Confessions of An American Literature Eater
by Carol Stanley
My Name Is Carol and I’m a Bookaholic
I guess you might say that there have been times when I have used books – reading – like drugs. I have hidden in books, using them expertly to put off until “tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow,” what must be done today. I am a connoisseur of procrastination, an aficionado of avoidance, and I find books the perfect enablers of my condition.
Books provide a “safe room” in which to hide from the intrusions of care, of the mundane, of that from which we want to hide when “the world is too much with us,” those times when we feel we have no skin on our body and all our nerves are raw and exposed. Books have saved me.
There are times when I am so wholly spellbound by an author’s imagination and the place to which he/she has taken me that I simply don’t care what happens in the real world. Housework can pile up around me – somewhat like all the brooms and buckets in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in Fantasia – the phone goes unanswered, calls unreturned, appointments canceled, until the book is finished. They take on a life of their own, and so seduce me that I am helpless.
I have read to stave off physical pain, or depression, anxiety and the like. Admittedly, a literary fiction snob, at times when I have been particularly depressed, I have been wont to read horror fiction – the darker, the more frightening, the more gruesome, the better. This is quite a departure from my usual fare, but I find the genre an odd tonic to my own woes, and I am not required to think too much.
Physical pain requires a different tack – re-reading Thomas Hardy, or Joseph Conrad. This can be quite revelatory. I read both authors in high school, and yes, I liked them then, but my understanding was that of one whose prefrontal cortex was not fully formed. (We’re apparently not quite done until we’re in our mid-twenties.) Reading them as an adult, I had aha moments of, oh yes, now I see why they were part of our curriculum – their understanding of human nature is spectacularly profound. When I was waylaid by the flu, I read Tess of The d’Urberville’s, Far From The Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude The Obscure in one fell swoop. I would be so enthralled with a passage that I would insist on reading it aloud to my son. As miserable as I was, I really didn’t want to recover and have to function until I finished all four. Conrad’s An Outcast of The Islands and Lord Jim, came with a particularly painful and massively swollen sprained ankle. These books were my chicken soup and opiate. A very appealing combination.
So, you know my addiction. I make no apologies. Call me irresponsible, call me self- indulgent, call me foolish, call me selfish. But you cannot call me unread.
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