Keep Reading, It’s Such a Pleasure

Unable to find the art I originally used for this topic, I found the above, a work by Daren Thompson, and A Girl Reading on a Train, by Edward Hopper. I love reading on trains, airplanes, or as a passenger on a long car ride. I wonder what these two woman are reading, the art celebrating the decades we have traveled on trains, busses, airplanes and in cars…reading. The first woman is so enthrall to her magazine, the landscape she is passing is not her concern; the woman in the hat could also look out her window, the sun is setting. But she too has been carried away by the words on the page. Reading is life-giving; reading should always accompany us on our life’s journey. Travel takes us away, takes us out of ourselves. Certainly for most of us, READING DOES TOO. So where are they going? Where will the journey of the train, the bus….take them. But even more stunning, where will the journey of the book take them.

WHAT ARE YOU READING 

Go on a journey with me. A bookcase full of books or a Kindle jammed with titles, it’s all the same, reading celebrates where you have been, where you are going. READING is always about taking a journey, about opening your mind and emotions to someone’s ideas. Below are some examples. You know I love Billy Collins… So I’ll start with him. 

THE POEM: Billy Collins, our poet laureate from 2001-2003; this one from ONLY CHILD (he wishes he had a sibling, dreams about it, writes about it)

I would gaze into her green eyes 

and see my parents, my mother looking out 

of Mary’s right eye and my father staring out of her left.

which would remind me of what an odd duck

I was as a child, a little prince, a loner,

…and maybe we would have another espresso and a pastry

And I would always pay the bill and walk her home. 

THE ESSAY: Marilynne Robinson, from WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? (after last week’s post you know that I love Marilyn Robinson)  

The U.S is in many ways a grand experiment. Let us take Iowa as an example. What would early 19th century settlers on the open prairie do first? Well…they found a university, which is now about 170 years old. Agriculture became, as it remains, the basis of the state economy. How did the university develop in response to this small, agrarian population? It became…a thriving and innovative center for the arts–theater, music, painting and, of course, creative writing. …the arts are the signature of the place and have been for generations.

THE NOVEL: TAYARI JONES, from AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE  This is a must read novel. Her work is poetic, startling, amazing. 

I needed to make some plans to get back to Atlanta, to greet Celestial skin to skin and ask her whether we were still married…Maybe I was setting myself up. Two years of no visit is a message; why did I need to hear it from her own lips? Whatever she had to say for herself would draw blood, and it wouldn’t be a clean cut. The truth would hurt jagged, like a dog bite. But there was still the simple undisputed fact that she didn’t divorce me. If she didn’t get out of the marriage officially, it was only because she didn’t want to. That carried some weight in my book. Besides, even a dog bite can heal. 

NONFICTION: Margaret Robinson Rutherford, PhD from PERFECTLY HIDDEN DEPRESSION (Robinson is a friend. If you haven’t read any of her work, you should.)

As I’ve stressed in a previous post, the characteristics of perfectly hidden depression, in moderation, can be helpful. But when they begin to govern every aspect of your being, they can become a huge problem. It becomes self-destructive when your perfectionist critical voice is screaming at you nonstop in the background. 

NONFICTION QUIRKY: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS (quirky, because this little book of 48 pages could change the world.)

Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture… My own definition of a feminist is a man or woman who says, “Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.”

And finally, when working on a project, there are always MY NOTES…

MY FICTION: from WHEN THE COTTONWOODS BLEW 

“Carole, if we were grabbing lunch in the cafeteria, constantly checking our watches, I might ask, how did I get here? Not our old joke, but now—for real. Because Sarah is gone. Because Mark is luring me. With him, things feel different, right when my life is challenged. His kindness…But why? There’s nothing special about me, but damn, I need to change how people see me. Not as the mother of a lost child, not as a child abandoned by her father, not as the nurse who tries to help others while finding the world shitting on her…Carole, my only child is missing.”