Very Unfinished Book Reviews
[In progress and will be updated, probably]
These are the books that my family had checked out from the NYC Public Library before, well you know, BEFORE.
In no particular order and noting that to date, none have been read cover to cover.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
At the Strangers Gate, Arrivals in New York by Adam Gopnik
The Reptile Room by one Lemony Snicket
To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donnohue
An Anthology of Interesting Animals
The Wonders of Nature
That’s right friends, four months and counting with these fine fellows lurking about on dressers and falling off of counters here and there, and not one has been shut with a satisfied *thwump of completion. When patronizing a library I will check out exactly as many+1 books as is comfortable to transport home. (I have a very clear memory of overcommitting to about 15 must-have picture books at the Tempe Public Library circa 1990 and having them cascade out of my arms and down a glass spiral staircase. It’s not actually an embarrassing memory for me though, or at least the only embarrassing thing about it is that I somehow didn't bring a large enough backpack to carry them in.) However, as was/is the case for many of us, in early March my reading diet turned to almost exclusively news or facsimile of news, and bread recipes. A both glutinous and gluttonous combination of flour + water + covid 19 graphs.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - This book has been on my bucket list for a loooong time. My wonderful 8th grade English teacher, one Ms. Blake of one now sadly closed St. Michael’s Academy of Bryan, Texas, who lead us enthusiastically through Jane Eyre put me on to it. Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel of sorts, recounting the life of Mr. Rochester’s first wife who he kept in the attic, Berta Mason. A solid 25 years later, I started this book around February 2020 and made it more or less halfway through when the writing was horrifically on the wall about where this was all going. Right, I know, I always knew where this was going, but I have to be in a particular mood in order to willingly sign up for a gas-lit, midnight dark emotional ride like that. A mood where February leads to March which leads to summer which leads to friends and rocky beaches and too many selfies. This year’s March was having none of that, so I put it down.
Similarly with Gopnik’s Strangers At The Gate. Let me tell you, this book rushed back all the great expectations of moving to NYC way back when. At this point some 13+ years in, I can even almost* roll my eyes and smile at the many tear filled subway rides “home,” the co-signed, muliple roommate apartment anxieties, the will-work-as-much-as-you-want-for-basically-whatever-justpleasecanIhavethisjob lows, the proto-FOMO feelings of 2007 when I felt like there was a key into the city that somehow I had forgotten to pick up at LaGuardia upon arrival (*Almost. Those are horrible feelings, not to be smirked at, ever, lest you tempt the fortune spinning goddesses of New York City who will rain down on you all sorts of karmic hell. I honestly believe this is true and I always picture them as perched on top of Grand Central, three green-haired and blue-tailed sirens, like statue of liberty mermaids, sipping milkshakes or martinis and just watching for passing New Yorkers to feel that they have finally won at New York, so that with a sharp flick of the wrist or raising of a single eyebrow, they may wreck any such person’s hopes and aspirations and reduce one to a sweaty, sweary, unbearable, shriveled and bitter shell of a person by the casual swishing away of job, relationship, health, money, apartment, family, commute, you name it, any and all you hold dear, poof!) I digress.
I’m up for Gopnik almost any day, I still count his sublime Bread and Women essay as one of my all time favorite pieces writing. Also, importantly, this book reminded me that I used to love art. Before it became my job, I LOVED ART. I loved making it, I loved thinking about it, I loved thinking about how it mattered, I loved talking about it, I loved seeing it, I took it all in with an open heart, I Believed. Not so much anymore, or so rarely that it takes my breath away when something does break through. I’d like that open feeling back though, and this book made the idea falling back in love again someday a possibility. But again, the New York of Strangers At the Gate was a New York that I could feel was slipping away by April. I had already lost Art maybe, but now to also be loosing the other pleasures New York had one held was too much. The GO of New York can be and will be exhausting and overwhelming, but now the ‘Going’ had stopped and with it something else about what it meant to live here had stopped. Full stopped. I put this one down too.
In the spirit of this enterprise, this post is of course, unfinished. There are no sweeping conclusions to draw at this point besides that I should almost certainly return these books now. But more thoughts on the above list to come… probably.