I never ever thought I would ever be annoyed at a job where I have absolutely nothing to do. It's not as if there's no work to be done: there's tons. It's just that the work that needs to be done can't be started until everything's finalized, until someone gives a greenlight, someone moves their thumb into the up position, until someone gives me access to a server, until hell freezes over is what it's starting to seem like. So instead of working I will talk to you about books!
The summer I turned 14, I was vacationing with my father on Cape Cod, and he took me to a bookstore and said "Pick out what you want to read. Whatever you want, I'll buy it." I'm not sure he was prepared for what I came up with. I'm sure he expected me to run for the Sweet Valley High section or to grab something about unicorns, but perhaps my father secretly knew I'd choose what I did and that's why he so generously offered to buy my reading material for the summer. I don't remember the entire list of books we walked out with that day, but it doesn't really matter. The important thing is I walked out with two books that changed my life: Catch-22 and The Catcher in the Rye.
I chose to read Catch-22 first. In the meantime, my father took Catcher and snuck away to the back bedroom of our vacation house, determined to recapture his childhood. As I sped through my first non-linear novel, I kept hearing ridiculous howls of laughter emanating from the back room as my father digested Salinger's opus. Once I finally figured out, midway through 22 that time wasn't necessarily linear, I started belting out howling laughter of my own. I came out of that experience a changed person. A little more silly, a little more insane, and a little more adult. Catch-22 represents to me, everything that is good and perfect and wild about literature. I won't say it inspired me to write, because at that point I was already writing my stupid little romantic fiction, but that it inspired me to LIVE. To BE. It inspired me to read other things that challenged my worldview and made me howl with laughter -- helped me to develop my extremely sophisticated sense of humor. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Heller and Salinger at 14, Ken Kesey at 16, Faulkner at 18, John Kennedy Toole at 20.
Last week I picked up Infinite Jest. I'm getting that feeling all over again. I haven't howled this hard at a book since that first reading of Catch-22. I find myself reading passages out loud to Devin, losing my breath at the convoluted sentence structures, but plowing through anyway because the laugh at the end is so worth it, and I'm thinking about how many people there are out there that don't read for pleasure. How many people are there out there who don't know what it's like to bury themselves in another world, whether it's real or imaginary -- to live elsewhere for a time, even if it's only 20 minutes a day. I think of what it would be like to be one of those people, and that, my friends, gives me a serious case of the howling fantods.
Read a book. You might like it.
Have you read "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett? Have I already asked you that? If not, read it. Extremely funny book about the Apocalypse. Had me laffin.