1. I frequently dream of things that later happen, usually minor things, like ordinary chores or scraps of conversation. I’ve had dreams like this since I was little. I mentioned it to my mother once, and she dismissed it as coincidence. This is impossible. I suppose one could argue that ‘oh, you dreamed it, so you somehow contrived to bring it about.’. Uh, but why? And how could I possible dream a specific conversation; I could say what I said in my dream, but I can’t put words into the other person’s mouth.
2. For several years, I dream about people I knew in high school; some were good friends of mine, others classmates whom I liked well enough. These aren’t memories; we’re never doing things we actually did. Often we’re on secret missions or elaborate trips. This is easier to explain: Where have we all gone, and what have we done?
3. I’ve been reading Lovecraft, and he posits that dream-life is our real life; waking life is the illusion. I think this may vary from person to person. Many people claim they don’t dream, or else they remember dreaming, but never the dreams themselves. I’ve always been a vivid and prolific dreamer. I get many story ideas from dreams, including a recent breakthrough on the fourth and fifth installments of The Lorrondon Saga.
4. Is this meant to be a message, or simply another view of the world? Not exactly a parallel universe, but the same universe from a different angle. (Chesterton called this mooreefoc, coffeeroom backwards. He wasn’t talking specifically about dreaming, but I don’t see why that can’t apply).
Or perhaps dreams are the place where past, present and future meet all at once, which they cannot do in waking life. Last night I realized I had to incorporate this into Book III; it’s part of Neoran religious practice that’s fallen out of fashion, and the attempts to revive it.
If there are ‘messages’ in dreams, as in warnings and such, I’ve never gotten one; Others insist they have, and I don’t doubt them; dreams and dreaming will, of course, mean different things to different people. Perhaps it all depends on what the individual expects expect from dreaming; if you expect warnings, premonitions, etc, you’ll get them. If you expect (or hope) for breakthroughs on plot points in your fiction, you’ll get those.
5. It’s a shame that too many people are familiar with Freud; the knowledge of modern psychology can’t be good for the imagination. But it’s impossible for educated people (the ones most likely to write/paint/etc) to avoid. It’s difficult to banish that ‘clinical’ angle, just as it’s difficult for any intended audience not to analyze. God, but I envy that final generation of writers and artists who didn’t have that monkey on their backs-people like the pre-Raphaelites, and William Morris. (Chesterton was born in 1874; he was relatively free of this, as were Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsly).
That djinn is long out of the bottle. More will follow.
Esme moved in with us at three a.m. We deliver newspapers, so we were up early. When we heard a cat outside, we thought it was the neighbor’s cat coming to say hi to Boogers, our old tom. But it was this gray striped tabby, with a long silky coat. We had never seen her before, and she immediately began to turn on the charm, hopping into laps, licking hands, and purring. Loudly. It worked; by the end of the morning, we had a new cat. She lived with us for nine and a half years, until we had to put her to sleep eighteen days ago.
Charm, aside, we quickly discovered she was an ornery cuss who liked things her own way, like most cats, only worse. Her long fur needed steady brushing, but if she wasn’t in the mood, that was that. Ditto for baths. Whenever we tried to trim the horrendous mats that developed every summer, she carried on like she was auditioning for the kitty version of The Exorcist-asPazuzu himself. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
Yet she could be sweet. Often in the afternoons she would creep into the bedroom and curl up against my husband’s back (a few hours later she would wake him by chewing his hair). When we walked into the room she would trill a greeting. If she wanted out on the balcony she would stand by the door (or claw the curtain) and meow earnestly, meow MEOW. It sounded like a chime.
And she loved to bolt. Fat as she was, she could clear the walkway and the stairs in two bounds, then dart between the bushes, forcing us to call and chase, until we finally caught her. I think was more a game than a serious attempt to run away, or perhaps she wanted the assurance that we would come after her.
She was always Mr. Garside’s special cat, probably because he was the one who opened the door and let her in. When he came home she would run to greet him, hopping up on the back of the couch. Or she would rear up on her hind legs, in what we called her ‘Hi-o Silver’ pose. Plump as she was, you’d think she would have trouble getting all of that off the floor, but she was remarkably agile and dainty. She seemed to float as she moved across the floor, so we never worried about her weight. With her short sturdy legs and her round head, dumpy seemed to be her normal body type. She wasn’t much for jumping into laps (unless we were trying to read the paper); she liked us to come to her. We were happy to oblige.
When she stopped eating, we spent a day telling ourselves it was only the heat; she was an older cat, after all, and their appetites shift with the years. Then we took her to the vet. It was a struggle, but they got the x-rays and the blood and urine samples. She still wouldn’t eat, and least not much. We braced ourselves for bad news.
And it was bad; Esme had lymphoma. The chemo treatment would be expansive, and grueling, with shots and blood draws every week. It’s possible to explain this to even a very young child, why this must be done, how even after all the shots and hospital stays, you still might die (amazing how matter-of-fact children can be about this). You can’t explain it to a cat, even one as smart as Esme.
With her strong sense of self and her ornery disposition, she would have hated it. And sooner or later, she would have hated us too. Mr. Garside and I held each other and cried. Knowing that euthanasia was the right thing to do was little comfort.
Being pack animals ourselves, we seek out the warmth of other living creatures-be they other people, or pets. Animal company is a comfort, a connection, and a reminder that we’re all part of Creation. You can’t bring animals, whether pets or livestock, into your home without loving them and appreciating their animality. And we loved Esme; had she been a human being, she probably would have been insufferable, But she was a cat, so she was enchanting instead.
The house is quieter; we keep expecting to see her, lolling on the couch or the dining table (she wasn’t allowed there, but we gave up trying to enforce that). Her brother, Grimm, seems lonely, but he doesn’t look for her. Did he know she was ill, and that she’d be gone soon?
Has she gone to Heaven? I think so. Any creature with that much personality and intelligence must have an immortal soul; a loving God wouldn’t separate humans from their animal friends for Eternity. To me, that makes no sense.
Of course we’ll get a new cat, after a decent interval. This household works best as a foursome; we’ve always had two pets, and Grimm would like a companion. Esme was part of the continuum of our lives, of the world itself. Like all of us, she was unique. She deserves remembrance.
In 1936, Margaret Mitchell was awaiting the publication of her only novel, Tomorrow Is Another Day. It’s a good title, at once wistful and optimistic. And it’s the heroine’s personal philosophy; she repeats it many times in the story. But right before the book went to press, Mitchell instructed her publisher, Macmillan, to change it to a phrase that’s used once, only in passing: Gone With The Wind.
When does an author know when a book is ‘finished’? When have you stopped making your work better, and are now only making it different? It’s hard to answer that question. I’m getting ready to submit my second book to the publisher. I’ve gone through it many, many times now. I’m not finding any more typos; I think I can say I’ve caught them all (or at least I hope so) If not, I can still make corrections when I get the galley-proofs.
But-I don’t quite like the way I phrased that; let me rewrite it. Does this name suit this character? Can I find a better one? (I recently changed a character’s name back to what it was originally). Am I being tasteful with love scenes, or am I just pulling punches? I should explain more about this plot point; nah, readers are smart enough to figure it out.
For writers, books are like children. You’ve done the best you can, and you hope it’s good enough. But you can’t resist the last piece of advice before they're out the door. And once they're out the door, for all to see, they’re not yours any more. They belong to any one who will read them, whether that’s a hundred people or millions. Readers have their own ideas of how stories should go and how characters should develop.
Witness the lively discussion of the final Harry Potter book. Everyone had different ideas, only a few of which coincided with J..K. Rowling’s. Yes, I would have liked to see some things fleshed out more, but it’s her story, and not mine. What looks vital to readers can seem secondary to the person who actually has the whole story in her head; as I’ve said before, authors and their readers have a weird relationship. The Hobbit has millions of fans, myself among them, yet on rereading it in the early ‘sixties, Tolkien was momentarily tempted to rewrite the whole thing. Could he have improved it? Who knows.
So, you proofread, or pay a professional if you can afford it. You weed out the typos and the homophones. Then you do it again. And again. You fill in that bit of back-story and change that person’s name. Finally, you must say that’s finished-and let it go.
I don’t remember exactly when I began the story of the Lorrondons. So much of it existed only in my head for so long-as much of it still does. I know that by the late winter of 1979, when I began to write things down, these people were already becoming known to me. So, the beginning must have been the fall of 1978. I was twelve.
I was also perfectly miserable, both in my own mood and to other people. We had moved a year and a half earlier, and I still missed the large trees in the backyard of my former home. I was doing poorly in school, and had no wish to improve (I wouldn’t until the ninth grade). I skipped a lot of school and spent the time listening to records and reading.
Tolkien was my lifeline, as he was for so many unhappy kids. By the end of the school year, my grades had picked up (a smidge) and I had already lost track of how many times I had read The Lord of the Rings. I seldom went away without my copy of The Tolkien Reader. I read a wonderful novel called The Book of the Dun Cow. I read the romances of Barbara Cartland, more for her descriptions of historical setting than for the romances themselves. I discovered Norse mythology and Iceland's bloody, brooding history told in the sagas. I read a lot of things I don’t remember in detail.
And I began a story of my own, like many other kids with a penchant for science-fiction and fantasy. The long tale of this family of mixed Galactic heritage(Terran and Neoran) came to me in pieces. Scraps of the Lorrondon children’s childhoods, how treachery and lust for power tore their lives apart, and how they survived and in some cases, prevailed.
For years I wrote nothing but scraps. Episodes, incidents, family trees, charts, lists of planets. It wasn’t until 1990 that I began anything like a complete manuscript. I still have hundreds of pages of scenes, Many will be in the books, but much changed (and, I hope, improved). Many will not. All of the principal characters were there from the beginning, Rusorin, Rob Lorrondon, Enrik Ratt, Anna Helsak, Walsam (the earliest name still in use). The overall story of galactic war and the efforts to build peace has never changed.
Like the tales that inspired me, this story was never happy, but it wasn’t quite as grim as Njal’s Saga. A few years ago I read through some of those old sketches and was amazed at how many of the things I wrote down had to do with death, or battle, or estrangement.
From the beginning I was interested in the romance of space itself; the distances, the incredible things like nebulae and black holes, and the possibility of other peoples out there. My galaxy was never as crowded as Gene Roddenberry’s or George Lucas’s. Space travel is a lonely and dangerous endeavor.
Even as I wrote more and more things down, and filled in more and more aspects of this world, I knew I was years a way from being able to write this story, or to write it the way I felt it deserved. I served a long apprenticeship, reading everything, fiction and nonfiction alike. Tolkien, Faulkner, Le Guin, Clarke, Poe, Undset, Woolf, Lessing-these were among my teachers. In college I majored in English, and continued to write out scenes. If you want to learn to write, read. That’s no guarantee, of course, but it’s the best training you’ll get.
It wasn’t until the late nineties that I finished the first book, The Bretton Katt Alliance. For one thing, it took years for me to decide what was necessary to the story, and what wasn’t. How many books would I need to tell the story-or rather, how many books could I break this into. I decided on six. I didn’t want to put out eight-hundred-page tomes when three to four hundred could do the job.
The book was self-published almost two years ago now. I’m still foolishly pleased when somebody likes it. We’re never the best critics of our own work, but I think my book is pretty good. Will it Teach People Anything? Is it inspiring, enlightening, life-changing? Darned if I know. Those calls are for other people to make, not me. I’m just telling a story, one that’s important to me, and that I hope will become important to other people.
And after thirty years, I will see this through to the end, sweet or bitter.
Sometimes nothing sticks in my craw as much as the word ‘genre’. And why is this? I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen variations on the following sentence: ‘This remarkable book transcends the genre’. Why is genre something that must be ‘transcended’ for a work to have merit?
Genre labels are limiting, constricting writers (and film makers) into stylistic straitjackets. Slap such a label on a book, and automatically, the cliches, ahem, spring to mind. Fantasy: That’s wizards and elves, right? Mysteries: Where’s the wry detective with baggage? Science fiction: Cue the Star Trek theme and snide comments about large-breasted women wearing as little clothing as possible. Historical fiction: That’s just a bodice-ripper.
Not always.
How does something ‘transcend’ its genre?
The phrase is used mostly by reviewers who don’t normally read the genre in question, and liked the book anyway. Therefore, the book can’t possibly be a typical specimen of that genre. It was too thought-provoking; the characters are too fully realized. The book was just too darn good. It must be an exception.
How many exceptions must there be before we realize that the rule itself might be bogus?
Let’s take mysteries. These days nobody writes so well about class conflict as British writer Ruth Rendell. Her books frequently hinge on missed communications, misunderstandings, and savage class resentments (I recommend A Judgement in Stone). Yet her books are shelved as ‘mysteries’, not literature; she gets Edgars, not Bookers. After all, she’s just a genre writer.
The same is true of Walter Mosely, whose Easy Rawlins books are about the postwar, extra-Southern black experience. I knew nothing of this world before I read Mosely’s work, and I’m grateful to him for showing it to me. Yet Easy Rawlins is a detective, and people get murdered. Nothing serious here, just simple entertainment.
Ugh.
The same is true of Ursula LeGuin, (sci-fi) and Terry Pratchett, (fantasy). Their work is sociological and psychological; their invented worlds make us see things in our own we might have missed. (Pratchett also makes good use of satire to achieve this.) Yet they too, are seldom taken as seriously as they deserve. Le Guin has won a Pulitzer, but not for any of her brilliant science-fiction.
I think that everyone loses by this. Writers don’t get the credit they deserve. Readers who decide they ‘just don’t care for that genre’ cheat themselves of wonderful books and stunt their own imaginations.
In on-line discussion groups, the most interesting, insightful people read all across the spectrum and readers who limit themselves only to Serious Literature (stuff that wins National Book Awards) can be as dull witted as the worst sci-fi/fantasy-only fan boys-and-gurlz.
This is also true of writers; the best work comes from people who read everything. Science-fiction writer Dan Simmons taught high-school English for a number of years; he has a passion for Keats and Marcel Proust, which he weaves brilliantly into his books. I’ve read work by writers who read nothing but genre; it’s pallid and limp.
Wider interests-and respect for those interests-are to everyone’s benefit. The next time you feel like dissing ‘genre’ fiction, read some instead-you might find a whole new vista open up.
I've been making up my reading list for this year, and so far it’s another eclectic mix. Of course it isn’t set in blood-new stuff that sounds interesting comes out all the time, and I must be flexible. This year I want to reread more books than I did last year, things I haven’t read in several years, like Cold Mountain and Childhood’s End. Patrick Rothfuss’s sequel to The Name of the Wind comes out in April, and I must leave room for that.
After reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Peter Matthiessen’s brilliant ShadowCountry back to back, I decided I needed something light. (after Shadow Country, something by Brian Moore or Cormac McCarthy would qualify). So I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch.
Pratchett is light, and frequently hilarious, but he’s never frivolous; behind the funny exterior, he has a lot to say about power, and the uses and misuses thereof, corruption, and the daily struggle to just keep one’s feet in an uncertain world. When I read his books I keep a pencil handy to mark these little insights; I think he’s as profound as Swift. Why he never quite gets his due critically is beyond me. (Well, actually it’s not. He writes fantasy, doesn’t he? Thus his work is nothing but light escapism. Lord, I hate snobbery.)
Next, I will probably FINALLY get to Dan Simmons’s Rise of Endymion, which, like Night Watch, has been sitting on my shelf for some time. Simmons is another seriously underrated writer. This man wants readers to think. And his erudition floors me.
Since the Simmons I have is an omnibus of Endymion and Rise of Endymion, that will take me through most of February. I think Cold Mountain will be next; it seems more like winter read than something for sunny weather. I haven’t read this since it was new, so I’m looking forward to it.
Then what? Actually, I don’t know. Perhaps something new will appear, maybe in the book club circular, that I simply must read. I owe great thanks to the science fiction book club, which is where I discovered Simmons, Pratchett, Naomi Novik and Patrick Rothfuss.
So, I see that my ‘list’ takes me through February at the furthest. Perhaps that’s as it should be-this isn’t a list for class, after all. Perhaps after that I won’t even worry about it; I’ll just prowl around and see what looks good to me, or if my mother recommends something. Right now she's prodding me to read The Divine Comedy. I promised her I'll think about it.
The publishing industry is in some distress these days. Consider the following.
Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien’s own publisher, froze acquisitions and laid off a bunch of people. This means they’re not buying any new manuscripts. It’s chilling, all right.
Borders Booksellers, the second-largest chain in the country, is undergoing a ‘restructuring’. Meaning, most likely, closed stores, lost jobs, and less selection at remaining stores.
Just last week, yet another phony ‘memoir’ was exposed-after a ringing endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and a movie deal. Herman Rosenblat’s touching story of two children helping each other survive to Holocaust, only to meet on a blind date years later, turned out to be a total fabrication. I think that’s three (or is it four?) fake memoirs in the past year. No industry needs that kind of black eye.
So, what’s to blame for all of this? The industry itself, of course.
Some time ago, I’m guessing the late seventies or early eighties, publishing decided to adopt the Hollywood model; acquire product that will move fast, build franchises/series/brand names (I’m always suspicious of a book whose author gets a bigger font size than the title). Work for the quick turnaround. Occasionally publish a smaller, ‘prestige’ book to let people know you still care about good writing.
I suppose this worked for a while, but in the end it was doomed to crash and burn. The reason is simple: Books are not movies.
True, both (or good ones, at least) can take you to other worlds, engage your heart and mind, make you think, make you cry. But the experience is different. Put five hundred people in front of a screen and run the flick, they’ll get everything at the same time, the dialog, that fiery explosion, that thrilling sunset. Give the same people a book, and very likely none of them will be on the same paragraph at the same instant. Some people read more slowly, some like to go back and reread little passages just because the writing stirred them, or maybe they missed some little bit and need to refresh.
But publishers got greedy. They wanted the quick turnaround and they began super-hyping star authors at the expense of lesser-knowns. When Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince was published in 2005, Scholastic spent eight million dollars on promotion. Never mind that the book promoted itself, never mind that Scholastic must have had dozens of new authors whose work needed the boost. But these days most of the big houses leave new authors on their own when it comes to marketing, which makes one wonder why they picked up the book in the first place.
Now they’re in trouble, and we’ll all lose because of it. We lose because new books that don’t ‘fit the profile’ won’t get published, (Twelve years ago, twenty publishers rejected Cold Mountain. Would anyone pick it up under today’s conditions?) . We lose because more books will go out of print, and because the houses that survive will publish more hum-drum retreads in the hope that they'll sell.
This probably isn't as dire is it looks. This is a shaking-out rather than the apocalypse. The world is still full of people who love to read, and they will demand good books. But shakings-out can be uncomfortable, even traumatic. A lot of people will lose their jobs and a lot of imprints will disappear. It will be interesting to see who survives.
I think the best outcome would be the death of the huge publishing conglomerates and the return of smaller houses that are truly independent. Even now, the few smaller publishers that remain are putting out better work than the biggies (on the whole at least). On-line publishing and self-publishing will also fill the gap. I think that in five years, the industry will look very different.
Let's see if we can all hang on.
Check out this article from The Nation, where Mr. Engelhardt draws comparisons to what's happening in publishing to the mess in other industries.
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions-at least not the way most people use that term. I don’t vow to lose weight (don’t really need to) or get more exercise (get plenty already). But the first week of the New Year is a good time to begin things I’ve been thinking about anyway.
Part of this is the combination of the weather and post -Christmas doldrums. January in Southern Oregon tends to be cold and foggy, with intermittent rain and snow. And all the bright lights and festive decorations are put away for another year. With no more holidays to look forward too, it’s pretty dreary. Setting goals and beginning new projects raises the energy level. If you feel gloomy and depressed, just clean out your closets-you’ll feel better.
Of course, this may also be the reason that so many don’t keep their resolutions; the cold gloom all around them just screams ‘what’s the point’? Perhaps we should move New Year’s to the spring equinox. Warmer weather, the return of growing things, baseball-people might have more incentive. Just a suggestion.
Part of it too, I suppose, is that I’m getting older; time no longer seems limitless, the way it did twenty or even fifteen years ago. I may seem a bit young to be facing down my mortality, but I have reached an age where I realize that every day counts, and that only elderly people call me a kid (little kids call me ‘ma’am).
So here’s what I hope to accomplish this year, in no particular order.
1. Get the second volume of the Lorrondon Cycle out. I actually have people who are waiting for it. Not many, but every little bit of encouragement tastes like Prime Rib. I also hope to finish the third book. The draft is about to go to my editor, a.k.a. Mom.
2. Organize my reading list. Sometimes I finish a book and then flail for a couple of days, deciding what to read next. All the while I feel I’m wasting time. So, when I finish Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, I think I’ll start Dan Simmons’s Endymion, which has been sitting on my shelf for about eighteen months. I’ve already sworn to buy no more books until February. I’m drowning in them already.
3. Clean out my den. This room is full of boxes that are full of things I can probably do without, like issues of Entertainment Weekly from 2004. It’s one of my favorite magazines, but still!
4. Get better on the chores. Sometimes I let laundry sit in the basket for two days before I finally put it away. That’s just laziness.
Hmm. Not an overly ambitious list, but it should keep me busy through the winter. Perhaps in the spring I’ll revisit this, see where I am, and what more needs to be done.
Christmas had come around again. I unpack the ornaments and get out my cd's of medieval and Renaissance music. I make a list of little things my family might like. I hope that this year people will realize what this is supposed to be about; It's not about the acquisition of stuff.
I don't kow why I take this so personally, but every year when the commercials start, with their 'you need this or you'll die' or 'buy this or your wife will leave you' messages, I get a tad sick. God's gift to the world was the promise of redemption-not the promise of more goodies. Yet even self-professed Christians carry on as if more (and more expensive) stuff was only their due. It's not.
This attitude brings out the worst in people. Long before this year, when a man was trampled to death at a Wal-mart by people who wanted those bargains, news programs ran footage of shoppers fighting, shoving, and just generally behaving, well, like Shagrat and Gorbag fighting over Frodo's mithril shirt. I hope they went home and wept with shame. We're not talking about hungry people fighting for food, or people fighting for scarce medicine for their sick children.
People must finally understand that they can get along just fine without all of this junk; no one needs a TV in every room of the house. (Nor can the rest of the world sustain this level of consumption). It won't make anyone happier, or more secure. In fact, it seems to be making people more miserable. So they buy more stuff in another attempt to make themselves happy. It's a vicious cycle. We need to break it. And Christmas is the time to begin.
I used to be a fast reader. I don’t know what my word-per-minute speed was, but I could zip through an eight-hundred page novel or biography in two afternoons (sometimes a day). Long books assigned in class held no terror for me. For twenty years I’ve kept a log of books, acquired in one column, read in the other. Every year I rejoiced as the ‘read’ column got longer and longer.
Then four years ago, I began having trouble seeing words on the page. They looked lumpy, as if somebody had smeared them with mashed potatoes. This, of course, sent me to the optometrist. During the exam she discovered what she called the worst cataracts she’d ever seen in anyone under sixty (I was, and still am, CONSIDERABLY under sixty).
Then two surgeries, two weeks apart. Lots of drops. My vision cleared up, although I now needed reading glasses (I never got used to bifocals). Ten days after the second surgery, the retina in my right eye tore. I had the surgery to fix that less than a day after I noticed the tear. This meant two weeks off of work, doing nothing. This was not a vacation; nothing means nothing. No chores, no exercise. Long periods each day lying on your side. Even more drops, and almost no reading.
When the eye recovered, I discovered that my reading speed had dropped. Strangely, I didn’t really mind. I don’t know if it was a shift in my attitude, or maybe the things I was reading, but I began to enjoy reading more slowly.
Perhaps it was my (now expired) youth, but now I think I was in too much of a hurry. Now I no longer regret my lost speed. If you read more slowly, you begin to sink into the book’s mood.
The book that did this for me was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. It’s a good length, about four-hundred pages in the edition I have. Lots of plot, lots of intrigue. But for many, many pages, nothing happens. The point of the book becomes the slow, almost smothering sense of decay in Gormenghast Castle and the lives of the characters. It’s not pleasant, but it’s seductive; it pulls you right in, so when it’s time to eat or do laundry, you close the book-and feel almost like you’ve just woken from a deep sleep.
I’d read books with great atmosphere before, but I had never experienced this. It happened again with Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. Again, not a lot of action. Most of what happens is internal. But you just plunge your head into Alexandria of the 1920's-and drink deep.
Now I’m almost through with The Dark Tower VII. It’s going to take me about twelve days. A few years ago, I would have read it in about two or three, depending on other commitments. It’s strange; some part of me doesn’t want to finish it. Not because I know this won’t have a happy ending (if it does, it better be hard-earned). It’s because I’ll miss the mood, the texture of the thing, that almost-physical sense of falling into another world.
Perhaps you should try this some time. Pick up a book and don’t even think about how quickly you can finish it. Treat it like a lover; go slow and savor your time together. You may end up reading fewer books, but the rewards will be richer.
