Thursday, April 28, 2005

The First Book of the Rest of Your Life I don't want Please Don't Come Back from the Moon to be the last book I read before my son is born. It's not that I dislike the book. It's a great read, a real page-turner, as they say. It's American magical realism, which I love. I inhaled the book in a couple of days. But it's so sad and filled with loss. Specifically, sons losing their fathers, and becoming ugly impersonations of their fathers themselves, drinking and swearing and living shallow lives in suburbs of Detroit. I don't want to retain that. I don't want that to hold the place of the last pre-Oliver book. I've been looking around the house for something else to read. I've been reading like crazy ever since I started the new job. For years I was convinced I had lost the habit of reading, but thirty-five minutes of bus time will change that in a hurry. Now I'm devouring books regularly. I've also started reading graphic novels - collections, really, of comics I forgot to read in the 90's. I'm halfway through the astounding Sandman sagas written by the multitalented Neil Gaiman. I've decided that these are books I want in the home, for when Oliver gets old enough to appreciate them. But they're also a little bloody, and a little jarring, and so he'll wait to read them until his teens. But what else to read? These Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara. No. R. collects bloody mysteries by Ian Rankin and Val McDermid and Robert Crais. No, no, and no. The Fortress of Solitude? We Were the Mulvaneys? The Corrections? Conversations with God? Where did these books come from? I guess it'll have to be Anne Lamott. She and Sam aren't a perfect family, but they're good in the way I hope and we're good with Oliver. "Dad, what was the last book you read before I was born?" "It was a book called Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott." And when I say that, I hope this is his response: "Oh, I've read that! I like that book." 7:23:36 AM     Speak up!  []