Keeping My Stories Straight

My friend Josie gave me this wonderful book by the illustrator Maira Kalman. Josie saw it at a library book sale and, though she already owned a copy, bought this one in order to give it a good home. "I read it all in one sitting," she told me, and as soon as I opened it, I saw why. It's delightful, beautiful, thoughtful, funny, mysterious, and wacky -- all at once.

I didn't want to race through it so I put it in the bathroom -- stretching out the reading to any number of . . . er . . . sittings.

And then I got to thinking about how many different things I read in a day -- Isabel Zuber's beautiful Salt is my primary book at the moment -- what I'm reading when I have a decent block of time. Isabel is a poet and the beauty of her language has me going slow with this one too. Moreover, the book is new and autographed so I don't try to read it while I'm bathing -- Vanity Fair by Thackery has already fallen in once (note the curve of the cover) so it keeps me company on the edge of the tub as I re-read my way through it yet again.

Books follow me everywhere. If I'm in the car, I'm listening to Douglas Adams' posthumous work The Salmon of Doubt; yesterday, while I worked in the kitchen all day, I listened to Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Two wise and funny men from very different times.

And then there's the reading material I pick up when I have a few minutes to kill -- waiting for the coffee to drip, for the computer to download something, the rice to cook --catalogues, magazines, and a book I picked up at a library book sale for no reason other than insatiable curiosity about . . .well, almost everything . . . but religion and other cultures are always particularly fascinating.

So, when the occasional reader tells me that he or she has trouble keeping track of the the two stories, past and present, in my books, I realize that our minds must operate very, very differently.