magicalthinklet

So excited – the rest of my January reading arrived! Man, I love memoirs. And yeah, the ones I read tend toward the harrowing and tragic, but there is also resilience and hope. So there! :)

I read Lidia Yuknavitch’s amazing amazing amazing The Chronology of Water last week, but I read it on Dan’s Kindle. I needed to get my wrinkly hands on the real, tangible book so I can pore through the prose more easily and cozily. I have to say, even though I’m all for the convenience & immediacy e-book readers offer, I am a lover of art objects.

Nothing beats curling up on the couch with a book: leafing through its pages, the smell of the paper, the sound of the page curl, turning it over in your hands to study the cover and read about the author, the respite you reach with each new chapter – a white expanse with floating words – a moment to breathe, to contemplate the words you just read.

Maybe it’s akin to the difference between owning the print of a beautiful piece of artwork and owning the original. You can see the texture in a print, but you can’t feel it. You can’t smell the paint. You can’t see light react to it.

Sure, I’m never going to own a handwritten book by my favorite author. Or a typed version. Or an original manuscript file. But a book is an entity. A thing in the world. Pages of words you can hold in your hand. Pages you can flag with your thumb, pages with margins you can fill with your own handwritten notes. Pages you can flip to by memory, just by spending time with the weight of the book.

I’m romanticizing, I know… Anyways! Here’s my January reading list:

• Drunk by Noon by Jennifer L. Knox
• The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
• How to Climb 5.12 by Eric J. Horst (I had to sneak a climbing book into the mix – the title is cheesy, but it’s really good so far)
• How to Die in Paris: A Memoir by Naturi Thomas
• History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
• The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch