But Reading: The Bookshop

Moving: nope

House: books are done!

26 June 2000: Rainy Days and Mondays

SEBB's and my latest (only the second) phone call lagged at the end. Later I emailed her, "I was apologizing for being boring at the end because I sensed you were not too enthralled with my dramatic reenactments of the iniquities of BJWL."

This is why I have missed SEBB: "You could never be boring, Lisa, not even if you tried. I don't know if you realize just how unique you are--you have such energy, such joie de vivre, such enthusiasm, not to mention being so well read and having such nifty turns of phrases. These are all rare qualities."

What has happened to me? Am I really such a different person among people I trust? I try to restrain myself and not force people to learn Irish step dancing in strangers' driveways, but if I don't occasionally risk commenting on the similarity between babies and Tweety Bird, I shall never make more friends.

It really shouldn't rain on Mondays. The idiom "feeling at sea" might describe how I feel when I can't see the mountains, adrift and vulnerable, except that to feel actually at sea would completely cure me of this idiomatic dread.

I started to read The Bookshop yesterday. It's set in 1959 in the Fens, speaking of gray wet flatnesses. I am thinking of basic foodstuffs and supplies like cloth still being rationed in England in the '50s, though I think perhaps not still in '59. The Fens led me to think of Graham Swift's Waterland, also set there, and in which an abortion features prominently. I went to B&N at lunch to buy Mrs. Dalloway (not in) or SEBB's best book of the decade, Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool. Her last greatest book of the decade--a decade ago when I last knew her--was Their Eyes Were Watching God, so I would have followed her recommendation except that B&N didn't have Nobody's Fool and I would read that before either of the two titles it did have, Risk Pool and Mohawk. Instead I bought The Cider House Rules --which is why I mention the abortion in Waterland.

Also, last night I shelved Richard Brautigan, of whom we have two volumes. One is Trout Fishing in America and the other contains three stories, one of which is The Abortion.

I am only two dozen pages into The Bookshop and already the geography has been as influential a character as any human. I said I wished it wouldn't rain on Mondays and I should be struck down for saying such a stupid thing: we desperately need this rain and it's not as if it always rains here or even, as is evident, often. Denver is not the Fens.

Nor is Denver inland Maine. I began The Cider House Rules over lunch and its geography, drear and raw, certainly sets a tone.

At this point I shan't have reread Mrs. Dalloway by Wednesday week, by which time I should have finished The Hours for the Dot Org Book Group. Well, Lou loved The Hours without knowing about Mrs. Dalloway or how Virginia Woolfe died, so I should be all right. I actually have no children's books on my slate now, just the three adult books here.

All books connect, as much as my seques eventually do. Florence Green in The Bookshop watches a heron swoop an eel out of the marshes, and watches how they attack each other. Homer Wells watches a hawk pick up a snake from the river in The Cider House Rules.