Take a Look, It's in a Book...Reading Rainbow

I made my way down the crowded bus aisle and grabbed onto the back of a seat as we lurched forward into traffic. I steadied myself and looked up to see a hulking man in front of me glance up from his book. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. My eyes grew wide with excitement because I loved-loved this book. I’d torn through it; I hadn’t been able put it down. It is beautiful and painful and heartbreaking and frightening and McCarthy is a storyteller unlike any other. I was angry with myself that I’d waited over a year to take my friend Kacey’s advice to read it – a whole year. It had been a month since I’d read it but my feelings for The Road were still fresh and dewy and I immediately felt a kinship with this man reading in front of me, as if he and I had this deep connection somehow. I wanted to sidle up to him and tell him how much I loved the book and find out his thoughts on the first half. But who really wants to get stuck in a conversation with strange woman on a bus, regardless of how well intentioned and normal this strange woman may be? The answer is, of course, no one. So I just made my way past him and found a seat in the back.

I settled into my new book, but I just couldn’t focus. The incident with the man and The Road got me thinking about my relationship with books. There are many that stir up incredibly strong feelings for me; those that were read at especially important times in my life and those that made my life more important by reading them. I’d never thought about books being able to conjure the past, at least not in the same way that a certain song or smell is able to trigger the most vivid of memories. But I was wrong. Just like Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” sends me back to my sophomore year of college, getting ready for a house party (applying false eyelashes with rubber cement because I didn’t have any non-toxic eyelash glue), or how the smell of angel food cake transports me back to my grandmother’s brown and orange kitchen on a hot Colorado afternoon – there are some books that have the ability to take me back to specific places in my history.

I read Immortality for the first time while studying abroad in Rome. My whole life was bursting open with opportunity and possibility and I devoured the book like I devoured all the fresh pasta and cheap wine I could, with gusto. I felt like I was the first American girl to walk the streets of Trastevere, everything so new and different. And I felt like the first reader to discover Milan Kundera, so brilliant and beautiful. I gained confidence with every new day, with every new chapter. It’s hard for me to even hear the name Milan Kundera without wanting to pack a bag and head off for an adventure.

My college roommate and one time close friend, Jung, highly recommended Snow Falling on Cedars. I finished it while on the train, as we chugged along from Spain to France. Our traveling companion Matt giggled as I threw the paperback at a sleeping Jung, telling her where exactly she could stick that the sappy, manipulative piece of crap. We haven’t spoken in eight years. I can’t totally fault our differing opinions on the book in our friend break-up, but it certainly couldn’t have helped.

I started Bridget Jones’ Diary the first night I spent alone in Los Angeles. A friend of my great-aunt had begrudgingly agreed to let me stay in the apartment over her garage in Agoura Hills for a couple weeks until I got my bearings. It smelled like mothballs. The TV was off limits and my mom had just returned home to Colorado. I was completely freaked out. The book, along with my Men at Work Greatest Hits CD, helped me get through those first few days. Then Renee Zellwigger had to go and screw it up, kinda like she screws up everything.

I drank endless cups of coffee at my kitchen table, while reading Atonement and refreshing my hotmail account every five seconds to see if that boy had written me back. Reading an epic love story in the earliest stages of a relationship is pretty intimidating. I was calmed by the fact that I didn’t have a younger sister or a library.

I started Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone during my lunch break, sitting on a cold concrete bench in the shadow of the Century City Towers. It was my first temp assignment in the corporate world – my stomach was twisted in knots all day, I was scared shitless. I felt like a little kid dressed up in big girl clothes (specifically red slacks...yes, slacks), pretending to be a business lady. Reading Harry Potter certainly didn’t make me feel any more grown up. That was a horrible day, and I feel sick even thinking about it. Seven years later and I’m still here, I sure showed them…or is it the other way around? At least I ditched the red slacks.

Shout-outs also go to The Dollhouse Murders and A Wrinkle in Time and The Rainbow Goblins and Don’t Get Too Comfortable (even though it’s an audiobook it still counts).

Thanks for indulging me in my trip down memory lane,

gretch