reading remains the sweetest of all my harried life's dwindling pleasures. or rather, reading is where I can be my most solitary, my most honest self, and knowing me, i love where that is.
so I kind of took offense when my jamaican born supervisor who, I needlessly found out, has this annoying literary pretension like myself, invited me to join her book club.
the invitation ensued after our rather accidental discussion of our analogous island literatures. I had the inanity to tell her that I was so into jamaica kincaid's deceptively simple island stories.
"you should be in my book club," she said with finality. and this saturday would be when I am to be inducted to this congregation that worshipped the holy trinity of plot, character and setting.
maybe it's oprah, and her uncanny understanding of what american women want, that is to blame for the proliferation of book clubs in this country, most of which are organized and run by women. maybe not.
all I know now is that this saturday, after the perfunctory introductions, I would be the first person required to speak about how the first installment of the autobiography, sort of, of gabriel garcia marquez touched me. there, I used the right verb. I'm talking the reading club talk now.
don't get me wrong though. i worship the magical realist and fabulist par excellence gabo marquez. but to twitter away about his book in front of six or seven other people who can't wait to twitter themselves about this book is to kill gabo. and I will not be an accomplice to this homicide.
in last year's national book festival, the first lady told an audience that "books are not just for reading, they are for sharing and talking about."
now there's the rub - talking about books. this exercise, this activity foreign to reading, almost always lead to somebody, some so-called expert, most often a self-appointed facilitator, making us believe that there is a special way, a trick to read and understand a particular book.
i've got news for mrs. bush. the trick with books is simply finding one and then reading it. there. anybody, either from a blue state or red, knows that by heart.
maybe, I'll feign sickness this weekend. fulminating tuberculosis, a slipped disc, whatever.
and then when my supervisor rings me, I would just ignore her. for surely, I would be lost either in the loo or under my unwashed comforters reading gabo.
and if all my stars align, something in gabo's book would be revealed to me, something that would touch me yet something I could never explain why it did. and the sweetest thing about it is that I don't have to.