quixote, I will be embarking on a magical, loving journey with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (a recommendation courtesy of my mother) and The Starless Sea. Going on this journey feels a little like floating down a numinous river, branches of stories poking at me, beckoning me to come closer and taste the fruits of the fables and myths.
Tonight, I selected the bookmarks that I will pack in my canoe for this river. I chose for Don Quixote my red-ribboned plate with a quote from Henry David Thoreau. Black Beauty was awarded a postcard of Times Square against a fading blue sky. Because it is on my Kindle, The Starless Sea was spared the ritual of digging through my bookmark bowl, eager for a match that will complement the cover.
Assembled around me are my annotation supplies, the sticky tabs I can only find on Amazon, the colored pens that I maneuver in zigzags below the text to save it, to press it like a long-hopeless flower into the pages of my storytelling soul. The pens of Don Quixote will be red and yellow, warm like the colors of the cover. Annotation, you see, is art for me. But even in the few pages I have pawed through before writing this blog post, I have the ticklings of a feeling, that Don Quixote will become an All Time Favorite Book. This seems a bit Calvinistic, a bit romantic intoxication with my annotation pens, but I have so long been stripped of glee as I read, attempting to wiggle my way out of a reading slump. This could be a vibrant rebirth.
And just as I aspire to one day read The Master and Margarita in Russian and Pessoa in Portuguese, I am wondering if I will want to read Cervantes in Spanish, the language of my grandparents. This is akin to the chugging sound and sensation one experiences as she froths and churns to the top of a roller coaster’s hill, right before the great plunge. At the moment, in these early but engaging pages, I hear the clatter of the coaster cart as it tap dances over the wooden slats. I cannot wait to be one with the language , the wind of words.
But I am also nestling close to my mother in this readathon. We have nights where we sit in the library, flanked by those bookcases that were such hell to put together, talking literature. Our conversations bump along a path of how does children’s literature distinguish itself from adult literature to is Frankenstein better than Dracula. Children’s books, we say over tea, are deeper than the self-help books adults cling to. My mother coos over Frankenstein; I am drawn to Dracula.
One of her favorite children’s books is Black Beauty, which sat solemn and quiet on the shelf for years. I finally dislodged it from its resting place and stuck a bookmark in it. I am eager to grow closer to her through her most cherished stories and characters. To be honest, I was never a horse girl myself, but my favorite book, The Call of the Wild, is from the point of view of a dog, so I think I am reaching for familiar material.
Though I am just wobbling in the light, having emerged from my cave of a reading slump, I am so excited for the next few books I am going to be reading. Rumi’s Masnavi. Goethe’s Faust. Cao’s The Story of the Stone. I have plans to reread Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar and Anais Nin’s diaries. To couch this in social media terms, I am expecting a lot of five star reads on Goodreads.
These are the thoughts cartwheeling around my head as I go into my first twenty-four-hour readathon. I am just breaking the surface of the roller coaster hill. The rush is beginning.
