Reading
As a writer, it’s a given I’m also an avid reader. I have a small black journal which contains a list of books I’ve read. I started it in 2001. There’s a gap between 2003 & 2008 possibly because 2003 was the year I moved back to LA from Cape Cod and went through a divorce, and was a single mother, etc. etc.
Some years I clearly wasn’t taking good notes with only two or three books listed which could not have been the case. I am a deliberate reader (slow), and I hate to abandon a book I’ve started. My book lists show my reading selection to be all over the place – from contemporary American to world literature to classic and everything in between. The minute I set myself to read only South Asian women writers and immigrant writers (like this year), a comment about the greatness of Henry James leads me to listen to a recorded version of “A Portrait of A Lady,” which I loved. (More about that book later.) The truth is I have nothing against old dead white men authors—I have learned so much from them— but I do feel passionately that woman’s voices, black voices, native voices and immigrant voices, and those from around the world need a greater place in on our bookshelves. As one of those voices, I feel a particularly strong bond with my fellow diasporic writers.
Reading for me is essentially a transport device into characters and worlds that could not know otherwise. Martin Amis said the novel was the great humanizing device of the 20th century because it allowed us to step into other people’s shoes. I truly believe that.
I, for one, I am overwhelmed by what I would like to read, and the stories I may never get to. I have perennially thought that I must sit down with the Mahabharata or finish all seven volumes of “Remembrance of Things Past” (I’ve finished 1 ½) to name a few, but I would only be kidding myself to think I will get to everything in my lifetime. In the meantime, I accept that my reading habits will be gloriously arbitrary.
I wish had done was taken notes on each book and what my response to it was. This blog is the beginning of that enterprise. It invites me to think deeper about each book I read and articulate my thoughts on it. So here we go!