Thoughts on reading…

I haven’t been reading much lately — and shame on me.  I could name a number of excuses, but none of them hold real water.  I remember what I used to be like — I’d carve time for a book even if it meant chiseling stone with my teeth.

Fortunately, I get to keep my teeth.  I’ve got a stack of books in front of me — romances, thrillers, YA, non-fiction — and I’m settling in for a long book retreat to put the taste of words back inside me.

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Here’s a great two part interview with Junot Diaz, called The Search for Decolonial Love:

Or said differently: how indissolubly our identities are bound to the regimes that imprison us. These sisters not only describe the grim labyrinth of power that we are in as neocolonial subjects, but they also point out that we play both Theseus and the Minotaur in this nightmare drama. Most importantly these sisters offered strategies of hope, spinning the threads that will make escape from this labyrinth possible. It wasn’t an easy thread to seize—this movement towards liberation required the kind of internal bearing witness of our own role in the social hell of our world that most people would rather not engage in. It was a tough praxis, but a potentially earthshaking one too. Because rather than strike at this issue or that issue, this internal bearing of witness raised the possibility of denying our oppressive regimes the true source of their powers—which is, of course, our consent, our participation. This kind of praxis doesn’t attack the head of the beast, which will only grow back; it strikes directly at the beast’s heart, which we nurture and keep safe in our own.

An essay from the late Nora Ephron on her love of reading, and how books make a difference, which I think most of us will understand perfectly:

I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book. I loved this book. I loved every second of it. I was transported into its world. I was reminded of all sorts of things in my own life. I was in anguish over the fate of its characters. I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I’ve loved. I composed a dozen imaginary letters to the author, letters I’ll never write, much less send—letters of praise, letters of entirely inappropriate personal information about my own experiences with the author’s subject matter, even a letter of recrimination when one of the characters died and I was grief-stricken. But mostly I composed imaginary letters of gratitude: The state of rapture that occurs when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time, or even every other time, and when it does, I’m truly beside myself with joy.