Reading Rejuvenation

Those that have known me for very long know about my passion for reading. Books. I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't have at least one book going. It started at an early age and continues today. But...as with most things a person can find important there exists the possibility for drudgery. Staleness. The feeling of slogging through without purpose. For the past couple months this has been the case with me and my reading career. I was not inspired in my reading. It has happened before, but rarely for longer than a couple weeks. I didn't like anything on the shelf, bookstores were filled with either books I didn't want to read or already had.

I decided to reread Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Say what you will about Hemingway, I will always love him. He was the first author who truly inspired me. In my most impressionable youth he had the ability to instill radical thoughts in my head and taught me the power of sentence simplicity. (Although, I feel I continue to develop my own style, one far from Hemingway's, there is at times shades of his diction in my own.) He has always occupied a special place in my own cannon and A Farewell to Arms was always near the top of every list I have ever made. There is romance, wonder, pain, and finally tragedy all wrapped into one complete tale of chaos and emotion. It was the perfect book to rejuvenate that passion for books I had recently lost.

Buying books has always been ritualistic for me. Sometimes I know exactly what I want, other times not. The process always includes a quiet meander through the fiction section usually starting somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, progressing to the end, looping back to A to finish where I had started. I rarely collect books along the way, but usually retrace my steps to pick up around three titles and head to the register.

This time, in the effort to get back to basics I went to the Barnes and Noble in Vancouver, WA. Although it is hard to calculate but this store, my home town bookstore, is amongst those I count as being the greatest recipients of my hard earned dollars. It was a great day when Vancouver had a bookstore that carried more than romance novels and dime store westerns. I bought all the books I could for my Senior AP English Class there and after college worked there for about six months. I discovered Bowles, Maughm, Greene, McCarthy, and O'Brien on its shelves. There are other stores worth mentioning, but few hold a more symbolic place in my consciousness. Included amongst these are:

Powell's City of Books
Brookine Booksmith
Harvard Bookstore
University Bookstore

I digress down reading memory lane. In this trip I picked up the following:

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Barbary Shore, Norman Mailer
You Can't Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe

Half way through The Maltese Falcon I can say I am back. Reading again is a joy and just in time. As training gets harder and lines of reality begin to blur. As time becomes a premium and is sucked into the vortex of swim, bike, run; carving out that little bit of time to ingest a few lines of prose will prove invaluable.