Category — reading

Bookstores are one of my biggest weaknesses.

Rare are the days I can walk by one and not go in. Even rarer are the times when I go in and come out empty-handed.

I went into Chapters today with my friends Emily and Beau and within less than five minutes, I’d found a book: At Large and at Small – Confessions of a Literary Hedonist by Anne Fadiman (along with three other books, because I really am very weak-willed in bookstores).

Anne Fadiman is the sole reason I enjoy reading essays. After years of being forced to write essays in high school and university  – writing that seemed to involve sucking the life and joy out of every word ever printed – I was finished with essays. Then I stumbled onto Ex Libris – Confessions of a Common Reader also by Anne Fadiman and what a gem that book is! My copy is a paperback with a pale green cover and contains some of the most entertaining essays about being a book lover I’ve ever read.

That little green book hooked me and suddenly essays were not life-sucking, paper-wasting pieces of boredom; they were interesting, well-written comments on something I truly love: books!

So you can imagine how eager I was to dive into the new find.

After saying goodbye to Emily and Beau I took out my newest treasure and began to read at the bus stop.

Now, I can read anywhere (and frequently do) so I’ve got the skills to read and enjoy a book while being aware enough of the world around me to still catch a bus. I got on the #10, which was unusually crowded, and managed to find as seat at the very back. I sat and opened my book.

Normally, I’d pick up where I left off and the rest of the world would cease to exist. Today, I found it hard.

The guy one seat over to my left had the most piercing nose-whistle I’ve ever heard. The guy to my right was blathering on about the colour blue to the guy next to him at top volume. The bus’s brakes were in desperate need of some kind of tuning given the high-pitched screams of protest they made every time the bus came to a stop. Another woman was digging her in over-sized purse for a phone that was shrieking out Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl at a very loud volume (who knew faux alligator skin was such a poor sound barrier) not to mention the various kinds of music leaking out of people’s headphones.

It was nearly too much to tune out. I am not good at meditation – largely because I’ve only ever tried a handful of times and taming the monkey-mind is not going to happen overnight – so drowning out the people on the bus, and the surrounding traffic was not going well today. My immediate feeling towards all these noises (and their creators) was one of pure resentment.

I know the whole world can’t suddenly turn down the volume because I want to read – but that doesn’t stop me from wanting it. This resentment towards the noisy world coming between me and my books goes back a long way.

As a kid I remember not being able to find a lot of time to read quietly – there were always interruptions. Most of these interruptions came in the form of my mother’s voice: “What are you doing inside? It’s a beautiful day, go outside and play.”

You want to see resentment? Separate a kid from her book all in the name of “playing outside”. Anyone who really loves to read will fully understand my sulky replies, the irritated tone of voice and even the backchat that was usually some form of, “Why don’t YOU go outside and play and leave me alone?”

I still can’t understand how parents can desperately want their kids to be readers and yet cannot, absolutely cannot, leave their children alone when they DO finally pick up a book and get absorbed in it. The moment the outside world disappears for a reading child is exactly the moment parents start in on all the apparent virtues of being outside (though, even if the kid does go out, heaven forbid you come back dirty with tears in your clothes and scraped up knees!).

Anyway, after many, many repetitions of this, I got smart. I took a small bag (a red canvas child’s purse with a picture of Snoopy on it), packed a couple of books, some stolen cookies, and a juice box and hightailed it through the woods behind my aunt and uncle’s place directly to the local graveyard. Once there, I found a great and shady spot behind the mausoleum, sprawled out in the grass, and read to my heart’s content.

I can’t remember the name of the family buried there, but I hope they didn’t mind me borrowing a little shade while I read The Secret Garden or The Stand and ate some Oreos. The graveyard is maybe an odd place to find such happiness but it was well chosen. It was close enough to the house that I could get back fairly quickly, but far enough away that if Mum stood on the back step and yelled for me I’d be able to honestly say I hadn’t heard her calling.

I wasn’t an awful child, just determined to pursue my passion without all the commentary – and children need privacy and freedom the same as adults.

In the winter, I lived at the library (usually on weekends) and the librarian, Annie, was always glad to let me take a chair out of the way and read whatever I liked. I also read under the covers with a flashlight, I would read standing around in my room while listening for any sign of a parent (and stuff the book under the pillow and say I was cleaning up when caught), I read in the bathroom, on the bus, at recess, in class (when I could get away with it), on class trips including the over-night trip to Camp Sylvan and once even at a particularly bad company summer picnic.

Romeo and Juliet’s doomed romance was far more interesting than getting a loaf of bread from the freezer, or cleaning my room. Reading about the survivors of “Captain Trips” in The Stand (and my secret conviction that I would have been a survivor too) was much more entertaining than doing the dishes.

Even today, I still feel that same resentment at being pulled from whatever world I was inhabiting. Of course, the good thing about being an adult is that no one ever tells me to go outside and play if I’d rather read. Nor am I frequently interrupted to fetch things or clean my room and best of all – I don’t have to hide out in the graveyard with contraband cookies.

I sometimes think I should open up a reading lounge. People would come in with a book and sprawl out on a plush and comfortable rug or chair and then just zone out and read. No laptops, all cell phones on vibrate, no chatterboxes yapping about the colour blue – just some unobtrusive music and the sound of pages being turned.

How peaceful that would be!

I hear my own reading lounge calling to me; my very comfortable couch where I will read without further interruptions.

Anyone who has chatted with me on MSN very quickly learns to read Renee-ese. I think well enough, my thoughts are generally coherent and phrased well (if a little archaically – I blame Jane Austen). When those thoughts are translated to MSN, they’re a mess. Typos galore, no sense of grammar and I have even spelt my own name wrong on several occasions.

My friend Amanda on the other hand is some sort of genius copywriter or grammar guru – her MSN messages are nearly 100% error free and entirely readable.

So, Amanda and I were chatting online one day when she noticed a typo – I had written “It was very entertainting.”

Her immediate response was that a typo that good needed a definition. I have provided one with an illustration:

Now that’s entertaintment!

(And thanks to Amanda and her eye for amusing, erroneous detail!)

Title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Author: Muriel Barbery
Publisher: Europa Editions
Pages: 325
ISBN: 978-1-933372-60-0
Price: $18.50 CDN

I picked this book up on a whim (and because the main character shares my first name and it’s interesting to me to see Renée’s lurking about in literature).

This is possibly the best money I’ve spent on a book since Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. I’ve spent the last two days reading it every moment I’ve been awake.

The story centres around Renée, who tells us up front that she is a “short, ugly and plump [with] bunions on [her] feet” and that she is the concierge at a “fine hôtel particulier” in Paris. We also find out that she is a closet intellectual purposely hiding behind a mask  of mediocrity (after all, who expects a concierge to be reading Tolstoy?).

Amongst the inhabitants of Renée’s building lives an extraordinarily intelligent 12 year old named Paloma who also hides her intelligence behind a facade (an average young girl doing fairly average things for her age) – whilst secretly planning to end her life on her thirteenth birthday as an escape from a world that she sees as rather pointless and shallow.

A new resident in the building – a wealthy and fascinating Japanese man named Ozu – causes them both to begin coming out from behind the masks they wear with very interesting results.

In addition to talk of literature, philosophy, music, food and art are the questions that everyone asks themselves: “Why am I here?”, “What is my purpose on this earth?”, “Am I more than mere biology, or am I simply an animal pretending to be more?” and, of course “What gives my life meaning?”.

Renée, Paloma and Monsieur Ozu come to these questions over and over again -all of them learning different things about what it means to be human, what beauty is and searching for those elusive “moments of always within never” – those perfect moments of stillness where the smallest things contain beauty and worlds within themselves. Whether a painting by Vermeer, or nibbling at particularly fine dark chocolate, there are moments where everything has a beautiful clarity and simplicity to it.

I also loved the way words are treated in this story – there is a quiet reverence for how words are put together, their meanings and effects. How a well structured sentence, even about something mundane like picking up dry-cleaning, have an elegance to them if well written.

Words are not just a means to an end, but have purpose and beauty.

After finishing this book, it made me think about the things I give so much time to in my head; things that are past – mostly moments of “never again” – and lost chances and possibilities that I have spent so much time labouring over at the expense of what is here and now. Missing moments of quiet and beauty now to dwell on moments of quiet and beauty that never happened in the past – simply because I wanted them so badly then.

There were moments of always in those nevers – those singular moments where there were possibilities that were so real I felt as if they had happened, and when I realized they hadn’t and never would, I held on to them rather than seeing them and letting them go.

How much time do we spend deceiving ourselves and chasing the “right” life, job, lover, friend or things? Too much I think (I always suspected we spent too much time chasing shadows and now I know we do).

This is a book I will come back to again and again – a book with characters that can give me a good talking to when I am being an ass and wasting the time I have here on earth chasing my own tail.