Still reading list-less

A few years ago, I lived on a farm. In a barn. And it was great. Greater than great. I don't know that I've ever been happier anywhere else. I shared the barn with a world-class roommate, my two mutts and, towards the end, the man I was seeing at the time. One of the dogs, the larger and more neurotic one, had for years up until the arrival of the boyfriend, always slept either underneath my bed, or right beside me on the floor. But I wasn't the only one who had fallen in love. Simply put, that dog positively adored my boyfriend. He took to him in a way he's never taken to anyone else in my life. He not only began sleeping on the boyfriend's side of the bed, but he'd wait up for him. Patiently seated before the front door until our little family was all home, refusing to be settled in for the night until his new master was tucked in as well.

Eventually, the boyfriend and I parted ways over several irreconcilable differences. And he soon moved out of the barn, the city, the state, this region of the country.

His absence was made all the more palpable by how badly my dog took this turn of events. He was unmoored. Confused. Frustrated with me. He trotted back and forth from my bedroom to the front door, wearing a path. He refused to come to bed. He wined incessantly, he barked at the door. He would come back to the room to investigate, surmise the boyfriend was still gone, and go back to the door for the night, settling down in front of it and letting out the weariest of sighs. It was weeks before he would sleep in the bedroom again, and months before he finally let go, and moved back to my side of the bed.

Sometime later, I thought to myself, This must be what I'm like to live with, immediately after I finish a really spectacular book. Moody, anxious, sad, unsure what to do next.

This was how I reacted after I finished The Kite Runner. I hadn't slept for three nights, sitting up in the TV room, listening to the Brokeback Mountain score and reading it. My roommate came home the last night to find me crying so hard I couldn't breathe, the music cranked, and me pacing around the apartment in mad little circles. She immediately thought someone had died, and was more than slightly amused that it was "just a book." (A book that she would soon have a similar reaction to.) The days following the end of Kite Runner, I didn't know what to do with myself. I couldn't read, I couldn't sleep very well, I was full of a beautiful sadness, that colored every moment of the days. This kind of intensity passes. No one, not even dogs, can hold on to this kind of emotion for very long.

But each time, I am thankful for it. I am thankful for the books that have made me feel so broken and also so alive. I don't want to read only these kinds of books. It'd be too exhausting. But each time, I despair that it will be the last time.

I have come nowhere close to drawing up a reading list that I'm happy with. But I do so hope that one or two or three of the titles will turn out to be the right kind of magic, and leave me utterly bereft and tired and satisfied in their wake.