"Immersion in the life of the world, a willingness to be inhabited by and to speak for others, including those beyond the realm of the human, these are the practices not just of the bodhisattva but of the writer." --Jane Hirshfield

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Nature of Reading: A Confession or a Coping Mechanism?

I confess a weakness for thinky books over feely ones. Sci fi, William Gibson, Mary Gaitskill, Doris Lessing, not an Oprah book among them. It's probably an idiosyncrasy of my own, but maybe not: If I worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, or even the University of Innsbruck, where they are teleporting atomic particles, I might like to kick back with a soft, feely book, but as it is, I live in a small town in the touchy-feely, codependent center of the universe, and I like to think, damnit.

Even if it is The Day of the Triffids




Ah, I know that everyone around me is reading Oprah books, and that at Princeton, they're likely to be reading at the left-brain end of the spectrum, but two paths diverged in a wood, and I'm still trying to figure out why the hell I went this way.

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