A Reader's Guest Essay

Yes, perhaps I read too much. I read wildly, I read experimentally, I’m liable to read about God and man and women; I read prose and poetry; I read the front pages of the newspapers, it seems like every front page during this strange time is an obituary intended for each and every one of us; I read dear John Keats who wrote ‘We must die into life and embrace our immortal destiny’. I read Rilke, who wrote in one of his poems, ‘You must change your life’ and for the rest of my life I’ll be wondering what Rilke meant. I read Samuel Beckett, reading Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’ over and over and over; sometimes I think that perhaps I’ve overdosed on him--there’s a poet I know in San Francisco who thinks I have. I read while drinking coffee in the morning and mineral water in the afternoon. I read when drinking white wine at night, having found white wine pairs well with cherries from Washington State. I like to eat sharp cheddar cheese when I’m near the end of reading a good mystery. Some reading makes me nervous; I avoid the kind of writing that creates unwarranted anxiety in the reader. I have no intention of reading autodidactically; I’m no omnivore and I’m not fussy about where the apostrophe must be placed unless the writer has misplaced it accidentally and unconsciously changed the meaning. Reading too can put me to sleep at night, whether it’s fiction I’m reading or non-fiction. A young woman writer I’m reading at the moment has written a very clever book about the politics of the internet and its impact on those on those of us who read;  she doesn’t address the president as president; rather she refers to him as ‘the dictator’ and is consistent in doing so throughout her book.