On books

I am currently reading (finishing!) a book called "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing. Having read the preface to the 1972 edition of the book (the book was first published in 1962) I have tried to read it purely as a novel. Not as a political statement, or a feminist manifiesto or a treaty on mental disease. I have found that for me (and this for me is very important, for apparently this book is about a different subject for each person who reads it) this book is about thinking and writing, and how what we think is not what we write. Writing about one's life is difficult. Not because you can't make a record of what you do, what you say, who you meet, but because that record is necessarily incomplete.

I have kept a diary since I was about eight years old. It is not  a continuous diary, for I have never been able to be constant about what I write, but I write in it once every year, or every two years. My favourite thing about the diary is the object itself, the notebook I write it in. I still find it as beautiful as when I first bought it. It is a design of sheep flying around a light bulb, and it has something about counting sheep on it. It's blue, which is what probably attracted me to it in the first place. When I read back on this diary, I am always shocked that I recognize myself perfectly but that I rarely think "That's me". Even recent entries aren't me, and I don't even think that they were me when I wrote them. It is partly because I mostly write in the diary when I'm feeling sad or sorry for myself, or when I have an idea. Writing like this makes the diary very moany and one-sided. Another thing is that I jot things down of the real world, but not of the dream world, which makes it hard to remember what the dreams I mention in the pages were about. Not that I'm a dreamer. I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do it is mostly due to who is in them rather than to the strangeness of the dream. Once every few months, however, I have a dream from which I wake with a terrible sense of irreality. It's a terrifying feeling. The world is unfamiliar. People are unfamiliar. I feel like everyone is a stranger. It is a heightened sense of individuality, and I mistrust everyone. It's horrible, waking up knowing that no one, not my parents, not my best friends, not even my dog knows who I am, they're different from me. Why would they understand me at all? When they talk to me on these days I feel like they're trying to trick me, to lure me into a sense of familiarity that shouldn't be there: they're different from me, how can they ever understand me? But at the same time, I remember that just the day before I felt about them that they were close to me, that they knew me and understood me, that, in a way, they were home to me, and I miss the feeling and I want to be that person again. These days are horrible. They're doubled. The feeling slowly wears off, but doesn't go away completely until the next day. I hadn't recognized this feeling anywhere else until I read "The Golden Notebook".

The book is wonderfully written, but I would not recommend it. It is a painful book to read. It is hard. The main character is, if not incapable of happiness, at least very incapacitated for it. It is difficult for me to read a long book without any joy in it. My first experience of this was reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. This book depressed me so much I decided never to read a book by the same author again. Now I'm reading a different book, not as depressing because what happens in it isn't as terrible, but still a book that's taking an emotional toll on me. Why do I read these books, knowing that they're hard for me, that, as much as I enjoy reading them (perversely enough), they don't make me happy? I guess it's because they teach me. About feelings. About different types of feelings. But I prefer joyful books. And if I were ever a writer I would like to think I write joyful books. Midnight Children is a joyful book. It's not a happy book, never, but it's joyful. The characters take life by the storm. They live, and they live big, and I suspect they don't know any other way. This kind of book makes me happy.

Long ago, someone said to me (and I've heard it repeated infinite times since) that reading is a joy until you are almost finishing a book, and then you slow down, you want to savour it, you wish you'd read it more slowly. I know now this is not exactly true. This is true of joyful books. With books which aren't joyful, I read constantly, at a speed that will let me take the book in without breaking me down but fast enough that I know the book will finish. I enjoy the book, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't finish a book that I didn't like, but I also realize that part of me hates it. This doesn't happen with joyful books. Joyful books make me want to read on, at all time, until about ten pages are left. And then I stop. Read slowly. Go back. Try not to finish. But of course I finish. I like nothing better than a complete story. And it gives me the chance to start a new one.