here I am, dear blog, just like I said I'd be

And I hope I'm on track to check in with you a bit more regularly now. But you know I really can't make any promises...I'm just not that good at keeping my act together.

Want to hear something that perpetually amazes me? That I have these incredibly intelligent, articulate friends...and they actually want to talk to me. Yeah me. Me, who struggles just to put sentences together. Forget eloquent and insightful. It's a party around here when I can manage coherent.

Case in point, dear blog, this comment from Jason after my last little chat with you:

I've done that with books before - sometimes you reach the end, and it all makes you glad you've read it - like you're a sadder, but wiser person, you know? Other times you get to the end and just feel like you ate too many cookies - like you're sick to your stomach and in retrospect really didn't even enjoy yourself. :/

Seriously, could he have said that any more perfectly?!! No, I think not. (And yes, I do admit to being envious of my wonderful, well-spoken friends like Jason and Ana  for their ability to just grab ahold of these ideas and lay them out there in beautiful fashion. For me these ideas dance around the edges of my mind, seldom coming together with such clarity no matter how hard I struggle to synthesize them. And then I'll read what they have to say, and will be left simply thinking, "Exactly. Yes, that's it exactly.") Anyway, at the time I wrote that last entry, the one that elicited his comment, I was still clueless as to which way it was going to end with Shadow Man. But now having finished the book, I'm happy to say the experience falls in the sadder, wiser category. I won't claim that it's in any deeply profound way. But this book gave me an excruciatingly painful look at some very real human emotions. It's not that I haven't thought about how difficult it must be to live when you spend your time hunting down evil, because I have. But I don't know, this powerful work of fiction somehow made it all so real.

I still don't know if this happened because this book is so very different from other thrillers I've read or if it's because I'm a different reader. I'm guessing it's both. Because I really have changed as a reader. And it's been such a change for the good. And it's thanks to my wonderful book blogging friends. It's not that my nature has changed, or my beliefs have changed...it's just that I've grown. In so many ways. I love the way that reading other people's thoughts about books expands my world. Seriously, my universe seems infinitely larger than it was just a few years ago.

So, ridiculous-sounding or not, I think that I just may have the book blogging world to thank for the intensity of my experience with this book. In the end, I loved it. It was disturbing. It was heartbreaking. It was horrifying. And yet, as Jason put it, it left me "a sadder, but wiser person"...and I can live with that.

And along with the compelling story, and characters that I grew to love, and that unique look at human experience, there were also just these little tidbits that somehow spoke to me. Little tidbits like these:

Jenny is quiet for a few moments after this. When she speaks, it's a single word, but it's filled with everything she wants me to know. "Fuck."

Fuck that, and fuck the world, and injustice, and what happened to you, and your daughter dying, and kids getting killed in general, and fuck it all till it's dead and buried and turned to dust and the dust is gone forever. That's what she's saying.

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A large part of being a parent is a constant near certainty that you are screwing it up...

(This was not said as a joke, but in complete seriousness...and with complete seriousness, I tend to agree.)

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And, surprise--tears. I thought I was done with them. Maybe it's a good thing. I don't ever want to be unaffected by kindness, whether from strangers or from friends.

 So bottom line, dear blog, I'm going to put this one in the win column.

unrealistic expectations

I have this really bad habit (okay, I'm not sure if "habit" is the correct word, but I can't come up with another at the moment): Every time we're heading somewhere on a trip, big or small, I pack up way more books than I could ever possibly read.

Inevitably, I get these grand illusions about how much reading I'm going to get done. Doesn't seem to matter how many times I prove myself wrong, how many times I tell myself that I really need to be more realistic...next trip rolls around and I'm packing up cartloads of books to haul with me. We headed to a family reunion this past week. Three days. Approximately eleven hours total traveling. So realistically, I should have brought along The Lightning Thief and the Fables volume I'm currently reading. Maybe a book of essays or short stories just in case my reading mood was off. And yes, even that is overkill... A.) Reading in the car often makes me carsick. B.) Rich and I often spend a lot of time talking on car trips. C.) If Rich has NPR on the radio, as opposed to music, I generally get too sucked into the stories to read. And yet, with all this knowledge residing in my head, I brought along seven books. And the saddest thing of all is that I somehow still had this inkling of hope that I could really read them all.

So what did I get read? I actually lost track of my page count, but it's somewhere around 150 pages. Yep, that's it. The Lightning Thief was the only book I even picked up. And I came nowhere close to even finishing it.

Lesson learned? Hell no.
*****
And from the dangerous world of blog-reading, this book was added to my wish list:

*Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (thanks to Carl's incredibly insightful review). I likely would have gotten around to officially adding this book to my wish list eventually anyway...but Carl's review really made me want to go find it immediately.
*The Punishment of Gaza by Gideon Levy (thanks to a link to this review from Book Blips). Sounds like a painful, powerful read.