I saw a great picture of Margaret Atwood, and I thought I should do a read through of he work. I loved her Shakespeare's Tempest book, Hag-Seed, and I liked Handmaid's Tale, which won the Arthur Clarke Award in 1985. I like the Netflix version of Alias Grace. She has poetry, and non-fiction as well. She's perhaps one of the prominent Canadian authors.
Then I thought about how I'm struggling to read these days. Perhaps I'm getting older and the energy expense is harder. Also when I read I'm easily turned off by writing. Some might be bad writing and some might just be impatience, and the idea that there's not much under the sun I haven't seen.
I wonder at my bizarre push to read 52 books a year for the past 30 years. There was a kind of stoical just push push push. It was a weird ambition that has never really paid off for a career or for anything. I've always had a vague fantasy to be a writer, and to be a writer I think you should read a lot, but I think my 3 books are vague fanfiction and unpublishable niche. I don't write for recognition.
I remember in college with all the reading I would often read something that wasn't for a class, just to declare my independence and love of reading.
I remember the day someone was throwing out books, and at 16 I didn't like the idea, so I reached in and grabbed a book, to save at least one. I read Slaughterhouse Five, and started a love of reading adult books from there.
I'm reading Mona Awad's All's Well, about a pill popping in pain professor at a college trying to get students into a production of All's Well That Ends Well. I tried to restart a second complete Shakespeare read and I've stalled on the first one. I've thought about reading Dickens, but the 2021 group was a spinoff of a Shakespeare group, and I'm not if there is one this year. I launch all kinds of ideas about reading and I order lots of books from the library that I never finish. When I do finish a book, I'm not sure if I can recommend them. I mean I liked The Godfather of Kathmandu but it wasn't great. I like reading along themes, but streams dry up and I have to switch theme or author or genus.
I have lists of books to read but honestly I can live without ready a small fraction of them.
I've really enjoyed my reading life. It's quite possible I'll have decades and decades more of it, and it's quite possible it could end at any moment. Life is fragile and uncertain, but I'm not sick, though I feel myself getting older.
My sons let me read to them when they were going to bed, but at one point their phones were more interesting or they collapsed exhausted. My daughter doesn't want me to read to her. So many books I want to read to her, but she doesn't want it.
John Lennon sang, "Nobody told me there would be days like these," and I think that quite a lot. To get to the point in life where there are few reliable roadmaps isn't uncommon. We're all freestyling it. Maybe I'll stop being a reader, that's OK, I'm not super invested in being a reader as an identity. Maybe I am a little bit. I'll just keep monitoring the situation.
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