The new reading year

I see that my old reading year (May to April) has ended, and that I managed to get through a puny total of six books, i.e., one book every two months. This makes 2015–16 my most anemic (documented) year of reading. And one of the books that I read this year was Gillian Flynn’s The Grownup, just sixty-some pages long. The only full novel that I read was The Remains of the Day.

How is this possible, when I highly value reading? How, when I am surrounded by friends and family who are voracious readers? When everywhere I go, I carry one or two or three books with me? When I buy maybe ten books each month? When, when I check out books at IUSB, it takes a full minute for the librarian to print out the receipt with all of my borrowings? How?

I resolve, this new reading year, to read more.

Gone girl

I wore my red rain poncho to school. The highschoolers thought I was disguised for Halloween, but no, I was just prepared for rain.

This afternoon, for the first time in the season, it snowed.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Mary is on quite the Gillian Flynn kick. She watched Gone Girl in the theater. When she got home, she wanted to read my copy of the novel, but I was like, No way, I’m reading it. And so she bought a copy of her own and sped through it. Then she sneaked into my bedroom and climbed over my laundry and stole my copies of Sharp Objects and Dark Places. It took her just a couple of days to speed through Sharp Objects. Dark Places is taking her a little longer to read because she keeps on having to go to her job.

I too finished reading Gone Girl. I told Mary I thought it ended (sort of) happily, but Mary said it didn’t.

(Mary likes to oscillate between extremes of darkness, e.g. Gillian Flynn, and light, e.g. our lovely cat Bianca.)

(One night, Mary was singing “Meow Mix” to Bianca. Then she put on some *real* music for us to listen to, but soon she was combining it with “Meow Mix”:

Are you going
To Scarborough Fair?
Meow, meow, meow,
Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow?)

I digress. What an ending Gone Girl (the novel) has! (I’ll try not to spoil it, but be wary.) When the Bible says that the sheep shall lie down with the lion, it doesn’t say how the sheep and the lion shall each decide to lie together. Gone Girl describes one way that that could happen. An imperfect way. Still, for imperfect creatures, what else would be appropriate? (Or possible?)

The book has three parts:

• “Boy Loses Girl”;
• “Boy Meets Girl”; and
• “Boy Gets Girl Back (Or Vice Versa).”

Part Three’s title is ambiguous. Is it about reconciliation? Or revenge? Or both?

Authors aren’t infallible. But Flynn insists that she likes both of her characters, the husband and the wife; and as awful as we may think those characters are, if someone likes them – even if it’s someone who happens to have created them – there just might be something about them to like.