Book Rebellion

I have a horrible confession to make. Until a couple weeks ago I hadn’t been in a bookstore in what seemed like an age. An age of stupidity. Walking up and down the aisles made me smile even though I felt so out of it. Last year when I was signing I was in bookstores all the time and could keep up with what I wanted to read and what I didn’t. I’m not sure what happened but now I seem to view going to the bookstore as a luxury, something I only treat myself to, not the necessary nourishment to my mind that it is.

Maybe it’s this horrible pile I have going. There’s such a high stack of books by my bed and in my book bag that buying more books seems way too optimistic. It’s not really that I don’t want to read the books in my piles, it’s just that between the recommendations from friends and self-forced reading everything tends to be heavy nonfiction. Apparently there is a consensus that I am in desperate need of knowledge.

Well I rebelled. I left the pile one day and walked around a bookstore without the constraint of trying to make myself a more logical being. I planted myself in the fiction section and finally chose a book I had never heard of before, something beautifully tragic and utterly engaging. I bought the book and read it in a few hours. Liberating myself from the world of information brought me the knowledge I really needed in the first place. I rememebered that I learned faster and more deeply when my imagination was challenged. Living, breathing, thinking in someone else’s world for a few hours time put me in the state of mind I needed to face my own.

I’m still working on my pile, and don’t get me wrong, a lot of the books are great. Right now I’m reading books on Spanish linguistics, code switching in New York City, different spiritual topics and views, Costa Rica, and the history of Spain in the twentieth century. Wonderful, but I’m ready to rebel again.