A Book Vortex

Sometimes, even when there is a precarious tower of newspapers in front of my reading and TV chair, a pile almost obscuring my view of the TV especially if it's a TV-formatted movie with subtitles, I get seduced by a book. Ever since Joan Didion's book about grief and death and such in the wake of her daughter's illness and her husband's death The Year of Magical Thinking came out I'd read reviews in those very newspapers and been drawn to read the book. Still, struck dumb by all the books we were having to deliver from this house in anticipation of downsizing, I hadn't bought it.

One of the things we do, FFP and I, as I might have mentioned is go on vacation and read. We take books along on trips in anticipation of this reading but we still feel compelled to seek out and patronize book stores, preferably lovely little independent ones.

So while I could have gotten The Year of Magical Thinking at Costco, if I'm not mistaken, we payed full price for it, albeit the paperback edition with a gold seal proclaiming its National Book Award, at a place in Santa Fe close to the plaza called, I believe, Collected Works. We bought two books and I immediately read the other, a small tome of essays on reading by someone whose name I've forgotten at the moment, culled from a smartish publication Dave Eggers may have had something to do with. FFP meanwhile read some of the Didion book. I returned after finishing the one new purchase to Tennessee Williams' Memoirs published over thirty years ago and bought by us in Powell's City of Books in the last couple of years. I think anyway.

Sometime in the last couple of days I decided to take Didion's book along to read on the bike instead of a stack of the aging aforementioned newspapers.

For some reason I was compelled to read it through to the finish. It's a short book. But its "I can't put it down" aspect for me wasn't the train wreck aspect of it. It wasn't watching this brilliant woman felled by the inevitability of life and death just like the rest of us. No, I think the fascination was imagining that I was the child of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. I love my parents and they loved me. But for some reason I find kids with very literary parents an enviable lot. It's a good book and I guess there is a little something for everyone in it except maybe those who find religion their salve for illness and death. I enjoyed the peek into the literary life as much as anything.