Now Reading: A Letter to My Bedside Table

I'm finally cracking open a book again.

I don't think this has happened since Harry Potter. [Editor's note: I stand correct. Kiki reminded me that I read, finished, and enjoyed Red Tent. Oops.] At least, not with any real commitment. Who knows how this will go. I opened up White Teeth about a month and a half ago. And Salt about six to eight months before that. And, dear books, I haven't gotten much past your covers. But it's not your fault. You are brilliant and thoughtful and funny and I madly adore your every word.

Perhaps a bit too much.

That may be the problem. I'm so enchanted with the words you cast on the page that I can't go past those delirious first impressions. I don't want to progress, I don't want to take it to the "next level." I just want to revel and bask in your well-crafted sentences, in your diligent research.

I'm afraid of losing you: of losing not what we have, but what we might have.

And so, I've left you, with bookmarks barely an eighth of the way through, to explore the bounties of yet another book.

I received this book as a gift from a new friend. She's not reading this blog. (But, Hi! You know, just in case I'm wrong.) She visited us here in Kansas City and, after a couple (re: several) drinks, we hit it off.

She's a "real" writer. So that helped. She wrote for a Politically Incorrect and that's all credibility and awe. But once I got past that, I found out that's she's really interesting, beyond her resume. And mostly because she's drawn to all the things I'm interested in: 19th symbolist art, world religions, amateur architecture, Jung, etc.

(Odd how that happens--how the proportion of interest increases with the scale of similar affinities. We like what we know. Not so odd how people who are drawn to 19th century something something are also drawn to Jung, world religions, architecture, etc. Not really. That's pretty much a given.)

After she left us, she did this incredible thing. She sent us all books. Bear got a book on Druids. I imagine because he WON'T SHUT UP ABOUT IT. (I beg, plead for him to turn off his caps lock, but sober or drunk, the man likes to talk some druid smack.) She sent Finn the Eric Carle book, "Papa, Can You Get the Moon for Me." And she bought me Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert (re: Coyote Ugly) that chronicles her post-divorce journey through Italy, India, and Indonesia. (Rumor goes it will be a star vehicle for Julia Roberts. Unfortunately and, yes, superficially, that could ruin the whole book for me. Regardless, New Friend sent thank-you books and that rocks.)

And so that's what I've traded you for. A memoir that chronicles yet another thirtysomething's foray into things spiritual. (Of the five women I've known who've gotten divorced, and I'm counting Gilbert among them, three of them have made a spiritual journey to India. I'm not saying, but I'm saying.)

Dear books already on my bedside table, I don't know how I feel about this new relationship. I'm only on page 46. It's part insightful, introspective, and enlightening--Gilbert does know how to write. But it's also part indulgent, narcissistic, and self-involved. (And yes, this comes from someone who writes a blog. About herself. Nearly everyday.) I could easily, and predictably, stop reading this tomorrow to retreat to your open pages, you books I started in, like, June. Or I could even betray the whole lot of you and start reading The Golden Compass.

Yes, I know, I'm fickle and unreliable. Yes, I know you don't really care. Because, whether you're read or not, I've already shelled out the necessary commitment (re: hard cash) that brought you into my home.

But I, too, am on a quest of connection. And whether that's found in a literary ashram or an alternative universe, or both, who knows.

I'm just glad my tickets are cheap.