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A bookstore recently asked me to describe my “most memorable reading experience of the last ten years.”
Sounded simple. But as I thought about it, I realized it was a complicated question.
It was a bookstore, so I assumed they meant published writing, a book.
But in fact, my most memorable reading experience of the last decade occurred 4 months ago, and it consisted of 23 handwritten yellow-legal-pad pages. It was a kind of open letter from my mother that I discovered she had been working on since 1988….crossing out sentences, adding new ones, amending old ones, carefully adding, thoughtfully fussing for the last 16 years. It was ostensibly about everyday stuff – the provenance of a poster she and my father had bought, her fondness for a certain dish… But because my mother is funny and wise and a terrific writer, it's also, in its sidelong way, a kind of essay about the important things in life…about saying goodbye. My mom wrote it for me and my sisters and brother to read upon her death, which we did in March.
A problem with picking the most memorable book - reading experience of the last ten years is the timeframe.
I think for most of us, the supremely memorable reading experiences occur when we're young. And sure enough, as I made a tally, I found every one of my most unforgettable, electrifying reading experiences happened during the decade of my extended adolescence… Huckleberry Finn , Bleak House , and 1984 , Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Emerson's Essays , Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones , Mark Helprin's Refiner's Fire , Walker Percy's Love In the Ruins and Don DeLillo's Americana. I read every one of those books between 1967 and 1977.
That's not to say there haven't been memorable books since 1994. Such as Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder , by Lawrence Wechsler, the non-fictional story of a fictional museum in southern California , astounded and delighted me …it's a book I immediately hard-wired into my whole way of looking at the world .
The other work that has staggered me recently is not a book at all, but a web site called the Online Etymology Dictionary . It's been created as a labor of love by an heroic writer and historian named Doug Harper. I stumbled across it researching the 19 th century for a novel I'm writing.
It contains thousands of words and the history of how they came to be…and how they've changed in meaning over the years. I don't just consult it -- I browse, I read, I revel and wallow in its troves of linguistic archaeology….such as fabulous words thwack, hullabaloo and scrunch …which the Online Etymology Dictionary tells me are, amazingly, 500, 250, and almost 200 years old.
And why am I such a freak for language? The answer goes back to the beginning: my mom. I t was she who made me a connoisseur of vivid words and felicitous sentences. She inspired me to worship books. I care about “memorable reading experiences,” I think, because of her. For which I'm very, very grateful.
