I’m a rereader. Some people don’t get enjoyment out of a second read, preferring the sparkle, shine, and surprise of the first read. I am not one of those people. Ever since I can remember, I’ve enjoyed reading books two, three, four, twelve, twenty times. I taught myself to read by demanding my parents read me The Little Mermaid so often that I eventually memorized it. Re-experiencing something isn’t, I take it, an unusual thing for a child (we all had that one movie we watched day in and day out; for me, it was also The Little Mermaid), but it does seem to be less prevalent in adults.

Until recently, I’ve never had a problem with rereading. I like studying new aspects of books. I like noticing things I didn’t before. I like trying to figure out how the author built tension and suspense, like being to see how the pieces fit together. But then I started rereading my declared favorite book of all time: Wicked.

First, a story.

On the first day of my second workshop in grad school, the one taught by Bark’s own Sam Ligon, I was asked to name the best book from the last twenty years. I asked for a minute to think of a book, and so the rest of the class answered first (each getting a nod of I-can-see-how-you’d-say-that-even-if-I-disagree), and then it came back to me.

Of course, I still had no answer. The trouble, you see, is that I had done next-to-no reading of books from the past twenty years. I was fairly well read in the classics, and I read a fair bit of fantasy and young adult books, but somehow I knew that wasn’t the question. So I said Wicked. Instead of the yes-I-see look, I got the you-have-got-to-be-shitting-me look.

But back then I really did love the book. I did think it had literary merit. (Can you see where I’m going with this?) It was my favorite book, I said. I could read it over and over, I said. Except I wasn’t reading it, and I had no real plans to. Grad school was quickly changing the way I viewed and critiqued literature, and one of the things I was learning about myself is that, despite once writing this way, I no longer had any appreciation of quirk for quirk’s sake. Even in my glowing mind-review of Wicked, I knew that was something the story suffered from.

The final book in the Wicked Years series came out a few months ago, and I bought it. I wasn’t impressed by the other books in the series, but I hate leaving things unfinished. By this point, however, I was feeling very nervous. Not liking anything else I’d ever read by Maguire, really feeling disinterested in the other two Wicked Years book, knowing how much I’d changed as a reader and writer—I was understandably nervous about jumping back into this series.

A few weeks ago, I finally did it. I picked up Wicked and decided to give it a go.

My copy is heavily marked. I’ve highlighted and written in the margins. Apparently one of the times I read the book was soon after discovering the loveliness of the serial comma, because I spent pages circling the little curlycues before and and or. What is most evident in my notes, however, is that, back then, I was more concerned with theme and symbolism than I was with storytelling. These days, that idea has been turned completely on its head.

And Wicked, my favorite book, is, well, bad.

Okay, it’s not bad. It’s highly successful, and I’m uncomfortable writing off any piece of success so easily. What I mean to say is I think it’s bad. It’s littered with quirks, lines and events that seem to be winks at the reader: “Did you see what I did there?” Maguire seems to say. “Can you believe my editor didn’t make me cut that?” And my god, I’m not squeamish or anything, but I really don’t need any more descriptions of bodily functions, nipples, crazed sex acts, and phallic objects. In moderation any of these elements can work, but when you get multiple on each page? It’s like seventh-grade locker room humor.

I’m going to finish the book, and I still plan on reading the new one I bought (Out of Oz), but while some books keep me up at night because I don’t want to stop reading them, I can’t put this one down because I can’t wait to be finished with it—forever.

Right now, I am in the middle of six books. The number jumps to fourteen, however, if you count books I’ve started and mean to finish but haven’t picked up in over a year. It goes up again to sixteen if you count the two books I’m reading (very slowly) in French. Seventeen if we include audio books. And I admit it: this is pretty normal for me. The number one reason I don’t finish books isn’t because I don’t like them but rather because I forget about them. I’m easily distracted by newer and shinier books, or at least by ones that I don’t have to walk all the way into the living room to retrieve.

Some people are one-book-at-a-time readers. It’s one and done for them, one and done. I don’t understand these people.

I like books to fit my mood. I like having books for all the many occasions that might arise. For instance, if I were to take a trip tomorrow, do I have a book that would (1) pack easily, (2) not earn me strange stares in public, and (3) engross me enough so that I don’t get bored in the backseat of the car, in the airport terminal. Then, there’s the book I read over meals or in the bathtub. This book is almost always a reread, something I can pick up and put down at a moment’s notice, something I could do without if I dropped it in the water and had to wait a few days to but a new copy. (True story: I dropped a first edition in the bathtub the other day; this was actually a poor bathtub choice.) Finally, there’s the book I think will impress my colleagues or my peers. Preferably, this book is also somewhat unknown so that I can recommend it to everyone I meet and it will be a new discovery for them. Read more »

Probably my favorite book read this past year, though it's always hard to choose.

Here’s a quick recap of the book I read this past year, and those that I’m looking forward to reading this year. Only new reads listed (I’m a big rereader).

Top five favorite books of 2011 (in no particular order):

• Room, by Emma Donoghue
• My Happy Life, by Lydia Millet
• Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff
• Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
• You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon

Five most disappointing books of the year (not necessarily ones I disliked but rather ones that I expected more from)

• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender (loved it, but the ending disappointed)
• People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (great premise, but short on character development)
• Cathedral, by Raymond Carter (I struggled to get through this one, honestly)
• The Next Queen of Heaven, by Gregory Maguire (just not that much to say about it, and overly quirky)
• Inheritance, by Christopher Paolini (too much introduced, not dealt with, cliched characters and situations, etc.) Read more »

Buying and reading secondhand books is a little like riding public transportation. You have no control over your companions. Mostly, they are perfectly civil. Mostly, especially if you ride early in the morning/read a book early in its circulation, you won’t even know they are there. Everyone is privately engaged. Maybe there is a stray cough from the back of the bus, a murmur of conversation, a highlight, a faint stain on a page margin. But that’s all. Not enough to drag you out of whatever reverie you find yourself sinking into: the scenery, the language, etc.

But occasionally, your companions do strange things. They leap off the page, distract the driver, and the bus swerves, hits the rumble strip. Now everybody’s wide awake and looking.

A few years ago, I bought a copy of David James Duncan’s Riverteeth, a collection of stories and essays that I cannot recommend. (Duncan is a fine fiction writer, but his nonfiction is a bit polemical). As usual, I bought the book used online, from thriftbooks.com this time. What’s strange about this particular copy of the book is that a previous reader had used the flyleaves as a kind of writing experiment-cum-confessional. The reader is named Sarah.

Although she’s written on both the front and back flyleaves, her story begins at the back of the book. Read more »

This thing lives outside the used bookstore in Hotchkiss, Colorado.

I buy most of my books cheap online. You could certainly argue that this means I’m not doing my bit for the struggling literary industry, and you’d probably be right. But whenever someone gives me a $20 Amazon giftcard, I get four books. How about you?

There are certain disadvantages to buying books this way. Chief among them is the errant annotation. You know the one: earnest handwriting taking down all the bits of brilliance lobbed out from behind the lectern, the acrid smell of impressionable minds being impressed. I often cross through these annotations. Sometimes I add my own annotation explaining the error of the previous.

More often, and more interestingly, though, this practice of gathering books secondhand leads to compelling anonymous interactions. Like Cathie, whose post last week started me thinking about this, I am drawn to the personal aspect of this practice, the sense of a shared communion. I am drawn to the sense of a book’s history, the book as link between disparate readers.

Several years ago, I had an eight-hour layover in Seoul. Read more »

Occasionally, at a party or a bar or some other situation that requires engaging with strangers, someone will tell me, “I don’t read fiction.” The statement is tragic enough by itself, and it becomes more so when the person offers the inevitable justification: I prefer reading books that teach me something. Instead of going on a rant about fiction expressing truth, rather than mere facts, or waxing philosophical about the human condition, I usually just nod politely and wander off to find someone more interesting.

fiction probably makes you happier, too!

It’s not that I’m deeply offended by someone rejecting my chosen genre as a writer. It’s more that I find myself incapable of addressing the implicit question: What’s the point? To me, asking what’s the point of fiction is akin to asking what’s the point of poetry or music or sculpture or anything, really. In the moment, it never occurs to me to ask those who dismiss fiction whether they’re opposed to all imaginative works. Are documentaries the only movies they watch? Do they restrict their TV viewing to cooking and history channels? Are their walls adorned only with utilitarian objects? Do they see no value in beauty at all? Read more »

I heard about this growing controversy while surfing various blogs over the weekend. Some people in Britain are pushing to have a Literature Prize, since they argue that the Man Booker Prize rewards sub-par works of art. Two quotes from the article:

And yet there’s a consortium of people, headed by literary agent Andrew Kidd and supported by a host of literary types, who last week announced they were putting together a prize, to be known as The Literature Prize, for “writers who aspire to something finer.”

The Literature Prize is looking to do the literary equivalent of applauding houses built with staircases that require mountaineering gear to climb them.

If you read this blog often, you probably already know which side of the debate I fall on, but I’ll say it again anyway, mostly because I feel so strongly about this issue. Readable books are good books. The sense of inflated ego that comes from getting through a difficult book does not make that book more worth than one that is accessible. And books and literature should be accessible, on the whole. Isn’t that why we create art? To be read and enjoyed?

Kenyon's Middle Path. Meeting place and route for travel between dorm and class and dorm and party

During an introductory address of sorts at Kenyon College, Professor Kluge, the very definition of a crusty, cigar smoking, typewriter-using English professor admonished my freshman class to stay awake–at least once during our four years–all night reading a book.  He also warned against yawning during our morning English classes, or at least using one’s hand to stifle said yawn.

I silently applauded the sentiment, having spent several high school nights reading until the wee-hours. But it wasn’t until grad school, when Ann Patchett’s “Truth and Beauty” kept me awake until four or five AM, that I felt the joy of being so completely enraptured in a world created by an author, that the pressures and demands of my own life had to be put on the back-burner.

In a grad school introductory lecture of sorts, we were told to find as many “good readers” of our work as possible, so that after graduating, we would continue writing and continue critiquing.  I took this advice to heart, and have managed to create something of a stable of readers.

I recently sent a first draft of a story to L and B*.  I hope I’m not disclosing too much personal info by revealing L to be a very hard-working and talented woman-writer, who always has smart things to say about my stories, and always responds promptly.  B, athough male, is also a very talented writer**, and while he can take a little longer to respond, always seems to know exactly what I’m going for in my stories.  They are both brutally honest and expect a lot from my writing. Read more »

This past week marked the one-year anniversary of my return to Michigan from Spokane. I graduated on a Friday, left on Sunday, made it back to my house in Michigan on Wednesday, loaded up my storage unit that evening, and got on a plane to Europe the very next day. Some of my books made it to the bedroom I’ve commandeered in my parents’ house. Most had to stay in paper boxes in the storage until a mile away due to limited shelf room. They were only supposed to be there for 6 months or so. 9 months tops.

But this past weekend, I cleared more room and returned to my storage unit. After beating back the approximately 87,000 spiders and preparing myself for the inevitability of being startled by the newly resident mouse (note: if that mouse is living in a box of my bedding, I’m going to have a fit), I selected the equivalent of three additional boxes of books to live on my home shelves.

I wish I had room for them all. Books were bent oddly. One even had inexplicable damp pages. They were warped in odd ways. None had been chewed, at least. Strangely, it was the hard covers that sustained the most damage.

To make things worse, I recently decided to stay at my parents’ house until I leave for France next September, which means my stuff—my books!—will stay in storage until I buy an apartment in summer of fall of 2013. That’s two more years! I swear I’m going to have nightmares about my poor books.

So someone tell me: How do I save my books?

Coming as a big surprise, I’m sure, there was no rapture Saturday. Or, perhaps those of us left behind are just getting a free pass on the whole earthquake-plague-destruction thing. So now that we’re buying green bananas again, and now that I’m sure I’ll get to listen to Lady Gaga’s new album (out today!), I’ve got to pick a new book to read. My Twitter friends, you see, were involved in a what-is-the-last-book-you-want-to-read discussion.

I couldn’t think of an answer—I have a hard time picking pizza toppings so one book out of the hundreds (thousands?) I’ve read is pretty much an impossible to make choice—so I asked my parents for their opinions.

“I wouldn’t be reading if I knew I only had a few days left to live,” my dad said.

Thanks, Dad, for introducing reason and ruining my fun.

Later that night, I started reading Island of the Blue Dolphins. Why? Well, I haven’t read it in about 15 years, and I recently found it in a box of old books (totally not as good this time around, even with my love of YA and MG books). But then I felt silly since, hypothetical or not, I still seemed to be inadvertently answering my question of deathbed book. What if the rapture came and I were judged on my reading selection (really, if we go so far as to accept that the rapture is true, salvation by book choice is just an additional baby sized step toward total insanity).

So I jumped in Melissa Kwasny’s The Nine Senses. Why? Because I’m trying to read more poetry, and a writer friend recommended it to me (totally a great choice for transitioning a fictioneer to poetry, so thanks Terry!). But then I had to put it aside, because I find that I get more out of it if I read it slowly, in daily chunks.

After that, I forgot about the coming rapture, because apparently my short term memory ranks only slightly above goldfish. Or perhaps because it’s hard to remember something that you’re not actually concerned about. So when Saturday came, what book was I reading? Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by way of the audio book that’s on my iPad. Why? Because some sort of restaurant screw up with my sirloin tips in plum sauce put me in bed for a full 18 hours and I was bored (totally not the way I’d planned on spending my fake last day).

So now that the imminent threat of rapture has been removed (whew!), I suppose I’m off the hook, which is good, because my three end-of-the-world choices all turned out to not be right for me. And so, to make my indecision (and, perhaps, bad decision making) look better, I’m declaring this whole one-book question to be incredibly silly and way too difficult.

And if you were wondering, that goes for desert island books, too.