It’s the most bloggable time of the year. I was recently filling out an editor profile for a site for which I freelance, and under the What do I do when I’m not editing section, I sorely wanted to enter “Breastfeed and wash cloth diapers,” not just because both of those things feel like hobbies that privileged stay-at-home-moms do, but also because when you subtract those things from my day, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of time left for anything else.
I have been trying to fit more into the breastfeeding time blocks, though. It all started in September, when I had a lull in editing work. Amid my efforts to tamp down the panic and self-doubt that inevitably accompanies such a break (“Why aren’t my usual clients asking me to complete more work? Did that typo I missed in Chapter 7 reveal what a shoddy editor I am? Did they realize what I have not yet grasped, that I am actually not a very good editor? Why did it take so long for me to understand that I am just not cut out for this kind of work?”), I decided to put my recently acquired library cards to use. I had been meaning to read Lolita for ages. In high school, I had deemed myself too young and immature to read it, even though it was on the venerated College Board list of 100 books to read before college. In college, floating in the library, I located a copy, read the first page, and was immediately drawn in by the weirdly compelling voice of one Humbert Humbert, but I put off jumping into what I could only assume was a very sympathetic psychopath’s head. Now, with a lit degree, and a baby no less, I figured I was old enough and experienced enough, and lo, there was an ebook version I could check out.
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Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, completed September 2015: It turns out Nabokov is just as lyrical and hyperliterately clever as I’d heard he was, and I mostly thought it was a shame he felt this was the story he needed to tell. It’s an accomplishment, of course, to make something so viscerally disturbing enjoyable to read, but I don’t think I’m ever going to shake my evangelically moralistic approach to reading novels. Nevertheless, I was completely sucked in. A few months later, I proofread a memoir by a woman kept and abused by her father for years, and the parallels were striking, especially in the motif of moving west to evade detection, so the story in retrospect certainly carries the heft of verisimilitude. I felt, too, shades of the creepy lyricism of Thomas Mann’s short stories, which I found enjoyable despite themselves in high school. After I finished Lolita, I summarily began Pale Fire, but it was yet another peculiar professor in a small college town, and I was just kind of over it, and then my checkout expired, and I haven’t checked it out again.
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Meanwhile, I applied to editing gigs ferociously, and I started getting some responses. I ended up taking five entry tests and passing all of them. One company bumped me up a pay level immediately because I pointed out some edits that were erroneously marked wrong in the test, and another said it hired me out of 85 candidates, so I decided to give myself permission to feel good about myself again for a while. (One publishing company I cold emailed found some typos on my sole proprietorship website, and that knocked me down a few pegs, but I decided to tell myself it just proves that everyone needs an editor.)
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The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, completed November 2015: One of the companies that hired me immediately welcomed me into the fold and offered me two tickets to a luncheon with Isabel Allende downtown at the end of November. I was ecstatic to 1. be a part of such a cool company, 2. see a famous author, 3. get out of the house, and 4. not breastfeed for like 4 whole hours. I had never actually read anything by her, but I knew who she was and that I could easily remedy that. The House of the Spirits is her first and most well-known novel, and I was absolutely taken in by it. The multigenerational plots are absorbing, and the characters are sometimes broadly drawn but ultimately fascinating. I appreciated most of all the window into 20th-century South American politics, which I’m pretty sure I learned nothing of in school, and the clear explanation of the movement from landed-gentryism, to communism, to a devastating military coup and fascism that continued until the end of the century. Also appealing to me were the characterizations of the women, who, it becomes clear, were the ones to hold the families and the country together despite their limited power and opportunities.
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Maya’s Notebook, by Isabel Allende, completed December 2015: I didn’t want to go the luncheon having read only one of her novels, so I began a second. Allende was charming and, for lack of a better word, feisty in person, and I deeply appreciated her thoughts on imagination (heightened reality), writing (if you don’t write it down, how do you know it happened, really?), and politics (imbuing the populace with fear makes it easy to enact atrocities). This novel draws on many of these themes in a chronicle of a young woman’s quest to escape her past while living among her grandmother’s people in a remote part of Chile in the 21st century. I was more than a little affected by the story of such an abandoned girl descending into complete destitution and then working to reemerge, despite the improbable murder mystery/evading the law hijinks that ensue.
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The Circle, by Dave Eggers, completed December 2015: During what I am sure will later come to be known as the Great Literature Hiatus (from when I graduated college in May 2011 to, oh, now, I guess), I read very few actual books. Sure, I edited a solid number of them, and I read large swaths of Slate, Jezebel, and anything discussed on Slate and Jezebel, but I just did not sit down and read books for the sake of reading books like I had since I had begun to read. Off the top of my head, I know I read Crime and Punishment (for the third time, I think?) because a friend wanted to try a long-distance book club. I started Reading Lolita in Tehran for some reason, and maybe now that I’ve read the real deal, I’ll revisit it. I also read The Peaceable Kingdom and Hannah’s Child, because Daniel and I were on a Hauerwas kick, me especially as I was looking for a semi-coherent account to rationalize the convictions I had buried in high school when my youth group leader asked us who supported the then-imminent entry into what would become the Iraq War, and I did not indicate that I did, and our leader told us that even if we didn’t support the war, we needed to support the troops, and, with the help of The Wall Street Journal, I began to open my heart to just war theory.
I also read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers because he was going to be at the PLNU writer’s symposium, and even though I wouldn’t be able to attend, moldering as I was in Michigan, I felt like I should, and because I liked McSweeney’s, and because his literacy center had an adorable robot-themed location in downtown Ann Arbor and I wanted to be in on the joke. And it was pretty heartbreaking, but also so, so self-aware in the way that is painfully annoying but also unfortunately authentic to the way we live now etc. The Circle is the way we live now in hyperdrive, a futuristic parable about what happens when we digitize everything (dystopian singularity, of course). At the beginning, the book felt blocky and ham handed, but then I decreased the size of the font in my ereading app and it began to feel more literary and written for adults, and by the end I was beginning to feel guilty about every digital move I was making, including writing this post, which no doubt will be monetized in the cloud and subsumed in the future digital armageddon. Luckily, I have Isabel Allende in the back of my mind reminding me that I am probably not going to remember much that I don’t document, so if I want to know what and how I lived, what made up my life, writing some of it down wouldn’t be the worst thing.
