Interim Review: Midnight's Children

It's like this. (With less masculine arms, admittedly.)

XOXO

Welcome to the world, baby boy!

Seth John Goldstein

    Born: 05 February 2009 at 12:20 p.m.

     Weight: 3.8 kg

    Length: 52 cm

     Parents: Radiant

     Friends and family: Beaming

    Everyone: Totally and utterly in love

Super-huge congratulations to Trace and Ev, and to the Goldstein and Raper clans.  We have a baby, y'all!

XOXO

Meet my new girlfriend.

Her name is Sarah Vowell, and I LUUUURRRRRRVVVVVE her.

So yeah.  I still haven't finished This Is Your Brain on Music, and don't even talk to me about Virginia Woolf.  She is still not a presence in my life, and we're all just going to have to make our peace with that.

But don't get me wrong, I've been reading.  I've been reading up a storm... if you consider reading Take the Cannoli three times in a month to be 'a storm.'  That's not all I've read, I hasten to add: I also got through Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans (the McSweeney's Press humour collection, which was awesome), as well as Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money (laugh-out-loud-to-myself-on-the-Red-Line funny).  But Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation brought me back to reading in a big way.

All of you who know me (which, let's face it, is all of you) will be familiar with the particular brand of ish that I went through in the last several months.  It hasn't been good, and there were a million and one ways that it reverberated through my life.  But one of the most troubling, to me, was that I found it really hard to read.  Reading has always been my #1 displacement activity: it's what I do when I'm sad, or fretful, or bored, to make me feel happy and relaxed and entertained.  I get sucked into books to the exclusion of pretty much everything else around me; when I go to someone's house for the first time, I make a beeline for the bookshelf; I get twitchy fingers when I'm deeply into a book and have to put it down.  I've been like this for as long as I can remember.  It's what I am.

So you can understand, then, why it was so unsettling for me to find myself unable to focus on print for more than a couple of minutes at a time.  I felt like (still yet another) piece of me had been suddenly and inexplicably ripped away, and I didn't know what to do about it.  I kept trying to read, retreating to old favourites like Douglas Adams and [heart] Nick Earls [heart], but I'd struggle.  The only things that seemed to hold my attention were Jacob's 'Gossip Girl' recaps from Television without Pity, but as awesome as they are (and they are - go, run, read them now.  I''ll wait), they didn't fill the hole that losing my book love had created.

This all changed when I picked up Take the Cannoli.  To be fair, the shift had started with Hornby's Shakespeare, but as that's a collection of columns, I still didn't get the feeling I was reading a single-entity book.  Take the Cannoli, while also a collection of essays, felt much more book-like to me, and I suddenly felt on much more solid ground: I was excited and moved, I laughed and cried, and I tore through it while desperately not wanting it to end.  All of this was heightened when I went on to Assassination Vacation, her story of touring sites related to the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley: I actually fell asleep hugging the book to my chest, and not because I had dozed off while reading it.

I like my room tidy.  This may come as a shock to anyone who has lived with me, but it's true: my decorating inclinations lean more toward minimalism than any other aesthetic; unfortunately, I also have an abiding devotion to books, stuffed animals, and Japanese kitsch, and this plays hell with my attempts at clean lines.  So I live with the conflict, mostly comfortably.  At the moment, this means that my books are migrating from my bookcase downstairs to my bedroom upstairs at an alarming rate.  Most of them end up on, in or beside my bed, even if I'm not reading them right that second.  I like having them close to me, falling asleep with them and waking up with them and knowing that they're there whenever I need them.  It's about way more than the text; it's their feel and smell and size and shape that I find comforting.  It's about the pages I fold down so I can find favourite lines quickly.  It's about the stains on the pages from sloppy laksa or suntan lotion, the sand between the pages and the weird water-marks from that time I dropped it in the bath.  I'm glad to have it back.  I feel like myself again.