“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.”
~ Gabriel García Márquez, from Chronicle of a Death Foretold
I was standing at a table of books at my local independent bookstore, and I picked up this book, a Márquez I hadn’t heard of. I loved A Hundred Years of Solitude and adored Love in the Time of Cholera, and I have been so tired of not reading, calling it “not able to read,” which was true for a long time, but I finally reached an understanding with my reader self:
Me now: I can’t read. Boo-hoo.
Reader Me: Why not?
Me now: I’m too distracted, can’t focus, brain hurts, boo-hoo.
Reader Me: I have an idea.
Me now: It won’t work.
Reader Me: You need to train yourself how to read again.
Guess what? Reader Me was right! I can read a good mystery easily enough, but reading them is like eating popcorn and watching a Duane Johnson movie: fun and interesting but neither nourishing nor mind-expanding. My brain wants reading that makes me think, that nudges my curiosity, that opens ideas I would never have thought of on my own. I love lines on a page that make me look up and wonder how the hell the author did that. I want a book that says, Read me—I dare you!
What was I supposed to do, standing in my bookstore and reading that first line? I bought the book, a short little thing at 120 pages, and I kept reading.
Here is a post about my old reading habits from January 5, 2014:
A Memory of Books
Pietro Crespi took the sewing basket from her lap and he told her, “We’ll get married next month.” Amaranta did not tremble at the contact with his icy hands. She withdrew hers like a timid little animal and went back to her work. “Don’t be simple, Crespi.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t marry you even if I were dead.”
Gabriel García Márquez, from Love in the Time of Cholera
It was the late ’60s, early 70s, and I dusted the apartment a lot in those days: coffee tables and end tables, window sills and door ledges, bookshelves, books, and the LPs of Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, the Fifth Dimension, and the Broadway soundtrack of Gypsy. I cleaned toilets, mopped and waxed floors, vacuumed, and did laundry. The apartment was small, so even if I did this routine three times a week—and I did do it three times a week—and shop for groceries and prepare dinner every night and clean up afterward—and tend to two toddlers—I still had time to read.* I read a lot of classics and whatever was on the New York Times bestseller list, which in those days was mostly men. I read Pulitzer Prize winners, all of Norman Mailer, Phillip Roth, John Updike. I read Wouk and Uris and Mario Puzo.
You’d think I’d have enough real drama already, living during a time when the Vietnam War was being televised with horrific images, when Richard Speck was raping and murdering eight nurses in South Chicago, Martin Luther King was shot down, and we were landing a man on the moon. I read Capote’s In Cold Blood where I went to a small town in Kansas and lived the terror of a family all shot to death in their home. I read James Jones’ From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line. I mucked through mud in the war-torn Pacific Islands and rolled around on the beach before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
When I read, I left the apartment, the kids, the husband, the life of a suburban housewife, and I traveled to Hawaii (Michener), Scotland (Mary Stewart), Japan (Clavell), and England (DuMaurier). But the best, the very best, was going wherever Gabriel Garcia Marquez wanted to take me, and he took me to lands fantastical and mystical.
Do you ever wonder sometimes if what you think you remember is really a memory? Or is it a scene from a book, a relentless image or scent or taste of something exotic and wild? Or maybe the taste of something benign like Ovaltine? I swear I have memories of the heat and dust and stink of a place and time in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Or are the sensual details of that story mixed with the sensual memories I have of—and I’m serious about this—Terre Haute, Indiana, in the summer? Really, have you ever smelled the Wabash River on a humid summer day just before a storm? It stinks, and I love that smell. Dad told me once that I’m smelling foliage rotting in the mud of that slow-moving river, mixed with the smell of creosote and burning rubber. The smell of childhood. The smell of a really good book. What’s the difference? Both evoke time and place—and emotion.
Return to the present, and I am still training myself to read, still struggling to get attached enough to a book to want to keep reading it. I am in the last 50 pages of a long book that I will tell you about in another post. But right now I want to know your experience of leaving this world and entering another through books. What takes you there? What do you get out of it?
*Why is it that I read less, have read less, since I’ve been retired than ever before in my life? This stumps me.