Summer reading

Every now and then, there's a book that keeps me up at night, the kind of story that made me invest in night lights and flashlights for the car. As a kid I was always hungry for words, and books were everywhere. It was unthinkable to go more than a few miles without a book in my bag. When we'd go on big camping trips, I'd trek out to the car with Safeway bags filled with library books.

Somewhere along the way, books became eclipsed by magazines, journals, Walkmen and Discman and iPods. These days my cell phone is as distracting as anything else. The focus of all these products is to entertain, but not necessarily to engage. I majored in literature in college, which meant that reading became an elevated act--one not only meant to pass time in cars, but something to be picked apart, studied, analyzed on a theoretical and historiographical level. I fell in love with a lot of writers in college (Frank O'Hara, Emily Dickinson, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Rohinton Mistry, Jack Gilbert, Adrienne Rich), but weirdly, in doing so I lost interest in reading itself. Reading equaled homework, which equaled deadlines, which equaled stress.

The older I got, the more important the books needed to seem. And yet, the books I truly remember are the ones I never expected to like. They impressed me with their nonchalance, their lack of pretension, and their lyricism.

This summer I fell in love again. First there was Maggie Nelson's Bluets, which I followed with Jonathan Dee's The Privileges and chased with Danzy Senna's Caucasia.

These books couldn't be more different--Nelson's tome is a carefully organized smattering of philosophical musings on the color blue, Dee's story follows a lofty hedge fund manager as he copes with an era of opulence, and Senna's novel shows a character struggling to find an identity as a biracial woman coming of age in the 1970s. Their aesthetics are different and their approaches unique, and they all kept me up late.


I always know a book has left an impression when I find myself missing the characters a day or so later, as if the writer had drawn them so clearly that I half expect to run into them at the farmer's market or the airport. I'll keep my eyes out for them, as if at some point they'll find me in a crowd, approach me and say, "I remember you--you were the one who paid attention." That's what Senna did with her protagonist Birdie Lee, and that's what Dee did with Andy and Cynthia Morey. These are people we know, innately, and they are characters that their creators have taught us to be on the lookout for.

These books are important because they remind us that stories are meaningful, no matter the content, no matter the characters. Yesterday I even turned off my iPod and silenced my cell phone in order to fully commit to Birdie Lee. How many times has that happened? It is now my goal that to one day be able to keep someone else up reading, lost in some other place, some other time, some other head.

Maggie Nelson and the livable condition

"217. 'We're only given as much as the heart can endure,' 'What does not kill you makes you stronger,' 'Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn': these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadri-paralytic. The tepid 'there must be a reason for it' notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has no time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it."

--from Maggie Nelson's

Bluets

, p.88

I love this.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Maggie Nelson's

Bluets

, a thin tome of numbered variations on the color blue.

I was recently talking with a good friend who lives with bipolar disorder about this very issue--how hard it is to respond when well-wishing strangers tell us that living with a chronic condition is some sign that we were marked at birth as people "strong enough" to handle them. It is perhaps the weirdest form of flattery. I understand this desire to explain away the bullshittedness of disease, that perhaps when we don't have a solid medical reason, or a clear cause and effect, we need to make up some reason why.

I tell myself these stories regularly--that I'm a bigger, stronger, tougher person because I'm diabetic. But there's a difference between growing stronger as a result of coping with something, well, unwanted, and the belief that those of us "lucky" enough to live with chronic conditions do so because we're the best for the job. That the sheer randomness of disease is best explained in terms of our more flattering qualities, or, better yet, that there's some cockamamie predestination to who gets to deal with what in life.

In Nelson's book, she references this quadri-paralytic friend and her body several times. In 109, they "examine parts of her body together, as if their paralysis had rendered them objects of inquiry independent of us both. But they are still hers. No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like 'pebbles in water,' they remain ours; us, theirs." (pg. 42) This, I think, is what so many medical professionals don't understand: that even if our bodies are imperfect, especially if our bodies are imperfect, they are still very much our own. It has little to do with strength, or even luck. It's just a fact that we come to terms with on our own, as we go on figuring out a "livable life"--something that I imagine is much easier with four functional limbs. Nelson explores this fine line between acknowledging tragedy and leaving room for self-definition, which is perhaps one of the reasons

Bluets reads like a literary Bible, peppered with philosophical nuance and no-nonsense confession.

Thanks, Maggie, for capturing the livable condition. That's what I want to read about.