Never Enough Time

No matter how long Sarah and her friends play together, they could always play longer. For me, there’s never enough time, either. Not enough time for gardening, for visiting with friends, for lying on my back in the grass looking at the sky—never enough time simply to look and look and look at the world around me. So it probably goes without saying that there’s never enough time for reading, either. As the name of my friend Gloria’s bookstore in Traverse City has it, “So Many Books, So Little Time”!

I suffer no shortage of “reading material” around me. (That phrase reminds me of another that David detests: “forest products.”) Does that make the shortage of reading time easier or more tormenting? While thinking yesterday about writing this post, I made notes of four books recently begun, none of them yet finished, and then last night I fell into a fifth. What can I say? Occupational hazard?

THE BOOK THIEF (Knopf pb, 2007), by Markus Zusak, is a novel I mentioned not long ago wanting to read. It starts off kind of stop-and-go, with Death, if you please, as the narrator, but don’t let that put you off. In a matter of pages, I was drawn into the story, and this may turn out to be the first book of the five that I finish, as I am devouring it at high speed. Promissory note: more on this book in the week to come.

BRANDEIS AND THE MODERN STATE (1933), by Alpheus Thomas Mason, is a totally different kettle of fish. I’m interested in history and the court system, however, and this book is just the size I like to hold, which sounds like a trivial consideration but which always counts with me.

L’AIGUILLE CREUSE (1909), by Maurice LeBlanc, is the third in a French pulp series about a master burglar. Noises in the middle of the night! Men seen running from the chateau, carrying large objects! A brave young woman with a gun! A high school student wearing a false beard and posing as a journalist! I’m told that the burglar turns detective later in the series. Pulp fiction is good for conversation-building in another language, and this series is old enough that I won’t worry about saying something indecent if I pick up a few new phrases.

THE LAST HOURS OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT: WAKING UP TO PERSONAL AND GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION (rev. ed., 1999), by Thom Hartmann, sounds like a self-help book but turns out to be an engaging treatise on technology, economics and the environment. I’m dipping here and there in the book, not reading the chapters in order.

Finally, Bruce gave me a copy of THE DUCHESS OF BLOOMSBURY STREET (1973), by Helene Hanff, a sequel to her popular story (so beloved by book people), 84 CHARING CROSS, and this is the book I read last night before falling asleep, having been glued to THE BOOK THIEF for as many fractions of an hour as I could steal for it throughout the day. London was Hanff’s magic city, as Paris is mine. Here is how she describes her delight in finally being there:

“I walked slowly along the street, staring across it at the houses. I came to the corner, to a dark little park called Bedford Square. On three sides of it, more rows of neat, narrow brick houses…. I sat on a park bench and stared at the houses. I was shaking. And I’d never in my life been so happy.

“All my life I’ve wanted to see London. I used to go to English movies just to look at streets with houses like those. Staring at the screen in a dark theatre, I wanted to walk down those streets so badly it gnawed at me like hunger. Sometimes, at home in the evening, reading a casual description of London by Hazlitt or Leigh Hunt, I’d put the book down suddenly, engulfed by a wave of longing that was like homesickness.”

The success of 84 CHARING CROSS, she writes, changed her life. While the book didn’t make her rich or famous, it did make friends for her, boosted her self-esteem and took her to England. In other words, it made come true her dream of a lifetime. What more could any author ask?