Who is afraid of book clubs?
“Let’s pick a book to read for our meeting next month.” The book club leader cheerfully suggested. Other members enthusiastically recommended one title after another, from classics to last week’s bestsellers, from Voltaire to Joyce Carol Oates. This was the time at every club meeting that I felt the simultaneous cringe and joy in the pit of my stomach, the same kind of mixed feelings whenever I open the Web sites of New York Times and Washington Post book review sections or listen to book reviews or author interviews on NPR. The joy rises from the thought of trekking new worlds and living new experiences through these intriguing books. The cringe, however, is rooted in the sinking realization that I would never be able to read them all. So many books, so little time.
I remember a time when scouting for new books were so much simpler. Growing up in China in the 1980s, my father used to take me to the only bookstore in town once or twice a month and let me pick up the few new publications that had come out since our last visit. I usually devoured these books in a few days and, to fill the void until the next trip, sneaked into my brother’s room to read his collection of foreign fiction, detective stories, and science fiction. The world of new books was happily large but comfortably finite. Even in my early age, I tended to eschew books with cartoons and pictures in favor of all-word books, because I knew all-word books too longer to consume. Like an undernourished child, I found everything potentially delicious, I wanted a taste of everything. Words carried a magical power that transformed, no, defined my world from the first conscious moment.
It was then inevitable that I ended up in jobs that allow me to live among words as much. Words, sentences, paragraphs, no matter how dry and technical, how unglamorous and uncreative, are enough to give anchor to my existence. Without words I would be literally lost. I had once spent a four-day vacation without books. By the end I found myself eating up the classified advertisements on a page of local newspaper with ravenous glee.
Perhaps it is this residual sense of hunger that makes every trip to a bookstore both glorious and intimidating for me. The dazzling spread of new books teases my eye and my stomach, for I know I could never taste even a fraction of this rapidly renewing banquet. I walk down aisle after aisle
[原创]Who is afraid of book clubs?
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helenClaire
- Posts: 3159
- Joined: 2003-11-22 20:12
我就靠这点压力才读了些书。-
helenClaire
- Posts: 3159
- Joined: 2003-11-22 20:12
我没用电影搪塞过，不过在包法利夫人最后剩了三分之一看不完的时候，曾经偷懒看过中文版。那是唯一一次。别的书都没有中文译本。 