For 2021 I took on the task of reading 50 books. For all those insane literary folks out there, I am wondering if this seems like a daunting task or a stroll in the park.
Each year I have been documenting my journey by talking pictures of my stack of paper trophies. See one here:
In 2020, the same goal had been set but then I had a serious episode of depression lasting several months during the first sentence of COVID prison. To that point, I had read 24 books from January to March. I was on pace to absolutely crush my arbitrary target of fifty. Instead, I stopped during the hard down turn and quit reading altogether for about half a year. I picked back up in October at finished at 43 or 44, thereabouts.
In 2021, I am already at 43 books and it's July. Of course I am thinking about what sort of soul-crushing event could prevent the target from being reached. Asteroid? Pancreatic illness? Methanol-induced blindness? Exploding sun?
No, there is a the distinct possibility of triumph. I need only live that long.
My 2018 stack looks sad and pathetic, and makes me think I was depressed then too. I just don't remember it as distinctly. Or maybe I had a really interesting life going on, I don't know. I was admittedly big into BBQ for a long while that summer.
Yet, I have been pondering notions of romance and sensuality in fiction, probably because I never see much of the stuff in the realms I read. YA has kissing and the true love kissing somehow evokes within that genre (if only it were true - so many might have loved me for my lips alone), but it's so much shallower than the nuances and complexities of the real adult thing.
If we want to examine love and lust, we have to do in a way that conveys joy, pain, passion, desire, sensory over/underload, the auras of good and/or awkward. The physical spastic squirming of looking for the peak, our egos, isolation, filling love gaps, the need for affirmation and the lusty want of just getting off. Sex, longing, desire, needs - these are part of so many of us. We want to be loved. We want gratification. We want.
Some deeper exploration of these notions will enter my work.
And if I see or read the same, I'll be back to report.
Comments