A Brief History of My Reading

Today I tried to come up with an author's name and it just didn't rise to the surface.  That isn't too surprising, not at my age.  I look at my co-workers, people I work with every day, and can't come up with their names although they are wearing name tags.  But I did sort of remember one of the author's books, which I confused with his name (because they are both singular - you know, like "Cher") and because there is the interweb-thingie I can key what I know in and come up with the bit I don't know.  Love the interwebs.

It is frustrating though, for someone who can't remember the names of the pseudepigraphic Pauline letters from one moment to the next (let's see, there's the pestorals and the ones that start with T ... but what about Effusions, Collations, and Fellations?) despite having heard/read about them time after time, to suddenly remember a book from 1979 and some of its content despite not having read it.  And suddenly I remember that I was on page 263/4 of Nabokov's Ada before I gave up (planning to resume later because I kept track of the page ... which is often how I keep track of where I stopped reading when a bookmark isn't handy: I just remember look at the page number and remember it) at about that same time.  Mind you, I don't remember what I've read.  In order to cope with the book discussion group I lead I have to make a note of each character in the book because I just can't remember names (see above co-workers).

This has put me in mind of what I have read over the years.  I go through fads, but cheezy mysteries and non-fiction tend to resurface.

Grade school: the Alfred Hitchcock collections, Nancy Drew, and Roald Dahl.  I was once handed some realistic fiction by a school librarian when I looked hesitant and regarded her with suspicion ever after.  Why would she think I would enjoy a book about a girl whose father was a janitor and who was feeling ostracized by her peers?  Later one handed me James and the Giant Peach and all was well again - but I have been careful since becoming a children's librarian about what I recommend to kids and how I express it.  "Well, I liked it," I might say or "I hear it's popular."  I will never suggest that they would like a book.

Grade school and what was then called Junior High: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a gift from my sister who knew a little martyr when she saw one.  My sister was the The Secret Garden type: pushy and devious ... but in a good way.  I read this book about once a month and cried and cried and spilled Chicken with Stars soup on it.  It's engraved on my heart.  Wish I could remember that little girl's name though.  Nowadays I read some of the stuff written for "teens" and I just can't take the pain and the angst.  I guess we like it at that age.

High school: Mysteries.  I started with Agatha Christie and never stopped.  Preferred the British and the more gentle, but occasionally branched out into the more gruesome.  And fell in love with P. G. Wodehouse and his unique turn of phrase.  Also, I spent high school summers immersing myself in themes such as Epic Poetry and Greek Drama.  This affectation continued in college.  It's an affectation because I didn't take any courses in them, just read them to be able to say I had and shut down conversations with "Well, you know what Aeschylus says ..."  Oh, and I also read a lot of John Barth and Anthony Burgess.

College: More cheezy mysteries to offset the reading I had to do ... in three different languages.  Oh, yeah - I forgot English.  Four different languages.

Grad school: I don't recall reading anything for pleasure during that time.  I was too busy drinking.  Oh, wait - I seem to remember reading popular books about physics - that must have been during the summers. And I got back into the medieval and ancient.


 The South Carolina Years: I worked at a public library and had all the material there to read: More mysteries (especially the Brother Cadfael ones by Ellis Peters), more Wodehouse, lots of non-fiction.  These were also the Shogun years.  It took me six days to read it and I've picked up used copies of it ever since to give away.  Also read an account of the historic Anjin-san Clavell based the book on.  Amazing. 

The New York Years: Mysteries ... and portable Greek philosophers, branching into ancient history.

The Boston years: Mysteries and I discovered that Charles Dickens was actually a fabulous writer if you weren't being forced to read him for school.  I was tricked into this by seeing that he'd written a book with "mystery" right in the title!  Before long, I was staying up until 4 am to finish Bleak House.  This caused me to read Jane Austen as well.  Well, dang!  And Harvard Square has the best bookshops.  I finally got the David Steinberg joke about the Ludwig Wittgenstein book with the red cover because I was back in the philosophy section again ... revisiting my idea about yet another play about the Athenian legal system.  And I became obsessed with The Iliad.  It made me mad, but I loved it.  And I was reading some Aristophanes one day at lunch downtown when it made  Diet Pepsi* come out my nose and I wondered if it could possibly be that funny in Greek.  And that's when I started signing up for the Ancient Greek course in adult education - again and again until it got enough suckers to make it worth a teacher's while.

The Back to SC Years: I moved back here with a Ryder truck full of books in ... several languages (none of which I had learned properly) and immediately got a library card and started reading mysteries again. Although in a book group, I find it really hard to read serious or realistic fiction.  I love satire (Christopher Buckley does a great job coming up with ideas for books, but I don't think he knows how to end them properly) and historical mysteries - but I love popular non-fiction.  I just love learning, even if I don't remember things properly.  But I am assembling a world view from what I have read.

My reviews: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1711341
My books: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/marfita/yourlibrary

*I come from a Coca-Cola family, but if I was forced to drink a diet beverage (and I never do anymore), I preferred Diet Pepsi.  Actually, I had a Pepsi Light (now apparently called Pepsi Twist) once and became instantly addicted.  I went out the same day and bought a six-pack, drank it, and suddenly realized I could Never Have It Again.

Advice for the Sleepless

Sleeping on concrete during dance rehearsals seems to have done me no harm.

I was one of those people who could sleep anywhere, anywhere, except her own bed at night. I've slept on a pile of coats on a concrete floor with a musical rehearsal going on around me. But just put me in a nice, comfy bed in the dark at night and suddenly my head keeps me awake. All the bad things that happened, that I did, that I didn't prevent, that might happen, all run through my pointy little head and I can be up for hours. I can't take a nap during the day for fear it would keep me up for hours at bedtime.

Middle age has done nothing to soften this effect. I have more responsibilities, more bad things that did, might, will happen (two elderly parents with dementia was not mitigated by their passing - now I have to worry about my brain). I feel guilty about everything, which I can forget about during the day when I'm busy or desperately searching for distraction on the internet - and that's what that is, isn't it? Searching for a distraction from the Guilt Furies in one's head. [Okay, maybe that's just me.]

Now I have to tell you how much my husband loves me. Sitting on a dresser in our bedroom is the device that has saved me. We had already discovered that a car plus an audiobook is like unto a visit from your friendly neighborhood anesthetist for me. Good thing my husband is driving. When my husband is away, I would pull the little boombox out of the kitchen and load it up with Bart Ehrman or, if I needed cheering, Terry Pratchett to keep me company at bedtime. When it suddenly stopped, I would grope for the next cd in the lecture or the audiobook and insert it (this is where my husband, if he reads this, discovers where the scratches on his Ehrman lectures came from) in the dark, then go back to sleep.

No more! This new device is a Bose clock radio/cd player. We can awaken to radio or the cd. We can also listen to the cd for an hour and it slowly. Fades. Away. When I say "listen for an hour" - I exaggerate. I can manage one or two ten minute segments before I start purring. Who can think unhappy thoughts when Granny Weatherwax is excoriating some miscreant? [And, by the way, how come she's Granny Weatherwax if she's had no children? Is this some honorific upon achieving grey hair?] I have to advance the story one increment each night because I barely hear ten minutes before falling into blissful sleep.

You might think that this was hardly so wonderful for my husband to buy me a clock radio/cd player. He enjoys the benefits of it as well, although hardly anything keeps him awake. [Men are so lucky. How do they fall asleep like that?] He even told me that my reading at night didn't keep him awake. What makes him so wonderful is the fact that he hates Bose. My husband is an audiophile for whom sound means everything. If a brand needs to be advertised, it can't be any good. His audio equipment is labeled with obscure branding ... or none at all. The fact that he went to a Bose store and bought a Bose product for my birthday speaks volumes about how much he loves me. "Don't even ask how much it cost," he said, implying that it was more than the thing was worth.

I am entirely satisfied with this product. First of all, it has a remote. I'm so lazy that I want everything to be operated by remote: the lava lamp (it's plugged into a clicker), the fan (it came with one - I was delirious with delight) - very important to women of a Certain Age who get hot suddenly at night, and now the clock radio/cd player. In fact, it can't be operated at all without the remote. There are no buttons on this machine. If I lose the remote, I'm dead. I've had to memorize the button positions to operate it in the dark. Two down, one over from the right to start the cd. On the left, four down to turn down the volume. One more to the right to up the volume in case someone starts purring or the a/c came on.

This works for me. If you lie awake nights with those nagging thoughts, you might try this. If your spousal unit doesn't want to listen, get a library audiobook on your mp3. I always sleep on my right side, so I've just put both buds into my left ear before. I worry that this has become an addiction, but I'm getting so much more sleep! Now if I can just pull myself away from the internet long enough to lie down.