Love, Hate & Poisonwood
I wrote a blog entry once about the things we take with us, but really it was about definition. About how the things we choose to take with us define something about us. There was a story about something similar--I read it during college--but I didn't like it. It's called The Things They Carried and I remember thinking it was vulgar. But the premise is true. What you carry defines you.
I was thinking about this again tonight because I was reading. And when I finished the book my thoughts turned to all the books I had read in the past year or so. And how those books, the ones I remember and the ones I love, define me. Particularly the ones that I now own.
The book I just finished was Le Petit Prince, but in English. It made me pensive. Before that was When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which is named for a headline found on a Japanese fire document in a hotel. His books make me want to write. And there's Blue Like Jazz, which I am reading for the second time and is about Jesus and people and penguin sex and carrots. And I essentially love the trueness of it.
Earlier this year there was On Beauty, by Zadie Smith, which makes you feel a lot of things and makes me think of Heinrich who gave it to me and European trains, which is mostly where I read it. The book struck me as being about humility and sin, though I think other people would feel differently.
I also read Leon Uris' Exodus while I was in Europe. I cried a lot on those train rides. Because I've always loved Jewish people and the book was real. And my heart broke a little. But I associate broken-heartedness with Europe anyway, because I knew I was leaving the man I loved at the time. I cried on planes sometimes too.
The only book I actually purchased in Europe was The Blind Assassin, which is Margaret Atwood. She also wrote The Handmaiden's Tale, which I read first and left in a hostel along the way I think. But the Blind Assassin, there's something to be said for that one. I don't even remember my surroundings: I was certainly engrossed in its three or four stories. And horrified by them, all of them, really. And, while this one is harder to pin down, I think it was about secrets. And hiding in the closet from God. Or maybe it wasn't about that: I just liked the line.
Earlier in my journey of book definition there was To Kill a Mockingbird, which is my favorite classic. And P.S. I Love You, which makes me happy more than sad and, I think, makes people believe a little more in true love when they read it. If they don't come into it with too much scorn, that is. I'm sad that they made it into a movie, which I assume is perfectly unlike the book.
Another unforgettable love affair was with Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. I could smell Africa when I read it. Feel Africa. And I am in awe of the author's ability to be inside so many heads. So many first person narratives with different personalities to keep track of. It felt something like sheer genius to turn those pages.
Of course there was drivel along the way, as well--most of the "classics" I could actually do without, excepting Jane Austin, of course. And more fantastic books that I can't remember or don't feel like listing. But mostly I feel that my experiences define my feeling about these books and these books, in turn, define my feeling about my experiences.
And shape me. Like the things I carry.
