Prologue: Jones

So here you have it. Bored on gchat one afternoon, and not very much inclined to do the things our employers pay us to do, Martin & I cooked up the idea for another blog. Both compulsive readers who have on occasion read the same things, and who know others who do as well, we have nonetheless ever been able to get a real live book club up off the ground. The kind where you get together once a month and eat dainty little foodstuffs and drink wine and gab on about this and that.

On the one hand, the discipline it requires is alluring. Having a list! Being held accountable for finishing on time! Knowing where you're going from month to month! All of it, I dig it. But also, you might have to read something you don't want to. I worked in Christian publishing for a few years, and feel I've done my time. If I'm going to read something that is spectacularly crappy, I want to have no one but myself to blame. There's also this: I could, if left to my own devices, come up with more than enough titles to keep me occupied for the rest of my life. And while suggestions from other readers I admire are always taken to heart, I don't, right now, want to spend a year reading things that other people want to read when there is so so much I haven't gotten to myself.

So here's how this gig works: we are going to read the first title together, and then split from there, and we might not ever meet back up again, except for here. If you haven't already figured it out, the first title we'll read is Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. And yes, I'm a little ashamed that I haven't read it yet. Seeing as how I adore him and have a litcrush on him and think he's one of the finest authors ever and want to retrace his every Parisian step and to spend just one evening next to him at a bar, would be too good for this world.

We're not actually going to kick this baby off until August. Why? Because that's when the fall semester starts. And because I'm waiting on an auction to close on a first edition copy of the above and, should I win it, it will have to be shipped from Zimbabwe, which takes a little while. And because it will also take a little while for each of us to come up with a working list of our own. Drafts of which, I'm sure, will appear here.

About me: I have a Bachelor's degree in English Literature & Anthropology, two disciplines I'm sure I'll always consider myself an amateur student of. I entered college as pre-med, interested in, at the ripe age of 17, epidemiology. And while I still find infectious diseases super interesting, I was quickly weeded out of the pre-med flock by organic chem, and fled to the liberal arts. I spent my last semester of college in Prague, studying scriptwriting, creative nonfiction and the literature of the Holocaust. It was equal parts terrible and miraculous.

That was five years ago.

Since college, I've considered master's programs in (wait for it) Literature and Anthropology, as well as creative writing (what does that even mean?), comparative literature, social work and education.

Now, I work for the state in which I live, as an advocate for the elderly, the disabled, military veterans and the low income population (which sadly but typically includes the first three). It's exhausting, heartbreaking, infuriating work. It is also oftentimes unspeakably rewarding. In writing classes (at least in the 7 I sat through in college), an inordinate amount of time is spent talking about finding your voice. It's kind of a shopworn concept. And still, I'm not entirely sure what it means. I wouldn't presume to say I've quote found my own voice yet. Which is or is not interesting in light of what I do these days. As an advocate, I spend my work week being a voice for people who are too sick or too poor or too old or too non-white to have any voice of their own. They get a hold of me somehow, and pull me into the center of their lives, tell me their stories, and then I go forth and I speak for them. To the government, to the pharmaceutical companies, to the insurance industry, to the media. To anyone who will listen and give us half a chance. Sometimes, I am able to secure for them things they need, or demand justice for them, or improve the quality of their lives in some small way. When this happens, they see me as a magician, a miracle worker. They cry and they pray over me and they tell me they love me. And it makes me cry, too. But these small mercies do not happen as frequently as any of us would like. And it's physically painful to have to tell people again and again that there is nothing I can do. That there is nothing anyone can do.

What this has to do with reading is this: I find that I need books more than ever these days. I need the escapism, desperately. I need worlds where there are unlikely and hesitant heroes and terrifyingly powerful adversaries, where everything could be lost, where so much is at stake, but where these plucky little characters make it out alright in the end. I need authors, too, who are kind enough or crazy enough to have written characters who I can relate to. Who are like me in enough but not too many ways. Who can say things that maybe I don't know how to say or am afraid to say. I need authors who can teach me lessons when I'm too proud or too tired to take advice from anyone else.

Put another way, the American philosopher Kenneth Burke once asserted that "stories are equipment for living" and I believe him.

They are also, lest I get too melodramatic or reflective, a great deal of fun.

At the end of the day, I read for pleasure, after all.

And this is where I hope I am able to make a bit of order out of it all. To dress up as a serious, disciplined reader, all that. Or to simply be another person, who in the howling, perverse, indulgent madness and delight that is the blogosphere, fancies she has something to write about things that have already been written.