Things to look forward to…
reading a favorite book… again
Movies based on books often have me yearning to repeat reading the book. Most movies do not touch me the way printed words do. I miss the nuance and the imagining. Books are more intimate conversations with a story and with a storyteller. So…
We watched Uglies the other day. So what did I do? I had to first go buy the books because Scott Westerfeld is one author that was completely destroyed in the flood. (Signed books… sigh…) This is also not a series kept by my library, or probably most libraries. It was always a niche corner of YA, bordering on adult, genre fiction. It strays a little too close to our present predicament and our future worries for popular consumption. It is not fantasy, though it does overestimate human abilities in many regards, mostly because it was written when overestimating ourselves was the norm even on the edge spaces. In any case, I had to buy the books. And now I am immersing myself in this unsettling story of what we might become, where even the goods are tainted with authoritarian evil. And I am loving it! It’s like meeting up with someone you knew well once upon a time. The relationship is still there just waiting to be rekindled.
I read many books — or whole series — multiple times. When the boys were young, we read Tolkien every fall. We read The Secret Garden many times, and Son#2 had a thing for Pride and Prejudice. I’m not sure how many times we read Harry Potter or Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows.
One epic narrative that I go back to over and over again is Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever stop discovering new things in this book. Another is Anna Karenina which simply can’t be taken in with one reading, but once you’ve done two, you’re compelled to go back again and again.
It is easier to re-read fiction. Nonfiction doesn’t bear repetition quite as well. My mind is drawn to a story. But garden books, and especially books that describe a gardening life, will draw me back time and again. Then there are the toothache books, or that’s what I call those painful stories that you can’t help but continually probe even though it never hurts any less. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is one such. A more recent toothache is The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist.
I don’t honestly know what makes a book so compelling that I want to read it again. I only know when a book lacks that critical something. It’s not complexity or simplicity. It’s not any particular quality of the characters or the style of writing. It’s definitely not pleasure, or not only pleasure. There are many that are not pleasurable in the least. I will never understand why Anna and Vronsky can’t just be kind to each other; they frustrate me to no end. No, it’s not pleasure, not even the weird pleasure we derive from sad stories. It is a meta-attribute, something emergent, probably something that has as much to do with me in the moment as with the book in its printed stasis. But open a book with that something and you will go back again and again.
It is my dearest ambition to put that something into my own writing… poetry comes closest… well, because poetry is made of almost nothing but that elusive something. I’m fairly certain that’s why most poet’s write… to become a book that will be re-read… that will be a thing to look forward to again and again.
leaves
she is autumnal
all rattling and riotous color
and mornings of clinging fog
she dances the dwindling days
riding the north wind
like dry leaves
escaping the ancestral wood
no foretelling her path
though the future is plain to see
she declaims grave destiny
in this fulvous profligacy
scattering needles in her wake
each a brittle memory
in lipstick and rouge
for a little time
before winter’s long grey sleep
she is gloriously present
in this frenzied pause
entrancing and enveloping
and then gone
leaving
cold confusion
barren branches
echoing silence after her storm
she does not last
but explodes into bacchanal
and is blown away
on a shivering whim…
Wednesday Word
for 2 October 2024
leaves
You can share whatever you feel on foliage and leaving in the comments below or go visit the All Poetry contest for October. Your response can be anything made from words. I love poetry, but anything can be poetic and you needn’t even be limited to poetics. An observation, a story, a thought. Might even be an image — however, I am not a visual person, so it has to work harder to convey meaning. In the spirit of word prompts, it’s best if you use the word; but I’m not even a stickler about that. Especially if you can convey the meaning without ever touching the word.
Even if you don’t choose to scribble, at least I’ve made you think about… leaves.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 