where does your mind go when you’re reading? you’re not always in the book or the article when you’re reading, are you? i remember being totally engrossed when i read an excerpt from bill buford’s among the thugs. i remember the actual physical sensation of looking up around me my seat on the train once i got to my stop and feeling like i was coming back into my body. feeling the weight of my arms, the unconscious movement of my legs as some other part of my brain compelled me to move toward the exit before the doors closed on me. i remember falling into books just after jack and i broke up. it was one of the only places that i could find an escape from the breakup; the whole thing had invaded even my dreams, but in books i found total escape. i tore through a bunch back then. any other world was so much more compelling than the grief i was dragging around everywhere. i finished three or four books in a two-week vacation, which is slow but still pretty significant for me.
i’m moving now through kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go, and i enjoy letting my mind wander while i’m reading. well at first it really annoyed me, but now i see it as a big part of my reading experience. (i realize it could also be that i spend so much time in front of screens that i rarely have time to let my brain chew over things, and so it’s while i’m in front of a book that i allow other parts of my life to come to the forefront. but maybe that is for another post, on technology and the way i have submitted myself completely to it.)
the book is so evenly, carefully paced, and the story is told through a woman’s weaving through her memories and lacing them together to make sense of the past. and the terror creeps in so slowly that there’s so much time for me to reminisce about my own school days, and to think about how i’ve constructed my own identity through them.
and of course i’m thinking about ishiguro’s technique, and the characters, and wishing i was less intimidated by my english classes in high school so i could attack this book with lots more energy and insight. but instead i’m moving through it slowly, reading only a few pages a day. i’ll find myself reading the same three, four sentences while another part of me drifts off into daydreams about love, about conversations past, about stupid, stupid mistakes i’ve made and the neuroses i’ve got embedded in me, the unshakeable doubts that i still find so hard to leave behind. never many new insights, it’s rarely fruitful introspection. but i see it in layers. the story itself, my relationship with the characters in it, and then all the other side chatter in my brain. i’m enjoying it all so much.
Recent Comments