reading

Sometimes I read as though I'm drowning.

The act seems desperate, as though stopping would mean something bad would happen. I've been trying to think about why this happens, what trips me into reading like this and I haven't figured out much besides the fact that I can only do it with pretty simple narratives, straight-forward styles. I did it with The Hunger Games trilogy over the holidays. I gulped it down, then because I'd read it so fast the first time through I missed some things, read it again.

Nearly as fast, to be honest.

The book doesn't have to be bad (not to say that trilogy is bad, it's just not much of a much). I do this drowning thing with books I like too. But they have to be plot-driven, just stories. It's like a habitual behavior and not the deep pleasure that reading can be.

I'm thinking about this because I just finished two books that reminded me what reading's like for me when it's good - China Mieville's Embassytown and Emma Donaghue's Room. Mieville's is science fiction and Donaghue's mundane, though not ordinary.

Both drew me into their respective worlds. Mievliie does it by this wild imaginative leap (he does this a lot), creating an alien species so shaped by language that a specific spoken performance affects them like heroin. They become addicted and their society goes to shit. (Of course it's a lot more complicated than that and how the situation turns out (I don't think you can call it a solution actually) shocks and intrigues.

Donoghue writes about a woman who's been kidnapped to be a sexual slave and does it through the eyes of her five year-old son who shares the living space (Room) with her. As Donoghue says on her website, part of the strategy of having the protagonist being the boy keeps the focus off the salacious details of the situation, though it doesn't make it any less horrible. If anyone's planning to read this, all I'll say is that they do get out about half way through the book, which tells you something about her intent here, very different from Fowles' The Collector, which she's clearly read.

So to my new year resolutions, which I'm completely superstitious about writing down, I'm adding this - less drowning, more pleasure.

And more walking. The picture was taken on a walk with Laine on Boxing Day.