I Could Punch That Book

I have read more books in the last month than I have in the last year. Maybe in the last two years. It feels good to say that out loud, because it felt like a dirty little secret -- all talk and no read. I've dropped out of book groups because of the...shame, even the book groups where no one else was reading the books either, or at least finishing them: I wasn't even buying them. 

I'm not sure why this latest manic book reading started, but it's been a rabid obsession lately. I think it makes The Kid pretty happy, he being a consistent reader of all kinds of books. He'll go from a big chunky historical tome to some crappy spy novel or Templar pulp and then he'll pick up Camus and carry on. It's kind of irritating in a way, how his brain can switch like that, but not half as irritating as I am when I read. 

I laugh out loud. I sigh heavily. I feel the need to tap tap tap him on the shoulder and say, "Listen to this." I swear a lot and get wildly pissed off and seethingly jealous when I read something that is so excellent or so funny or so goddammit-why-can't-I write-that. I get completely wrapped up and utterly inspired and I stay up late for a few more pages, just the next chapter, a little more.

And I throw books. I throw them down on the bed or down on the couch and if I really really adored it, I'll throw a book clear across the room. 

I hurled "An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life*" practically into the neighbor's house when I was finished. Like I was mad at it for being so divine, which I wasn't, but I was probably mad at it for being done. I realize this is fodder for some shrink somewhere so I should add, while I'm on the couch, that when I was younger, like middle-school younger, when I saw something irresistibly cute, I had this terrible urge to punch it. (Look it up: it says this very thing in my ninth grade year book.)

Let it be known, that this urge has passed and I do not and never have actually punched or even pinched ridiculously cute things. But the fact is, love can be a very physical thing. And I don't mean the poetic lightening bolt that happens to a person (supposedly), but a lightening bolt that rises up from a person, from me at least, when some love button, some emotional wire is pushed or tripped and wham! There goes the book, splat against the wall or flat on the floor. There go my hackles or the shivers or the instant stomach ache, which is half like butterflies and half like hysterical laughter, and there I go again: sensitive? emotional? reactionary? crazy?

Who cares. 

I think this is why I can be a lump on the log, half dozing at ten, and hear a major thump from upstairs and leap to action like James Bond, completely alert and ready to perform CPR or lift a bookcase or scale a wall. I think this is why, after my terribly long and embarrassing absence, I am back in love with reading books. They are easy to haul around and use up little space on the table and take me away from and also back to myself. But mostly, they are light enough for me to send on an arc through space. I can really chuck those suckers when I need to and I think I forgot how good that feels.

Got any for me to throw around? Do tell.

* by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Read it.