June 6, 2024

Message From the Middle

In December 2017, under the influence of Vicki Ziegler, and after much fretting and deliberating (was it really necessary to track my reads? Couldn’t I just read books like a normal person?), I finally started tracking the books I read in a notebook, which turned out to be the very best thing, and this week I reached the milestone of getting to the centre of my book of books. THESE THINGS I KNOW BY HEART, by Erin Brubacher, the 83rd book I’ve read this year, and the 1083rd book I’ve read since December 2017 when I began the notebook with LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. And I am so grateful to have this record, which is useful when anyone asks me what I’ve read lately (like I ever remember?) or I want to take a trip back in time to recall what I was reading on vacation in July 2019 (MIRACLE CREEK, by Angie Kim, PACHINKO, by Min Jin Lee, THE LAST ANNIVERSARY, by Lianne Moriarty), or later that summer when I was reading THE NEED, by Helen Phillips at Kew Beach, or the books that counted down the days before the world broke in March 2020 (POLAR VORTEX, by Shani Mootoo; DISFIGURED, by Amanda Leduc, all my little obsessions (when I reread Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series in 2019, or 2018 when I read everything by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, falling in love with Sue Miller and reading EVERYTHING), the forgettable books that were forgotten, the UNforgettable books whose reminders make me feel so much (reading THE BURGESS BOYS while eating breakfast in a hotel lobby, how I couldn’t put it down). It’s not about the numbers, though the numbers are interesting too, but instead about the stories in the experience of reading the stories that the notebook has recorded, where over six years has taken me, bookishly and otherwise. And the other half of the notebook, its pages still blank. All that possibility, patiently waiting for each line be filled.