So there’s this thing about The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis’ses’s magnificent novel about plague and death and time travel and the church. I love it. But I don’t like reading it. Or, rather, I find reading the book a harrowing experience, not a pleasant one. And (I think this is my third or perhaps fourth time through) I don’t know that at this point there’s anything enormously positive about the experience. I mean, it’s not (at least so far) one of those books that is different when I read it from a different place in my life. But each time I’ve picked it up, once I started it, I didn’t want to do anything but read it.
OK, so my house, like many houses in this part of the world, has the bedrooms upstairs and the not-bedrooms downstairs. I don’t like going up and down stairs all that much (I grew up in the desert, after all), so at any given moment I usually am in the middle of an upstairs book and a downstairs book. Well, and often I’m in the middle of three or four books, for a variety of reasons, but my point is that I have an upstairs book that I read when I am upstairs; generally in bed before shutting out the light, in the bath, and perhaps for a few minutes in the morning before getting dressed. And in the john, which is a bad habit that Gentle Readers probably didn’t need to know about. Anyway, I don’t carry the book up and down the stairs; when I’m downstairs, I have a downstairs book.
Digression: Fortunately, we have passed the time when the Youngest Member made going up and downstairs a team sport testing parental endurance. Halfway up the stairs is where he would always stop, the little mamzer, and it wasn’t entirely safe to just leave him there. I did consider stashing a book there, but that seemed a bit extreme. End Digression.
So anyway, every now and then, I start a book that does go up and down stairs with me, that I carry downstairs and read at the breakfast table or whilst supervising the Youngest Member’s attempts to dismantle the house. It doesn’t always mean that I like the book, particularly. I mean, of course there is the occasional book that is simply due at the library in another two days, or that somebody is waiting to talk to me about for some reason. But also there are books that just take over my life for a day or two, that cause me to rearrange my schedule to sneak just a little more interstitial reading time, a few more minutes back in the book. And, as I say, I don’t always love those books. The Sharing Knife series of recent discussion was a lot like that for me. And there are books that I do love that I can read for only a few minutes a day.
This one, though, is one that I love and that takes over my life, but that I don’t for some reason enjoy. So perhaps I’ll stick it toward the back of the shelf, and not pick it up for another five years.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.