I spent a good part of my morning reading in Starbucks rather than at Westminster. I could blame this not making it on the fact that I had a mojito nightcap at Xiomara with Christina, celebrating our resepective triumphs over the last few months. Her school just had a WASC visit, which she was in charge of and has been working on for months. Happily, she and her school got glowing reviews by the WASC committee. Mojito worthy stuff. And Xiomara has that cool machine, the King Cane, that actually grinds up the stalks of sugar cane.
The real reason, though, was that I didn't go because I just couldn't bear getting out of bed. Yes, I was physically capable, but totally unwilling. Our house was built in 1906, one of the oldest structures in all of Monrovia, and it hasn't exactly been modernized. I doubt it's up to code in most respects (and we've made it worse by not replacing any of the batteries in the smoke alarms). Case and point -- there's no insulation and a ton of windows, so the damp cold seeps through in winter and the stale heat creeps in during the summer. It's liveable most of the time, but when the temperature drops to 40, like it did last night, it's almost deabilitating. We have two space heaters, two heating pads, two paris of REI insulated socks, and one anicent looking gas-heater unit on the wall. I'm sort of afraid to turn it on. Okay, not sort of, really. I imagine the explosion scene with the helicopter a la Independence Day. Plus, Russ and I have accumulated so many books in the last year, that it's become a bookshelf and we'd rather be cold than move all the books. And so, we are.
Perhaps the thought of a warm church would've gotten me out of bed, but alas, Westminster is also very cold. It's a gothic-style cathedral, built about 20 years later than our house, but sadly, not many more technologies in heating and cooling had been devised. Gothic cathedrals aren't exactly designed to be warm and cozy, either. Everything is stone and brick and dark wood, which might be okay if the ceiling wasn't also 40+ feet. As we all know, heat rises. So the pigeons and church mice are all very cozy up in the ceiling and bell tower, thank you, while we silly humans rub our hands together and shiver on the ground level. It means that you wear layers of socks and blankety wool wraps in the winter. Add to this the fact that Westminster's boiler is constantly on the fritz or as in the case a few years ago, destroyed by vandals, and you can see why I did not leap out of my bed.
What actually motivated me to finally get out of bed today was the thought of spending the morning at Starbucks, reading. I know, I know, Starbucks sucks and so does corporate America. But I actually like the one Starbucks by my house; I know a lot of the workers and they like working at this particular Starbucks. Many of them are grad students, artists, lifers. The chairs, it's true, are uncomfortable and the wall art is hideous and some of the clinetele are extremely loud when on their cell phones, but there's always steam coming off the espresso machine and enough heat to keep your feet warm without the special socks. What was actually more exciting than the thought of heat, glorious heat, was reading a book for fun. Something I haven't done in a few months and in a way, needed much more today than warmth, though I didn't know it at the time.
I just read Dog Soldiers, a book that took me three days and a total of seven or eight hours to finish. That's a long time for me. I was further frustrated by the fact that as I read the final pages, I wasn't sure that I understood the book at all. Granted, it's about the developing drug community in 1970s California for which I don't have a lot of context. Even more, though, I just felt like I didn't understand exactly what Robert Stone was trying to do. He felt inscrutable, way too cool for me. I felt like I wasted a lot of time reading a book that ultimately excluded me.
This made me feel rotten about myself as a reader. It's a National Book Award Winner, after all. Stone must've been doing something right -- and not only something right, but something important. Something that would be mind-blowing and earth-shattering if I could only figure out what the hell he was talking about, especially in the last 100 or so pages. But, I didn't. All I felt was a vague sense of shame and a little bit of anger, as in, what's wrong with me?
When I went to Starbucks this morning, I cruised through my bookshelves (and heater shelf) looking for something to read. I have a lot of options. But instead of reading something that I have to read, I chose a book that I'd already read once, a memoir by a writer I respect and who has written me a really nice note in the past. Plus, I like her funky cat-eyed glasses. So I pulled it down and brought it to Starbucks, along with another, more academic, book. I figured I would reread a little bit of my memoir, get my groove back, and then tuck into the other book.
But I never even looked at the other book. I found myself rapt in a voice, in stories, in perspective and beliefs. I'm a sucker for great humor and for great sadness, and I was manically laughing and then, by turns, wiping the corners of my eyes as sentences and stories sprang off the pages at me. But more than anything, I love a story full of hope; to me, hope means possibility, a way to look at the world and imagine "What If?". As a writer of fiction, that's my job, to look at what is and imagine it as other. It's a very bold, very hopeful sort of thing to do.
It took reading this book to remind me why reading is so joyful, such a huge part of my life. It also took reading this, and feeling deeply connected to the words on the page, to get me to take a deep breath and say, "It is okay that I was frustrated by Dog Soldiers." Not every book is going to get me all hot under the collar and it's, whether I believe it or not, normal. And it's okay if sometimes, the books I'm supposed to love most as a writer end up frustrating me. It put me in mind of a book I'd read a few months ago by Andy Besch, who wrote a book about wine, which was a revelation to me. He said the biggest mistake that people make with wine is not knowing what they like. And if you don't know what you like, you'll never have a satisfying wine experience. If you base your wine choices on Wine Spectator (or other reviews), you're simply adopting someone else's likes and dislikes. The most important thing you can do, he said, is to experiment by trying lots of different wines and figuring out which qualities appeal to you and which don't.
I think the beauty of Andy Besch's approach is that it's about learning to trust your own judgments as valid. This is what I'm slowly learning how to do, with wine and with everything else. So much of the time, I know I rely on others to tell me what's valid and what's not. I'm glued to Amazon, Metacritic, and Rottentomatoes, to how others judge certain books, music, and movies. I want my opinion to not only be informed, but confirmed. But really, when it all comes down to it, Kenneth Turan or Michiko Kakutani can only tell me what sets well on their palates. They can't tell me that how it will set on mine. There will be days when I may choose a memoir over Joyce, or a bestseller over the obscure. There will be times when I go that movie that no one liked and get a kick out of it. But that's okay. That's where the joy of reading, or anything else, happens, in discovering what affects and resonates.
And if that's unhip, what of it? You should see me in double socks and a ski cap at home.
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