A few months ago I couldn't find a thing I wanted to read. I picked up mysteries, memoirs, essays, old favorites; read via print, audio, and kindle. Nothing captured me. I'd endured book malaise before, but never with such persistence. Had I lost my great passion? or had my mind merely yielded to the prevailing culture, where reading too often means skimming a few lines on screen, clicking on a link, racing through emails--all of it barely breaking the surface of my brain. Would I ever finish a book again? More importantly, would I ever be totally immersed again in a book I never wanted to end, a book like The Prince of Tides or The Shadow of the Wind or the Mary Stewart romances I read in seventh grade?
A month earlier son Michael had insisted that the first book I should download onto my new kindle was The World to Come by Dara Horn. I finally dug into it as I took off for a week in Sedona. Maybe it was the magic of beginning a vacation, but I dove into the book and didn't want to surface until the end. It's a beautifully written story about a lost young man in New York City who steals a Chagall painting that he believes once belonged to his family. The story floats through time like Chagall's night flyers, transporting us back to the lives of Benjamin's ancestors, Russian Jews who fled to America. I loved every page of it, even the somewhat bizarre last chapter that seems to belong in a slightly different book but is well worth reading in its own right.
Did I mention that Dara Horn has a PhD in comparative literature and three novels under her belt, though she's barely past thirty? Jealousy aside, I'm grateful to her for ending my book blahs.
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1 comment:
whenever i hit a slump like that, I usually reread an old, comfort-reading favorite. it often helps.
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