I’m midway through reading Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle, and I do not want to stop. I want to swallow this book whole the way I have so many more before it. She sings to me, even in the differences of our lives, I hear her voice above the din of everything else. Her voice and before hers so many other women writers, whose skills intimidate me, but whose stories inspire. Not too long ago, I finished Lab Girl by Hope Jahren and wanted to give copies of it to people I know. “Read this,” I want to tell them. “Read this and maybe you’ll get it, get me.”
Before that was Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Although these stories are not specifically about being women among men, this part reverberates long after in my mind. I want to draw the parallels and factor to the common denominators, but I also want to continue reading. There are so many books in my library queue of eBooks. I only have three more days to finish The Faraway Brothers by Lauren Markham, and five more days to start and finish Dr. Beverly Daniel Totum’s Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? If I am lucky, the library will let me renew them; if not, I can put them back on hold and wait to finish them. There are no late fees with ebooks. They simply vanish. In the last year, I have logged 50 books as read in Good Reads. This does not include the half a dozen that evaporated before I could finish them, and for which I am waiting at the end of a wrap-around-the-corner and down-the-block line of other readers.
I delight that others are reading these books while at the same time I tap my toe on the ground in frustration that they aren’t letting me finish them. Some of the 50 books, I went ahead and purchased on Amazon because I couldn’t put them down. Not all of the books are about the theme I found in Jahren, Strayed, and Doyle. Before those I read There There by Tommy Orange and the thematic harmonization to The Faraway Brothers is uncanny and tragically ironic that the latter speaks of people immigrating to this county while the former is about the indigenous who have been pushed aside by the US. If I were still in school it would have been as if someone had assigned me a compare and contrast paper. Only I picked up the books from separate recommendations, and I won’t take the time to do anything beyond subconsciously absorb the content.
Reading is where I both find myself and lose myself.
Days and weeks pass where I can stand to find myself again and again, discovering memories that mirror the author’s stories, uncovering family stories that could have been my own, opening doors in my world that are new and dangerous and make me reconsider everything that I had held true before. Self-reflection should not always be reflection. Sometimes it is shattering the mirror to see beyond yourself.
Then come times when I pull down the curtains, shut out the light, and fall into a ridiculous and fanciful plot with characters no deeper than a puddle. I step into the rubber boots of a fantasy, science fiction, paranormal romance, steam-punk adventure, or British police procedural and stamp and stomp and splash about in the rain that has soaked me to the bone.
You can discern the fragility of my mental health by the books on my shelf.
Today, I am strong. Well, strong enough. I have five ebooks, three audiobooks, and three hardback books to read and return to the library before December. And another two that friends lent me. Perhaps they will let me renew.