Raptured in Misery

For quite some weeks I had been thinking about a summer at the beginning of the nineties, when I worked my way through a very tall reading pile that had been growing by my bedside table while I was at school. I don’t remember all of the books which I read at that time, but I do recall two: The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Postman. I worked through these in three days or so, sitting on the sofa and unable to enagage with life as it was taking place around me. That’s because I was engaged with the life of my characters. Nothing was more important than to know what would happen next and how they would react to it. I remember fondly my mum calling from the kitchen, and my impatience bursting right across the corridor and back at her: WHATEVER MUM I AM BUSY! I wasn’t just busy. I was annoyed. Didn’t she get it? I was reading. I know that over the years I’ve subcosciously tried to re-capture that summer of reading love when my own life did not exist, if only as a subservient corollary to the characters’ own endeavours. When three weeks ago I started Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, I was equally shocked and delighted to find a specific description of my state of mind from many years before: I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture–with a book. I loved this book, I loved... Read more →