Literary Isolationism

Today, the top item on the list of things I don't understand: book clubs. Reading is such a solitary activity that it seems artificial to try and make it into something social. I suppose the understanding of the book can be shared, but even then the entire thing strikes me as intellectual vanity. "Well, what *I* thought...", "Did anyone else notice...", "I found it interesting that..." and so on and so forth blah blah blah and yes - we all think you are brilliant and we agree to overlook each others' posturing for the sake of our own five minutes. For reasons that are apparent, I've never successfully participated in a book club. Though, I did read Ender's Game upon the suggestion of a club and I enjoyed it immensely. However, I believe that I got lost while driving to the discussion and ended the evening crying into the phone while stopped on a residential street somewhere in Southeast D.C.

I prefer to read in the mornings before work. Our row house sits along a Northeast/Southwest axis and the sun arcs over the house from the back left (as you face the house) to the front right. Attached to the front of the house is a covered porch and just beyond the porch a well-established cherry tree. The front room is blue with shadow most of the day and in the evenings the setting sun slants through the wooden slats of the blinds and the light becomes diffuse, as if the sun were setting over a rippling lake and I was viewing the play of the light from underneath the water. A reading lamps sits on top of the rusted radiator cover and coffee cups, soda cans and water bottles take up residence next to stacks of books on dark brown bookshelves.

My morning rituals are not extensive. A refusal to wake up followed by repeated attempts to fall back asleep as a hungry cat chirps and trills in my face while my spouse stomps between the bedroom and the bathroom occasionally offering up titillating trivia such as the time, the time and the time. Once resigned to consciousness for another day I'll feed the cat, take a quick shower during which the spouse pops in to give a kiss goodbye, pull a comb through my hair, moisturize with sunscreen, pet the dogs, grab some caffeinated something and just before I pick up my keys and head out the door I think, "I have time to read just one chapter before I go." And then in the way of things, one chapter - which is always a very short chapter - becomes two and then possibly three and I'll find myself admiring a particular turn of a phrase when it will occur to me that I do actually need to go somewhere.

I revel in the solitude of reading in the morning when the house is slowly recovering from the frenzied aerobics of waking. The cat - now fed - curls up like a white comma on the corner of the bed, nose tucked into his fuzzy belly while occasionally an ear might twitch in response to a sound only audible to cats and the insane; the dogs settle back into their basket of blankets, snoring gently on each others' rumps; the low thrumming of the radiator pump in the basement is an undulating whisper through out the house. All around is quiet, the neighbors having left for work, the back alley absent the illegal craps games and late night ruckus of the night people. It is then that I am truly content, as if I have exhaled after holding my breath for too long.